ONLINE PRESENCE MANAGEMENT
Online presence management refers to the system of managing a company’s online visibility. It is the process of drawing online traffic to a particular professional or personal brand on the Internet. It is a combination of web design and development, social media, SEO, link sharing, blogging, Pay Per Click marketing (PPC), directory listings, reputation management, and other streams of creating a positive image for an individual, company or product on search engines and the Net.
Reasons for having an online presence
An online presence is imperative for outbound marketing because it emphasizes your brand and your service or product offerings to your focused market. Once you communicate these to your market, you need to complement this with a Net presence where you can display your products or services to your potential customers.
For inbound marketing too, it is important that you have an online presence as high quality online content will drive customers to your site, even though they might not have heard of your product before.
Features of Online Presence Management
The business climate of today, as you know, demands that every business needs to have an online presence to be relevant in the market. Through the Internet, you can interact with your customers, sell your products and complete all transactions, among other things. There are several techniques or strategies by which you can enhance your online presence using your website, such as:
1. Web Design and Development
If you’re setting up a business, you need to launch a website with all necessary details such as your products or services, location and contact details. It’s always better to have a simple but effective website with such details than to lose out on potential customers. Besides, it doesn’t cost too much.
By using free content management systems (CMS) and blogging tools like WordPress, you can communicate with your customers and give them updated information about trends and changes in your industry. You also get an insight into what your customers want and can perhaps alter your products to suit their needs.
By designing your website attractively, you make your logo stand out in your customers’ minds and establish a bond of loyalty, customer satisfaction and quality. You can tie in your web development with your branding activities and SEO so that your brand is easy for your customers to recall.
2. Blogging
By blogging on your business site, you can promote your brand by constantly uploading content related to your brand or industry. Using a microblogging platform like Twitter, you can establish your brand and maintain it too. By blogging every day, you can respond to any customer queries or complaints and show your responsiveness as a company.
3. Search Engine Optimization
It’s not enough to set up a business website and expect traffic and sales automatically. What you need to do is to optimize your site so that your site gets immediately crawled and clicked each time someone is looking for the products you make or the services you offer. When this happens, your site ranks high on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can imagine how important SEO is to your business if you realize that about 50% of online shoppers use search engines to source products.
There are obvious benefits from optimizing your site, such as:
• It gives you long-term results and good ROI.
• You get higher rankings on Google and other search engines. This will automatically bring in huge droves of traffic to your site.
• You also get traffic that converts into confirmed sales.
• The biggest advantage SEO gives you is that all aspects of the SEO process is measurable. So, you can analyze your reasons for success and make any necessary adjustments to improve your online performance so that you get a higher ROI and more product or service sales.
4. Internet Advertising
One way of broadcasting and popularizing your product or service online is to use Internet advertising. It has gone far ahead in reach and results than newspapers, magazines and radio. It works by targeting users interested in certain keywords that match your line of business and display a little text or an image ad adjacent to search results or on social networking sites.
If you want to get the most out of Internet advertising, you can try using some of the following options:
• Google Adwords
• Bing Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
• Reddit Ads
• Yelp Ads
5. Reputation Management
Reputation management is a technique by which one’s reputation, if marred by negative comments, is immediately removed and converted into positive statements. This is done by constantly tracking the opinions and actions of others so that a business owner’s commercial interests are not harmed. By creating a strong web presence and defending oneself quickly, reputation management can come to a business owner’s rescue.
6. Social Media Marketing
A major part of your online presence that can fetch you extra revenue and build customer loyalty is social media marketing. By this marketing technique, your potential and existing customers engage with you through a platform that is already an important part of their lives.
Of course, not all social media platforms are relevant to your business, but it’s better to check these out. For instance, you’d do well to check out Twitter and Facebook which are great sites for the latest news, tips, videos and photos, and questions and answers.
Then, there are LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. Each of these platforms has its singular strength, so research each one to see how far it can help you. For instance, you can use Instagram to display your products because this is a photo-sharing platform.
Once you’ve gone through them all, you can decide on the relevant content to upload on them. You need to write interesting and updated information that your followers will comment upon positively. This kind of engagement with existing or potential customers keeps you close to their needs and thoughts and your brand in their memory.