The Benefits of Having An Online Presence

Customers are increasingly turning to online platforms to find the products and services they need. An online presence provides businesses with an excellent platform to connect with customers. In this post, we'll explore the various benefits of having a good online presence.

Why should you improve your business's online presence?

Makes it easier for people to find your business

The most important benefit of having an online presence is that it makes it easier for potential customers to locate you, whether that be through your social media platforms or your main website.    Allowing your customers to share their positive experiences is a terrific way to engage with your audience. The less time a customer spends trying to find your business, the better.

Increases your reach

Another core benefit of having an online presence is that it increases the reach of your business. Only using traditional forms of marketing, such as cold calls and newspaper advertisements, will limit your audience's reach on these platforms.

Utilising online platforms such as your business's website and social media channels to boost your presence, means that potential customers can search for your company organically and easily find your website or social profiles.

Online advertising tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads can massively improve your reach within specific audiences. For example, you can use targeted criteria to show your ads to individuals most likely to engage with your business.

At Formation Media, we have experts in SEO and Paid Social Media who can help you widen the reach of your business.

Enables you to monitor performance                                     

Building an online presence for your business helps you to monitor the performance of your business's website, social media channels, and posts. 

For example, tools such as Google Analytics allow you to monitor how the pages on your website are performing, allowing you to create detailed reports about user behaviour. On the other hand, social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook enable you to gather useful insights from your posts and stories.

Each one gives you different types of data:

• How many impressions have been made? 
• The number of people followed your profile? 
• How many people viewed your profile? 
• Where did they find your post?
• From their home feed 
• Hashtags 
• Location tags

Instagram, allows you to see when your followers are most active on the app and you can plan posts around certain times. This helps you to ensure that your posts appear on the radar of your audience.  

Using these tools allows you to tailor the content on your website and social media channels. It highlights to you what it is that needs to be changed or adjusted to make users more inclined to stay on your profile or website and move from a prospect into a lead. 

Here at Formation, we have a team who can monitor your website and social media, and provide you with monthly reports and advice on what your next steps should be.

Establishes credibility and builds trust

Using your online presence, you can create a consistent brand identity across the digital spectrum, which can be easily recognisable and help you to establish credibility and build trust with potential customers. Your platforms allow you to publish your company values and give information about the services and products that you offer. 

Keeping your online platforms up to date helps you to build trust with potential customers. You can leverage the use of social proof, posting positive testimonials and reviews to tip the balance on whether a potential customer becomes a lead.

Support your customers

Websites and social media platforms give your business the chance to build a direct relationship with your customers. They are where customers are most likely to turn to for support if they run into issues with products, or if an individual requires help and advice in an area that your business specialises in.

Taking 5 minutes to respond to a seemingly trivial enquiry will help to improve your relationship with your customers, and convert them into leads.

How to build an online presence

Now that we've talked about the benefits of having an online presence, let's go into the details of how you can build your own online presence.

1. Create an email list

One of the ways that you can start to build your online presence is by creating an email list. A sign-up link can be put on the website asking people who visit to join up and receive newsletters. These can outline information about the business and updates that will affect the overall running of the company.

They're also a great way to get information to your customer base quickly and effectively. The emailing list can be used to send out exclusive content and special discounts that wouldn’t normally be accessible. This can help you to figure out how many customers are interested in knowing more about your business and what you could be doing to encourage more people to join the list.

2. Keep your website up to date and optimised

Making sure that your website is kept up to date improves your online presence. Having business updates and new content can encourage more people to click through and see what other services you can provide.

Using SEO optimisation, you can boost your online presence. If done correctly, it can push your website and content up the search rankings. There are three different types of SEO that you can take into consideration while optimising your site. 

• On-page SEO - which is when you optimise the content on the page using keywords.
• Off-page SEO - which takes place off the site, but if you have links from reputable sites on yours. It tells the search engine what you've written Is of value and pushes It higher up the search rankings
• Technical SEO - this is based on how you code the pages on the site. This considers image compression and CSS file optimisation, if it isn't done can affect the loading speed of the website. 

All three play a part in pushing your website up the search engine results, making it more likely for it to be seen by potential customers who are searching for the services you offer.

At Formation, our professional SEO specialists and copywriters can work cooperatively to keep your website up to date with fresh, optimised content.

3. Build up a social media presence

When it comes to building social media presence for your business, it’s worth taking into consideration where your target audience is online. What social media platforms are your target audience using? You can find out by seeing which platform you get the most interaction from. This could come in the form of likes on a post and which platform they use to get into contact with you.

You can cross-post your website's articles to your social media channels, encouraging social followers to visit your website and get more information on the different goods and services you offer.

Building up a social media presence allows you to branch into social media marketing. Where you can create promoted ads that appear on the timelines of your target audience. This means that you don't need to worry about posting it at certain times.

4. Become more active online

It's essential to create content that can be shared across your website and social media channels. These can be used to direct customers to your website to learn more about your services. In addition, using different types of content lets, you show off to the customer and tell them that you are the solution to their problems.

There are a few ways that the content can manifest itself on the website. But a large percentage of it comes from the news or blog pages. This is where you can tailor the content to answer the questions that your customer has. This helps not only encourage the customer to make an informed decision but also may lead to an enquiry later.

5. Collect and analyse data

When putting your online presence together, you may decide to track your user’s behaviour on your site and social profiles.

Using your social media channels, you can gather insights about your posts, such as how your posts are performing. These insights also let see when your followers are most active on the app. This combined help you to make an informed decision on what kinds of content you should be posting and at what time you should be posting them to get the most engagement with followers.

By using tools such as Google Analytics, you can track a user’s behaviour on your website. It can give you in-depth insights about the users on your website, such as by telling you what devices the users are using, how long they are staying on the site or individual pages, and how long their session lasts. 

By collecting this data, you can see what is and isn't working on your site, so you can tailor your content to encourage users to stay longer and look at what other services or products you offer.

Do you want to use your online presence to reach more people, or improve your online presence? Why not get in touch with the Formation team to see how we can help.