You can no longer ignore your company’s digital presence. According to a variety of studies, somewhere between 57% and 90% of both B2B and B2C customers conduct research online before making a purchase. Don’t miss out on being part of that research.

Customers wish to be informed before they reach out to a representative. This means that you should develop online resources to engage with your target audience early in their buying journey.

Additionally, your company will have a digital footprint whether you manage it or not. Social media, search engines, and other means allow people to post about and review your company. Without a strong digital presence, your online narrative will be controlled by others.

Let’s take a look at the different forms of digital presence and how to cultivate one that converts into sales.

Find what you need

1. What is a digital presence?
2. What are the different types of digital presence?
3. Why is your digital presence important?
4. How to build your digital presence
5. Work with me

What is a digital presence?

Your online identity is how your audience perceives you in the digital world. It includes your website, reviews, social media presence (both from your brand and your customers), email marketing campaigns, and other online media.

Your digital presence is something that must be cultivated and tended to. With the ever-evolving digital landscape and the fickleness of online audiences, it’s crucial to stay on top of trends and adjust your strategy accordingly to stay relevant.

What are the different types of digital presence?

Your digital presence should incorporate a wide variety of channels. However, unless you have an entire team solely focused on your online presence, it’s impossible to cover every area of digital marketing, especially if you want to do it well. If you’re a smaller company or just getting started, consider outsourcing some of your digital needs, or focus on three essential pieces: your website, your socials, and web content.

Let’s take a closer look at five key types of digital presence, including the three most important ones.

1. Website

If you run a business in the modern era, then you must have a website. This is where your customers will learn about your business, your services or products, and how to contact you. If you don’t have a website, then you are missing out on customers. 

Even if you have a brick-and-mortar business, customers will use your website to figure out who you are, where you’re located, and what you offer. While walk-ins may still occur, modern customers prefer to know where they’re going and what they might find there. Your website helps them choose you.

Your site is also where you can post blogs, articles, and other resources that will boost your SEO, prove your expertise, and grow your audience. It will be your customer’s leaping-off point where they can explore the rest of your online presence and get to know your company on a deeper level.

2. Social media

Social media allows you to engage with your customers online. Through branded posts and interactions with customers, you can humanize your brand and create relationships. Social media marketing can also be used to show your company’s personality, reveal a little bit behind the scenes, and make your customers feel emotionally connected to your brand and what you’re trying to accomplish.

3. Web content

Blogs, articles, case studies, white papers, guest posts, and other digital media all encompass web content. Your content can achieve a number of goals:

• SEO content allows your website to appear in searches, helping your customers easily find easily.
• When your ideal customers conduct their research, you become one of their resources.
• It showcases your authority and expertise.
• It answers user queries, making their purchasing decisions much easier.
• Sharable media improves content distribution and spreads brand awareness.

Your website should be a dynamic resource that provides everything that your target customers might need. You can accomplish this through high-quality, strategized content.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing is a way to target those who have noticed your brand. Once you’ve gained a potential customer’s email, you know that they’re at least a little bit interested in your company and what you offer. Email marketing helps nudge them toward a purchase. Use email marketing to promote sales, offer VIP deals, and provide information tailored toward existing customers and warm leads. 

5. Reviews

According to TrustPilot, 89% of global consumers read reviews before they make a purchase. If your customer is reading your reviews, they are ready to make a purchasing decision. You need to make sure that your reviews are good enough to clinch that sale.

Unfortunately, reviews are largely outside of your control. While you can do what you can to provide amazing services and products, you can sometimes get bad reviews for no reason at all. Trolls and disgruntled employees exist, and they will bring your overall rating down.

That being said, there are ways that you can incentivize happy customers to post a review. You can also include excellent testimonials on your website, where they can be controlled. Of course, do all of this in an ethical manner. You should never pay for good reviews or provide discounts for five stars. Customers are savvy, and they can see through reviews that are clearly fake.

Why is your digital presence important?

Your digital presence is often the first impression that a potential customer has of your company. Most people research before they reach out to a representative or a vendor, and if your digital presence is poor, then it may push customers away. 

A strong digital presence accomplishes four key things:

• Increased brand awareness through social media, searchable blog posts and articles, and emails.
• Improved credibility with well-research, high-quality content that answers user queries and teaches customers about your industry.
• Increased customer engagement by interacting with social media comments, direct messaging, and partnerships with influencers.
• Enhanced customer experience by joining them at all stages of their buying journey, anticipating and answering questions, providing thorough information to make them feel confident in their decision, and more.

How to build your digital presence

Building a digital presence is not formulaic. You need to have a deep understanding of your target audience, their pain points, and where they get their information in order to create an online presence that works. There are lots of people who claim that you can cultivate an audience of millions with a few simple steps and in a few short weeks. These people are almost always selling something and should be ignored. The truth is that building a strong digital presence requires strategic thinking, careful research, and adjustments as you learn what works for your audience and what doesn’t.

If you’re starting from scratch, you need to be patient. It often takes at least 3 – 6 months before you start to see results. Even then, the results that you see may indicate that you need to pivot and try another approach. Content strategy must be tackled scientifically; don’t just throw crap at the wall to see what sticks. Create an online presence that you think will resonate with your customers, and if it doesn’t generate the results that you want, adjust one or two things at a time until you find what works.

All that being said, here are the first five steps you need to take when building your digital presence:

1. Know your brand. A strong digital presence is uniform across all channels. While your messaging may adjust depending on the type of online content, where it appears, and which customers you are targeting, it should still align with your overall brand. You want your customers to instantly recognize your company and trust the information and content that you are providing.
2. Create a website, and build your online presence from there. As mentioned above, your company must have a website. Use this as your anchor. Your website is where you can establish your brand, link to your blogs, social media, and other online channels, and build your email lists. This will be the foundation for your digital presence, so make sure that it’s strong.
3. Learn SEO. Although your customer (not Google) should be your focus when creating content online, you still want to ensure that your website is searchable. You can do this by conducting keyword research, learning basic on-page optimization, and ensuring that your website is indexed. Thorough keyword research can also help you to better understand your customer’s search queries so that you can create content that answers their questions.
4. Determine where your customers get their information from. Your digital presence won’t matter if you’re busy making social media posts while your customers are reading blogs. You can figure out your clients’ preferred media by looking at competitor websites to see what types of content they’re publishing, searching terms within your industry to ascertain which types of content pop up first, and surveying your customers about what types of content they prefer.
5. Start creating content. Once you’ve created your platform, learned what your customers are searching, and determined the content they’re consuming, you can start creating content! Make sure that you invest plenty of time and energy in these projects. Remember, you are competing with trillions of existing content pieces. Cultivating a strong online presence is more than simply putting stuff out there. It needs to be better than everything else if it hopes to compete.

Outsource your blogs and articles to O’Neal Writing

If you’ve gotten to the end of this article feeling a bit overwhelmed, don’t worry, I’ve been there. Your digital presence is important, but it’s not easy to cultivate. There’s a lot to think about, and if you’re just starting your online journey, you’re going to make mistakes. It’s part of the process.

However, you don’t have to do this alone. Through my years of experience, I’ve been a part of successful projects as well as strategies that could have done better. I know what works because I’ve done what works… and what doesn’t. Through my failures and my successes, I have developed tried-and-true strategies that are proven to achieve digital marketing goals. Take advantage of my know-how by investing in my services.

The key to a strong digital presence is focusing your energy on the projects that get results. While you can find articles to educate yourself about content strategies and SEO, true usable knowledge comes from applied practice. I have that.

My written content goes beyond SEO. While SEO remains a key piece to my work, the focus is on the customer; my articles are easy to read, thorough, accurate, and interesting. This is why they consistently see high traffic and competitive SEO ranking.

Here are some key ways that I’ve improved my clients’ digital presence:

• My ghostwritten work improved distribution by appearing on top sites like the World Economic Forum.
• Blog posts shared on social media pages encouraged positive engagement, improving social media presence.
• Improved organic traffic from high-ranked SERPs.
• Increased site traffic overall.

You could try and create written content that may gain attention and build your online presence. Or, you can outsource your blogs, articles, and other written content to me and guarantee positive results.

Want to talk more? Contact me to set up a discovery call.