It has been estimated that approximately 80% of all business conducted around the globe is done online, and even if your particular business is not exclusive to the web, you will undoubtedly benefit by having a strong website that will increase your visibility to the world. If you don’t have a website already, you need to get one designed, developed, and implemented as soon as possible. If you do have a website, you’d be well-advised to try and get the most from it, and you’ll find some of our suggestions below.
Creating a strong website
While this might have been a laborious process years ago, it could hardly be any easier today. There are a number of online companies which will provide you with starter templates that can be customized for your business, so you end up with a very professional-looking site. The only drawback to taking this approach is that your website will have the look and feel of millions of others on the Internet, rather than something unique. If you really want something no one else has, it would be to your advantage to hire a website designer/developer team to create something extraordinary and unique to your business.
Developing content for your site
It’s extremely important to create outstanding content for your website, because it’s that content which will attract Internet users to your site, and keep them there long enough to learn about your business. The kind of content you put on your website also dramatically affects your search rankings, which are the criteria used by search engines to determine how well your content satisfies user search requests. If your website does not appear on the first page of search results returned to a user, you are far less likely to be visited by a large number of internet surfers. If you don’t really have the skills to write great content yourself, and to optimize that content for search engines, you’d be much better off to hire a professional, so you can get the results you need.
Beyond your website
Once you’ve established a great-looking website, with powerful content that attracts visitors and keeps your business strongly visible to the world, you’ll be ready to take the next step toward fuller customer engagement – using social media. The reason you need to do this is very simple – that’s where all your potential customers are. There are a staggering number of people involved with social media, and if you can interact with some of these potential customers, and get your business and its products recognized by them, they could do much of your advertising for you.
If just a few users on social media picked up on how great your products are, and shared that opinion with a few of their friends, it can easily start a domino effect that circles the globe. Making regular posts to the specific social media channel frequented by your target audience is one of the best ways to reach your likeliest buyers, but getting out there personally to engage with potential customers can be very effective as well. If you can show social media users that your company is not a faceless, uncaring corporate entity, but instead is an active and involved member of the community, your online presence will probably become a very powerful component of your overall business success.
At Business Partner Alliance, we can help you build a strategy for your online presence. We provide targeted coaching, consulting and business advisory services to help small and medium sized business owners achieve new heights. We put our passion and experience to work to help business people achieve their goals. Let’s meet for coffee to see how we can work together.
Emory Ware