The a company's online presence is essential if we want to be relevant in the 21st century. It is no longer enough to have a physical or face-to-face business, if we are not online we are doomed to failure.
This may be an exaggeration. For example, if we open a souvenir shop or a restaurant in the middle of the street, we can Gran Vía madrileña, we may not need to be online.
What is a reality is that if we are, we will have great opportunities to improve our results, be more profitable and, not least, more relevant.
In addition, most companies are not lucky enough to be focused on a general target group and located in an area with a large number of visitors. Or, even then, it is not always profitable because these types of locations also involve large outlays for renting the premises.
In any case, although even more so in niche shops, the a company's online presence will allow us to reach our target group and make them fall in love so that they become repeat customers.
In this article, I am not going to talk about the -obvious- advantages of having an online presencebut of the different options we can follow to do so. A combination of several is always the best choice we can make.
Website
In the midst of 2022, talking about the importance of having an website for a business is almost ridiculous. You know that perfectly well. The website is the foundation of a company's online presence..
It is a place with unlimited possibilities from which everything else starts. Googling the website is the first thing a person does when they hear about a company. So we have to have a website, but we also have to work on a few things. SEO guidelines so that they can find us.
Do not do the content for SEO on the website will make us invisible unless we invest heavily in a variety of different online advertising formats.
Long gone is the time when having a website was enough. Now, if we want to appear, we need a good website. One that is responsive and adapts to mobiles, as most searches are done on this device, that does not weigh too much and that we can manage easily.
Personally, what I would recommend is have a CMS such as WordPressIt is free and easy to use so that you don't have to depend on a computer specialist to make any changes.
Also, work the website. Update it with the changes that happen in the business, write interesting information about your products or services, examples, etc... Don't just have it for the sake of having it.
Finally, analyse your website. It's not enough to have it and work it, you have to know what's going on. What is my dwell timeWhere are my users coming from and do they match my target demographics? This way you will know if your work is working.
Blog
If you really want to have room for manoeuvre from your website, the best thing to do is to have your own blog. There you will be able to work a keyword research to define your SEO content strategy and build brand awareness and showcase your brand and your expertise online.
Websites should be simple, intuitive and without large amounts of content. If we have a lot to tell, that's what the blog is for. There is room for a lot of things: tips, tutorials, success stories, corporate information, etc...
The only problem with the blog is that it needs regularity. We need to feed it regularly so that it becomes the traffic generator that we need, in which case it will be the most important piece of the digital presence of our company.
A good blog not only gives us a presence, it also generates business. By means of buttons, landing pages, links to our ecommerce, digital products, demo or appointment bookings, etc... the blog has a lot of options to facilitate monitoring.
Of course, always taking into account the customer journey if we really want to get the most out of it.
Social media
After the blog and the website, we need to talk about the social media. Of course, we are not talking about all social networks. The first thing we need to know is in which our target audience is located.
The public profile on LinkedIn is not the same as the one on TikTok., Instagram o Twitter. Each network has its own particularities and there will be some that interest us more than others. Not only because our audience is there but also because of the nature of our business.
For example, if you are in tourism, fashion or catering, a visual network such as the Instagram is the best option we can have. If we are a business consultancy or a political consultancy, our site is probably at LinkedIn o Twitter.
Once we know where we stand, measure the social media engagement is essential to check whether we are meeting our objectives. Of course, never forget the qualitative section. The interaction of your audience must be positive, otherwise you are not getting what you need.
Let's look one by one at what the main social networks can bring to us in terms of a company's digital presence.
Twitter is the network of content and outreach. One important thing about Twitter is that if we want it to work well, we have to creating tailored content.
Many companies open a Twitter account and use it to link to their blog content. That doesn't work. On Twitter, you need to know the language of Twitter, which, moreover, goes by trends.
This does not mean that you have to create the content from scratch. For example, we can transform our blog post into a Twitter thread. That is, a succession of linked tweets that function as a piecemeal story.
This social network is perfect for dissemination, tutorials and anecdotes.. It can be used to make ourselves known in a more human way and another of its main advantages is that if our threads work, engagement will grow more easily than in other social networks.
On the negative side, Twitter is the network where it is easiest to receive criticism. However, if we know how to answer them with grace and panache, we can come out stronger.
Facebook is in complete decline. It is losing users and is far from its peak when everyone had an account. Today, we are experiencing the opposite process. Many people, especially the millenialstheir Facebook accounts are being deleted.
As for Generation Z, they live in Instagram and TikTok and they didn't even open it at any time. Even so, human beings are creatures of habit and there are quite a few people who are still Facebook users.
For example, Facebook continues to have more users than Twitter. So I don't recommend to skip it in our social media strategy. Especially interesting for social ads strategies because it has an excellent segmentation and can be very useful for certain demographic groups.
Whereas Facebook is in decline, Instagram survives. In this case we are dealing with a very diverse network, which is taking the place left by Facebook as the network that is used by the widest audience and with the greatest diversity of interests.
Whatever our sector of activity, it is quite likely that we will our target is an Instagram user. What can happen is that our type of company does not adapt well to the Instagram format and we have to be a bit more creative to reach people.
As in the case of the blog, here we also have to work on the SEO on Instagram if we want greater visibility, being a more complicated algorithm than Twitter's to achieve organic reach.
While at the beginning Instagram lived off its feed, nowadays the most important things are the stories and the direct feeds. Ephemeral content that disappears (although it can be pinned to featured stories or IGTV), which is more work than with more permanent elements such as Twitter or TikTok.
As in the case of Facebook, if we're thinking about make social ads, It is important to have a digital presence on Instagram, even if we don't work so much on the content of the profile.
LinkedInthe professional network par excellence, is an important stake for our company. digital presence on the internet. It may not be so crucial if we have a B2C business and we want to reach the consumer, but it will allow us to function seamlessly in B2B business.
In addition, LinkedIn works to attract talent is currently the best employment platform for qualified profiles. Thus, LinkedIn can work for us to let other professionals know that our company exists and to achieve access to better profiles in selection processes.
Due to the profile of its audience, it is not generally a good option for advertising, as the price is very high and far from those found in other networks. Only if we have large margins, we will have a positive ROI.
Still, it is a network that makes sense to be in and does not require as much work in general as others on the list. On LinkedIn, it doesn't hurt you so much if you don't work it very actively.unlike on Instagram, for example.
If we are in the business of selling on LinkedIn for our company, there is an indicator of social sellingthe SSIwhich will tell us how optimised our profile is for the algorithm. This can only be calculated for personal profiles and not for company profiles.
TikTok
Finally, we need to talk about TikTok being the fastest growing social network in recent years. Especially important among young people, if our target is young it is a place where we have to be.
Here it is very important to take into account the language specific to the TikTok and be able to produce quite a few videos, as they the algorithm requires quite a lot of periodicity.
It is also a very good option for advertising. One of the advantages of the TikTok advertising is that we can also use the advertisements that we make for the Instagram stories.
The case of TikTok exemplifies one of the most important social media lessons we can learn as a company. Users have loyalty to social networksbut not to specific brands. At any time they can drop one network and replace it with another.
Thus, it is also our job to be attentive to the changes that are taking place and to the new trends. The sooner we start working on a emerging social networkThe easier it will be to have a greater presence there as the public migrates.
Ads
If you have a website and social media, another way to improve a company's online presence is through ads, which complement well with organic work. Choose between SEO or SEM may seem complicated.
The SEM gives more immediate results, but it also requires more investment. Still, it can be an ally for faster organic growth.
In addition, we can also work with other online advertising formats, such as the programmewhich allows us to appear in the media as if we were news.
Sponsored content
Finally, we have to mention the sponsored contentwhich can also be a fundamental ally of our linkbuilding strategy for SEO.
In this case, it is about sponsoring a piece of information in a blog or media. We will pay and thanks to this we will be talking about our brand or dealing with a topic. This is the less obtrusive format for users but it must be used intelligently.
As a general rule, sponsored content does not generate much traffic and it is usually cheaper to use programmatic. However, if we are willing to invest to appear in a major media outlet in a certain position, it can be a very good option to gain digital presence.
As we can see, there are multiple ways to improving a company's online presence. The most advisable thing to do is to study each case and choose the most interesting options according to our public and sector of activity.
