How are you managing the Online Presence of your business?

A Brief Definition of Online Presence Management

Online presence management is the process of presenting and drawing traffic to a personal or professional brand online.  This process combines web design, blogging, SEO, Pay Per Click Marketing, Reputation Management, Business Directory Listings, Social Media Management, link building and effective management of your Google My Business Page.

An Online Presence is important for marketing because it reinforces your brand and what you offer to your target market.   Online Presence also critically important marketing because quality online content will help attract customers even if they haven’t heard of your brand.

Due to the evolving nature of Internet use, a web site alone is not sufficient to promote most brands. An online presence management strategy has several parts including website SEO along with a combination of social media platforms, local business directories and a Google My Business Page.

Six Critical Dimensions of Online Presence Management

1.Website and Online Portfolio Management

The Online portfolio helps build visibility of a brand or individual. It works as a centralized hub for all the activities related to the brand and includes, contact info, about the brand (history, vision etc.) and a product showcase. The Web portfolio range in type. The most common form of portfolio is the website. A website, usually built on the same domain as the brand’s name, represents the business throughout the web.

Brands and companies prefer to use websites to establish themselves and gain higher brand awareness levels because it is very important for the company to stay relevant as time passes by and promoting a product online makes it much easier to keep up with the times.  It is important for businesses to keep online visibility high compared to their competitors.

2. Company & Industry News-Blog

A News-Blog provides the brand a way to express and promote. It allows the brand to talk and get their voice/opinion heard on any topic they choose. Blogging can promote a brand through consistent, interesting content generation associated with a particular brand and the industry that the company competes in.

Company blogging is a very powerful tool when attempting to communicate an idea important to the company’s industry and target audience.  However, there are a few rules to keep in mind when utilizing company blogs:

• Blogs can be both internal and external – This means that they can be effective to communicate new products or ideas to customers, or make sure everyone inside the firm is on the same page.
• Blogs can be personal – Blogs can be written from a first-person perspective.
• Blogs need a good author to be successful, but it does not have to be the chief executive officer – Some believe that chief executive officers are too busy running the rest of the firm to also write a blog. Companies like Boeing and General Motors have successful blogs that are not written by their chief executive officers.
• Blogs are targeted – Value the audience and write for them.
• Blogs can be short lived – Corporate blogs should not last long. They are created for a purpose, used, and then shut down. They are not meant to go on forever.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is one of the most popular technique to build traction and turn a web page into a revenue generation machine. SEO allows companies to:

• Identify keywords that are likely to bring potential customers or audience to their website
• Embed those keywords into the web content, naturally and in a value-added way
• Allow search engines to crawl the web page and index all the content

Search engines use a spider to gather listings by automatically “crawling” the web. The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages, and stores them in the search engine’s index. Based on this data, the search engines then index the pages and rank the websites accordingly.  Some methods that help optimize a web page for the search engine including creating great, keyword-optimized, articles.

4. Internet Advertising

Internet advertising is a form of broadcasting and promotion of products, ideas, or services using the Internet to attract customers. This idea is very similar to that of social media marketing. Internet advertising has overtaken other traditional advertising media such as newspapers, magazines, and radio.  Social Media Marketing & Google Ad’s target users interested in relevant keywords and displays a text or image ad next to search results or within social media. While searching for these specific keywords, firms can target their advertisements for specific audiences. The advertisements will more than likely pop up on social media, but can also show up just on websites that customers would visit. This increases the firm’s online presence and makes their products or services more visible to potential consumers.

5. Reputation Management

Reputation management is a critical part of online presence management. A company’s reputation is based on consumer trust and is often dependent on information that is found on social networks and the internet. Having a good reputation has a significant impact on a company’s survival. But having no reputation can be as critical as having a bad reputation. No reputation means you don’t exist in the eyes of a consumer.

With the internet and multiple social media outlets, information is everywhere and is hard to control. It is how managers react and oversee these opinions or reviews that is critical. Digital media offers the possibility to monitor customer opinions almost in real time. It is imperative that businesses constantly track what their customers think of them and work proactively to ensure the conversation remains positive toward them.

The first steps in developing and managing a company’s reputation requires the business to define their image, identify a target market and develop a core message.  Management of a company’s online reputation should include maintaining a social platform.

6. Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing uses social media platforms to create and foster communities and relationships among people and businesses. Social media is one of the most prevalent forms of communication and marketing today and businesses reach massive amounts of potential customers through it.  Social media marketing is focused on creating content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share content with their social networks. Social messages are often effective because they usually come from a trusted, third-party source, rather than the brand itself. However, a brand having their own specific voice through social media can be very effective for keeping loyal customers close and attracting newer ones.

In Summary

We hope this article will help to provide you with a better understanding of Online Presence Management.  Please note that hiring a Digital Marketing Agency to handle the heavy lifting of the numerous tasks is the right decision for many small businesses the time or the expertise to manage this process.

To learn more, give us a call today.  Click Here: (423) 591-5993