10 Effective Ways to Build Your Online Presence for Agency Growth
How your agency is perceived online as people search and find information about you will determine whether they will contact you and want to purchase your product or service. So you have to understand: Do you have an online presence or not? How easy is it to find you?
Before you plan your marketing activities, you need to understand what you can find about yourself or your agency on the Internet. Do you even exist for users? What opinion has been formed about you online? If they don't know anything about you, what are you doing to change that?
Your online presence constantly projects how you want to be perceived. And today, we're going to tell you 10 effective ways to improve your online presence.
Why Develop your Online Presence?
Consumers are spending more and more time online
Any information about a product or business of interest on the Internet today makes it much faster to purchase or choose a supplier. In the case of B2C, users want to make buying decisions here and now and on their own. They are helped in this by the completeness and availability of information online: reviews from other customers, having a website with useful content, chat rooms, etc.
Traffic from mobile devices has equaled the volume of traffic from desktops, and in some niches, it has even overtaken it — this is a separate significant trend that will only grow. It is a signal to many companies that your site should be correctly displayed on mobile devices, or simply put, have a mobile version.
A confident online presence enhances and strengthens the image of the company
Today, it is very important to have a blog as well. There you can share helpful information with potential clients and suppliers, create value for your company in the eyes of your customers, constantly collect feedback through comments, and adjust your strategy to market needs.
Maintaining social media pages also increases your company's transparency in the eyes of your customers. It can even be habit-forming in regards to content and selling your product as the final step.
24/7 availability increases the speed of decision-making for working with your company
Now any customer support is perfectly realized online with minimal costs. You get the opportunity to get new leads during employee out-of-hours: the user simply fills out a request form on the website. The nearest trend in this direction is the development and implementation of chatbot technology for closing one-type questions from users, making your company more accessible and effective for clients in the market.
Optimization of operating costs
Technology online is becoming so accessible that it no longer requires costly developers to create fully-fledged websites, online stores, and applications. Just hire a person who is technically savvy and willing to understand the subject. Modern digital tools do not require large budgets, a large team, or advanced development skills, which reduces the burden on a company's operating costs.
Increase the responsiveness of customer interactions
The Internet and available online tools allow you to deliver information and offers to the customer faster, as well as gather feedback and adjust to the customer. The more customer questions you learn to close online with your website, social media, or blog, the fewer questions they will have in the future. Thus, it will take less time to close the deal.
So, the next important point: Is it easy to find you on the Internet?
This is the main question to start with if your company has been on the market for a long time. But if you are just starting your business, starting to develop and promote yourself online, then you need to get such a result that the answer to the question in the title is "Yes."
Ways to Improve your Online Presence
Now, let's proceed to the tips for improving the online presence of your agency.
1. Strategy → Action
A person's path to order does not always consist of three simple steps: see an advertisement → go to the site → place an order. Many users at the top level of the typical sales funnel may not even be aware of the brand's existence or its online store. Offering them to buy something right away is not a good idea.
Therefore, work on your online presence should be broken down into several key steps. Start by creating a balanced digital promotion strategy and choosing the most appropriate tools. Start from the AIDA model.
AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) is a model of consumer behavior accepted in marketing practice that describes the sequence of actions leading to a purchase.
2. Update your website to keep up with the times
Consumers, especially online, are capricious and impatient. They don't want to wait a few minutes for your site to load or for them to find the "Search" button on it. In their opinion, if your site is hopelessly out of step with today's requirements, it's better not to have one at all. What's more: according to Stanford Web Credibility Research, 75% of online consumers judge an agency or brand by its website.
Worth thinking about it!
Of course, there are now many designers with which you can easily create your own site. But often, many people find them hard to understand, and it's much faster and more reliable to hire a separate developer who will do everything the way you want. It's worth the expense and will noticeably increase your online presence!
3. Media and search campaigns
Spread the word that your agency went online. To do this, launch an extensive media campaign in Google Ads and campaigns for new users in Facebook Ads.
Billboards, YouTube ads, website banners — these are all types of media advertising, and they all serve the same function — to draw the audience's attention to the product and drive sales. If the consumer does not respond to it immediately, there is a high probability that he will remember it later.
Media is not only banners but also video and audio. Depending on the preferences of the target audience and existing business objectives, a different format is chosen for each marketing campaign.
4. Use more keywords in your agency blog
There's not much room to use keywords on the basic pages of your site, such as the home page or services and contacts. Let's be honest. It's only in the latter two that you can somehow use them. How, then, to use more keywords? This is where your agency's blog comes to our rescue.
Your goal is to appear as often as possible in search results and for as many of your potential clients' search queries as possible. Each article on your blog must be carefully worked out using as many keywords as possible to achieve this goal.
The more often you appear at the top of Google, the better your online presence. And it also brings increased credibility and traffic to your site. According to HubSpot, companies that pay enough attention to blogging have 55% more visitors than competitors who don't bother to do so.
5. Choose social media wisely
Online presence depends on the quality, not the number of channels you use. There are plenty of social networks — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and so on. First, choose the ones that have the most of your target audience and focus on them. It's much more effective to actively maintain accounts on a couple of social networks than to waste effort on multiple platforms with low returns.
6. Audience before followers
Once again, it's not quantity but the quality that counts for your online presence! No matter how many followers you have, their number by no means guarantees activity in your account. Your agency may have 3, 5, or even 10 thousand followers. But what is the point if only 300 of them interact with your posts?
Publish useful and interesting content to your target audience, and the number of likes, reposts, or comments will noticeably increase under each subsequent post. Think about the value of your content, and your active audience will only grow!
7. Don't be afraid to ask for reviews!
Reviews are the most crucial tool in building trust in your agency. And they are the ones that affect how you will show up in local Google searches. More positive reviews mean a better online presence for you. It's not enough to perform well if no one knows about it. Ask a satisfied customer to leave a review on your website or Google, and new customers will start showing up more often!
8. Welcome guests
Many companies and niche media outlets are eager to publish guest posts by other companies and agencies. And many of them have a well-developed online presence. Negotiate with them about the possibility of publishing your post or series of articles. That way, you'll solve several problems at once:
- Improve your online presence.
- Introduce your brand to more Internet users
- Increase your credibility as an expert
- Improve your SEO with a link to your website in the publication
You can also do guest posting on your profiles — the author of the publication will surely share the link with your audience, attracting more people to your page!
9. Let your employees share your content with their followers
LinkedIn says: employees often have 10 times as many active subscribers as the company itself. And if they share company content, it gets 8 times more engagement than when the company distributes it exclusively through its own channels.
Your employees are a fast, reliable, and free way to increase your online presence. Share a new publication in your agency's chat room and ask your colleagues to repost in their personal accounts. If you're on good terms with your employees, they can automatically become something of an advocate for your brand.
10. Make your content inclusive
One of the main requirements of today's online world is that content must be such that both an average user and a person with disabilities can interact with it. For example, add a version of your site for visually impaired people or the ability to listen to the text on each page. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in four adults in the United States has some form of disability.
Along with this, the assistive technology industry is also actively developing. Don't miss the opportunity not only to increase your online presence but to gain a grateful new audience who will choose you over your competitors because you've thought about their needs in advance.