Creating a digital presence as part of digital marketing strategy is the easiest way to increase the availability of your business to your customers.
Digital Marketing – What is Digital Presence?
Digital Presence as a part of your digital marketing strategy in simple terms, is ‘to show your business online’. Digital Presence matters whenever any person searches for your business online. Generating a digital presence is really easy with the help of resources like a website, social media platforms, business directory listing, customer reviews, and other online sources.
Bring digital presence dream into reality and better the chances of online visibility.
Whether you’re going DIY or hiring any agency, here’s the list of things you can expect to build a digital presence.
Top 8 List of things which help to build Digital Presence for your business.
- Create Online Website – Use CaKom webhosting
- Using Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, and more…)
- Business Listing (Google My Business, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Trustpilot, and more..)
- Business Location Listing (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, and more..)
- Participating in Online Question-Answer Sites (Quora, StackExchange, Yahoo Answers, and more..)
- Local Directory Listing (YellowPages, Whitepages, Foursquare, and more…)
- Digital Advertising (Google Ads, FB-Insta Ads, Twitter Ads, Bing Ads, AdMob, and more…)
- Content marketing (Blogging, Video, Podcasting, Infographics, Email Marketing, Visual content, Ebooks, Lead magnets)
Anyone who has spent any amount of time working in search engine optimization (SEO) knows that the industry is always changing as the leading search engines constantly update and alter their algorithms. While SEO teams constantly try to capitalize on the newest rules to ensure their content achieves the highest possible rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), search engines like Google and Bing are looking for loopholes and room for improvement to provide searchers with the best possible experiences and the most accurate search results.
Modern digital marketing demands both— a solid international-targeting SEO strategy and a full-proof geofencing marketing strategy— to have an active and engaging digital presence. It seems like each new year brings new disruptions.
If you want your brand to cultivate a solid digital presence, it may be time to reevaluate your approach to digital marketing. While your tried-and-true methods may still offer acceptable results, you can find lots of ways like ad tracking, campaign audit, gap analysis, etc. to improve your digital marketing strategy with often surprising results.
Digital Presence – Is It Really Necessary in 2023 as a part of your Digital Marketing strategy?
Creating a digital presence is the easiest way to increase the availability of your business to your customers. Gone are the days of simply having a brick-and-mortar store — your customers are looking for you 24/7 and unless you provide them unbridled access, you are not going to get an edge over the competition. When you create a solid digital presence, you ensure that your business performs even when you are asleep and without depending on any additional workforce. You simply enable a wide range of audiences to reach out to you at their convenience and reap benefits.
Moreover, leaving your digital footprint is a great way to showcase what you have to offer. Creating a stellar online portfolio of your offerings is much easier than printing endless flyers and brochures. Not only does it save on costs, but it also allows you to present your brand in a more aesthetic manner. Digital presence also makes it easy for your brand to have its own voice and allows the audience to connect with them. After all, using social media helps you to create more impact on your followers. It helps your brand to acquire a voice, no matter the platform, and become more relatable.
In short, the absence of social media means that you cannot leverage the power of the internet to build your brand. But bear in mind that there are several digital channels available for your business and you may not be ready to create your presence everywhere. For example, your website is owned media where you can post regular content. At the same time, you can also opt for paid media options such as native ads on social media platforms to raise your brand awareness and improve your digital presence.
What You Should Already Be Doing
The golden rule of every search engine is to provide the user with the most accurate results for their searches as quickly as possible. Search engines use various methods to match users’ queries to the most relevant results. The algorithms behind these search engines are constantly being tweaked, improved, and adjusted to provide better user experiences. To capitalize on how search engines function, it’s vital to fill your site and your blog with well-written, valuable content that appeals to your ideal customers.
In the early days of digital marketing, many unscrupulous content marketers simply uploaded content stuffed with keywords that were barely readable by human users. This content was intended to capture the attention of the earliest search engine bots, programs that crawl through online content to find keywords, links, and other data points to match to user input. This quickly became a trend, and leading search engines like Google took swift action to penalize keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO tactics.
Today, Google rewards websites for publishing relevant, high-quality content that appeals to a target niche. If you already invest the time and effort necessary for creating high-quality SEO content intended for human readers, you’re ahead of the curve.
You should also be regularly taking time to research your market and your target customers. Consumer preferences change over time, industry trends shift, and the market may not be the same six months from now.
Essentially, you need to keep tabs on your niche and the customers within it as best as you can so you can continue to deliver the highest quality content and better experiences to keep them coming back to you for more.
Ways to Boost Your Digital Presence in 2023
You’ve probably developed a solid digital marketing strategy that works for your current goals, but it’s always worth investing some extra time and effort into futureproofing your marketing strategy.
As you develop your content marketing strategy for 2023, the following tips can help you be more successful and discover new ways of connecting with your target audience:
1. Invest in Customer Persona Research
How well do you know your core customers? Do you have an idea of the types of customers you’d like to reach but haven’t connected with as strongly just yet? Customer persona research could be one of your most valuable marketing investments of 2023. Effective user research can provide you with a better understanding of your target market’s wants and needs, help you develop content that’s more precisely targeted toward their interests and goals, and understand your place in your niche more clearly.
Questionnaires, surveys, usability tests, and A/B testing can all provide valuable insights into your target customers. Develop several customer personas using the data you’ve gathered over time to determine who your best customers are, how they spend their time online, and the best ways to reach them with effective marketing campaigns.
2. Expand to New Social Media Platforms
Almost every business has a Facebook profile by now, but other social media outlets can be fantastic for connecting with different audiences. Instagram and Snapchat can be ideal places to display new products and upload video content snippets. They’re also great for photo content, and Twitter is the go-to place for hot stories and the latest news updates.
Determine where your target customers spend their time using social media and try to cultivate followers on a new platform in 2023. Spend some time fleshing out customer profiles and determine which social media platforms are most likely to appeal to them.
3. Increase Your Brand’s Authority
Does your audience know they can rely on you for the latest industry news? Do they regularly comment on your blog posts to tell you how informative and valuable they are? Brand authority builds as you connect more deeply with your audience. When you consistently provide your audience with relevant content and prove you know what you’re talking about, you inherently build authority. One way to establish your brand authority is by providing your team with professional materials that showcase your expertise. For instance, you can make your own business cards to ensure a consistent, polished appearance across all your marketing efforts
Your brand authority also has a significant impact on SEO, so look for opportunities to prove your place as an industry leader. For example, if you publish content to your blog and simply list your contributing authors as “staff” without creating fleshed-out author bios for them, this is a big missed opportunity to build your authority and earn some easy SEO points under the new EAT update.
4. Start Leveraging Voice Search and Planning for NLP SEO
Search engines are getting smarter, and the newest set of updates for Google includes BERT, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. This new system is a natural language processor (NLP) system designed to more accurately interpret user searches, especially voice searches that typically entail more longtail keywords and filler words.
While you have likely already adapted a mobile-first approach when it comes to web development and content creation, make sure to carry those lessons over to prepare for the surging number of voice searches. Start looking for ways to incorporate more NLP SEO elements, such as longtail keywords and more fleshed-out keyword strings with filler words that users will likely speak into their devices to perform voice searches.
5. Invest in Video Content Creation
Content still very much reigns supreme as the key to successful SEO, but the type of content you’ve produced may be a bit stale compared to what some other brands are offering. Video content holds incredible potential for virtually any brand. How-to videos, product demonstrations, facility tours, “meet the team” interviews, and behind-the-scenes showcases are all possibilities. Video content is also highly shareable, so this can be a great way to boost your social media presence, too.
6. Get influencers to promote your product
What influencers recommend is what the vast majority of the audience listens to. If you want an organic way to tap into the pulse of your audience, leverage the power of social media influencers. Invest in influencer marketing and get them to promote your brand — whether you are selling a product or a service. As soon as an influencer recommends something, their followers are likely to take notice and take the action you want them to. If you are a new brand, you can tap into the micro-influencers, given the budget constraints.
7. Analyze Your Results
What use is it to have a digital presence plan unless you are willing to take a look at the results? In the digital world, everything moves at a breakneck speed and you need to keep up with the changing times. This also means that you will need to periodically update your strategies — what worked yesterday may make little or no sense today. The most convenient way to achieve this is by keeping an eye on the analytics. Almost every social media platform has native analytics tools you can use. Third-party apps can be also useful to analyze the metrics. The best way forward is to create goals that you can track. For example, aim for a certain percentage of click-through rates and review your results every quarter. Bear in mind that the key is to remain patient as establishing a digital presence is not a one-off event.
8. Publish customer testimonials
Along with influencer recommendations, if there is something else that your audience will take seriously, it is the recommendation of their peers. That’s why testimonials play such an important role in establishing your digital presence. Your words are not enough — hearing them from someone who is also a customer can make a difference.
Every time you have a customer who is mighty impressed with your products or loved the service you provided, make sure to get a testimonial from them. And instead of opting for a text-based testimonial that is easy to fake, go down the video route. There’s something about watching a human being on screen sharing their thoughts about a product. It can trigger a reaction that a normal text-based testimonial may fail to.
9. Invest in email marketing
Email marketing can help tremendously to strengthen your digital presence. Reaching the inbox of your target audience and compelling them to open your emails can be a great way to send the traffic where you want it — that is, your website. But very few business owners understand the difference between spamming their customers and actually sending them emails that they want to read. Concentrate on building an email list. Tap into creative copywriting skills so that your emails always hit the right spot. Keep in mind that your customers are inundated with hundreds of emails on a daily basis. So they are really looking forward to reading an email that provides some unique information.
10. Optimize your website for mobile devices
A vast majority of your audience may be looking at your website on their cell phones. This means that your website needs to be specially optimized for them so they don’t have to strain their eyes. Your website needs to have the correct resolution to lure in the audience.
11. Have a value-first approach
Having more followers is no guarantee of a good digital presence. Your goal should be building a stronger presence on your own. Make sure that you are working towards developing high quality and niche group of individuals who are really interested in what you have to offer. Only then will it translate into more likes and comments on your social media posts and get you the desired traffic. Such user-generated content is extremely important for beefing up your online presence. As a rule of thumb, always focus on delivering more value than simply focusing on getting more followers.
12. Make use of online listings
Whether it is Google My Business or Facebook pages — there are a number of ways to list your brand online and increase your digital footprint. In fact, increasing your digital presence by way of online listings is completely within your control. You don’t have to rely on an audience to find out that you exist. If anything, these listings will make you easily discoverable and add an additional source of getting more traffic.
Embracing the power of virtual events is yet another way to strengthen your digital presence and engage with your target audience. Webinars, virtual conferences, and live streams offer you the opportunity to showcase your expertise, share valuable insights, and establish genuine connections with your audience. This in turn fosters brand loyalty and enhances your reputation within your industry. Collaborating with a virtual event production company can help you craft professional, immersive, and interactive experiences that leave a lasting impression on your audience.
