Your customers really do want to find you online so a strong digital presence is critical for the future of your brand.
Your company has a digital presence. Of sorts.
Said presence isn’t anything like it could be, however. Or should be. You and your team know there’s more to be done.
These six strategies are, collectively, that “more.” Carve out some time to put them to work getting your digital visibility where it needs to be.
Nothing turns off prospective customers more than a “parked domain” notice. There’s no point in having a web domain if all you’re going to use it for is email hosting; Gmail is fine for that, and cheaper too.
No, you need a website. A real, publicly visible website that shows up in search results and looks like it was put together by someone who knows what they’re doing. You don’t have to “finish” your website in one go, or even build it out completely on the sort of timetable your customers might expect, but you do have to get it live.
Your website is in the books, or at least on the way to being done. Now it’s time to turn your attention to other web properties that you can control.
First up: Crunchbase. It’s not as well known as the LinkedIns and Facebooks of the world, which we’ll discuss in a moment. But it is a key platform for growing brands and the personalities behind them, from executives and creatives to investors and board members.
The Crunchbase profile for Skybound Capital, a global wealth management firm, showcases the medium’s potential nicely. You can see that it’s not flashy or fancy, but that’s the point. It’s “just the facts,” and that’s just fine.
Next, LinkedIn. No introduction needed here. An admonishment may be in order, however. Many otherwise well-marketed brands and business leaders don’t do all they can to maximize LinkedIn’s potential.
If you know deep down that you can do more to polish your LinkedIn presence, take a moment to review these best practices for a first-rate LinkedIn presence. Whatever amount of time you’ll need to invest up front will be more than justified by the engagement your better-than-average profile earns.
To be clear, you should use them. Both of them. Two minutes with the Twitter handle for Charmin, the ever-popular toilet paper brand, should convince you of the power of a creatively managed Twitter platform. Ditto for any of the countless actively managed Facebook company pages you’ve come across in your online travels.
Let’s say you don’t, though. Let’s say your Twitter and Facebook presence is mostly just for show. You should still go through the motions of maintaining footholds on these platforms if only for the SEO value of doing so.
That’s right. SEO. Twitter and Facebook are about as close to guaranteed first-page search engine results for brands that aren’t in the news every day. Which means they’re among the very few digital marketing scenarios in which doing the bare minimum can still pay off.
YouTube’s secret isn’t its SEO value, although that’s not negligible. YouTube’s secret is twofold: the fact that millions upon millions of Internet users spend hours upon hours consuming its content coupled with the ease with which YouTube enables creative branding and promotion.
You don’t need to look far to find examples of the latter. Take the YouTube channel for LEGO, the venerable toy brand. Defying easy categorization, it’s part educational tour de force, part irreverent gadget showcase, part slick marketing platform. And yet it has millions of followers, so clearly it works.
Medium has the SEO juice your website blog can only dream of. Milk that for all it’s worth.
Just be sure not to duplicate your website blog posts on Medium. Consider publishing longform content on Medium linked to from shorter summary pieces on your blog. You’re apt to get more eyes on your Medium channel anyway.
No matter how hard you try, you won’t create a digital presence worthy of your company in a week’s time. Even a month is pushing it. Putting together a well-rounded, well-polished online ecosystem takes time and often doesn’t progress in a straight line.
And yet it’s incredibly important for the future of your brand. Because your customers really do want to find you online. You have to do the work to let them, even if that isn’t quite as easy as hanging out a sign on a storefront.
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