It’s not enough simply to have a brick-and-mortar business. You also need to have a digital presence. This is essential for your business to increase public awareness about your brand.

Think of establishing a digital presence as creating an online business footprint. A carefully crafted digital presence will drive the growth of your business to reach new customers.

Defining the Concept 

The simplest way to describe this marketing concept is that your digital presence is how you represent your business online.

While having a comprehensive website tells visitors all about you, your company, and your products and services, this alone is not a digital presence. Of course, it’s a good start, but the digital presence concept also includes other online elements.

The Elements of Your Digital Presence 

When developing your digital presence, create a consistent brand image and make it easy for potential customers and partners to view your online elements from any device, including mobile devices.

Here are some elements that you should include to develop a robust presence online.

1. Build a website.

Although the physical location of your business may be in the best part of town, it’s a mistake to rely on walk-in traffic, your yellow page advertising, or your phone book entry for people to inquire about your business.

Many people prefer to find out more about a business’s products and services through a website. You must have a website even if you have social media accounts.

It’s fairly easy to find website designers. If you prefer, you can also build one yourself or use a website builder. All you need are a few pages to give people a good idea about your company and how to contact you. Besides talking about your company history and your products and services also include biographies and testimonials from happy customers.

2. Create a blog.

While a website will establish your presence online, your blog will help you engage visitors with fresh content.

Use your blog to answer common questions that your customers ask and propose solutions to some issues they might be facing.

If you or your staff members are not writers, it’s worth hiring freelance writers to create high-quality content.

In addition, make sure your blog and all articles on it are SEO optimized. This will improve your rankings of the major search engines, making it easier for people to discover your blog when they do an online search using keywords related to your business or industry.

3. Choose a social media platform.

The best social media platform to adopt is the one that your audience frequents.

After you create your customer avatar, do some research on which social media platforms you are most likely to find your target audience. Unless you have an unusual niche, you are most likely to find them on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

After you set up your profile, you need to be active on social media. Share any relevant blog posts, images, or videos regularly on your account. Also, respond to comments and engage with your audience.

4. Use both organic and paid advertising.

Use organic and paid advertising to drive traffic to your website and blog.

The advantage of organic traffic is that it creates long-term traffic and the benefit of paid advertising is that it creates almost immediate traffic.

A mix of both types of advertising works remarkably well.

5. Invest in content marketing.

The best way to get your visitors to know like and trust your brand is to invest in content marketing.

You will need more than sales pages and product descriptions on your website to convert visitors into buyers. Besides copywriting to convert visitors into subscribers on your landing page and sales pages to convert prospects into customers, you will need plenty of free content. This content could include blog posts, email marketing, and YouTube videos.

A good online presence should include elements like a website, a blog, and social media marketing. You should also leverage the power of advertising and content marketing to help you become a recognized thought-leader in your industry. Seattle Public Relations can help you establish a strong digital presence.