Simple Steps to Build An Online Presence From Scratch

There are hundreds of reasons to build an online presence for your business in this Digital World. According to a recent research, about 1.9 Billion people are search online for the things they need. This is not a small number and the things range from a small pen to large ships. So if you are a business owner which sells some sort of Products and Services than you should act upon it as early as possible.

Still, confused about taking the first step?

Then below are some points that will help you clear your doubts. You will also know why is it important to build an online presence for your business. After deciding it you can then move to the simple steps that you need to follow in order to accomplish your goals.

Reasons to Build an Online Presence for Your Business

1. Reaching The Right Customers

No matter how small or big your business is people tend to search and find you online. If you are still focusing only on the offline structure then you are losing much of your target user base. The first thing that people do after hearing the name of a company is to Google about them. Everyone loves information and the Internet is the place to provide information to your valued customers.

Don’t let their attention move from you to your competitors who already have an online presence. The time has changed for better and now its too important for you to get yourself online.

2. Building Trust and Relationships

While operating your business online you tend to remain as closer to your consumers as you can. Their actions and behavior towards your products and services could be easily reported. This gives you an extra benefit of molding your support and services in a way your users require.

As you bring yourself online you create a place for your consumers to interact with you. This healthy interaction will help you in building a customer-centric way of Business. Suppose your customer is facing an issue with your service, He/She can directly contact you on social media profile which saves both the time and energy.

3. Marketing Made Easier

It’s an obvious fact that marketing a thing online is easier than its offline. People tend to trust something they see on Digital Media rather than the physical representation. The Internet is accessed to gather information and if you provide the right information to the right person you are good to go.

There are tons of ways for marketing a product online to your targeted customers. It includes Digital Marketing Services such as SEO,  PPC Ads, Content Marketing, Social Media Advertisements and a lot more.

4. Helps In Managing Customers

Its a lot easier to manage the queries and feedback of the consumers online. They come to your website, look at your product and services, contact you and get a new lead. More and more websites are implementing Live Chat options on their websites to solve out queries and complaints right from the website.

Solving user’s problems even before it reaches the market saves the reputation of your brand. If you have built the reputation then you are half done with selling your stuff.

5. Spreading of Your Messages

When you already have an online presence then you can easily spread your messages across them. Finding the right way to spread up the message is up to you and the best required for your business.

For example, if you are launching a new product or service. You can use your online market to spread this information and get more people to know about your new launch.

These were some of the points explaining the need to build an online presence for your business. I hope now it’s clear about the need and now we will be looking at the process of building a strong online presence.

Simple Steps to Build a Strong Online Presence

With the advancement in tools and strategies, it’s very easy to build a complete web presence. I will now be writing the steps which can be followed to get the best results not immediately but gradually over the period of time. Another thing with these steps is that they are universal for all kinds of Business whether it is small or big and just changing the strategies can be applied to both.

So let’s just start with the steps:

Step 1: Building a Website for Your Business

This is no more a thing to tell about and the first and very important step. Your business should start with building a website even if its a static one. More functionality could be added later on while working and analyzing the requirements. You should know the type of website that your business requires.

Here are some of the basic types of website that you can choose from:

• Personal Website – For an Individual Business owner like if you are providing Digital Marketing Services
• Blogging/Informational Website – For providing information on certain topics around your field.
• ECommerce Website – For Selling out Goods and Services
• Forum or Community Website – For handling the query and feedback from your customers
• Business website – Comprising of many other blocks such as ECommerce, Blog, Forums, Etc.

Now after choosing the type of website you require you can plan out the basic structure for it. The website could be developed by hiring any web development company or you can develop it yourself on the WordPress platform, WordPress has made it much easier to develop and build a business website with complete facilities. There are tutorials all over the Internet for building up a website with WordPress easily.

Step 2: Creating Social Media Profiles for your Business

Social Media is the best way to reach out and interact with your customers directly. People use these platforms to get updates from the people and profiles they love. So start to build social media profiles on some popular platforms including:

• Facebook Page
• Twitter Profile
• Instagram Page – You will need to share pictures and videos.
• Whatsapp Business Account – If you need to interact with Users directly
• LinkedIn Profile – You can also find people looking for job-related to your business.

You will get the tutorials on the Internet for creating these profiles. A Social Media Manager could also be hired for managing all your social media profiles efficiently.

Step 3: Setting Up your Blog

It is very much hard to reach more people with your static website. Because people and even the search engines love fresh and updated content and only a Blog could help you out. A Blog is just similar to a website but it is used to provide updated information occasionally. All the posts that you publish there will be shown in date wise order.

Google loves new information and therefore it will really help you in ranking purpose for your digital marketing campaigns. WordPress platform could be used to build a blog in simple and easy steps.

Step 4: Providing Information to Build an Online Presence

As you have already created Social Media Profiles and have setup the Blog. Content and Information is what you will require next for spreading out and interacting users. Hire a content writer or Graphic designer who can provide fresh content for your profiles and blogs. This is the best thing to build an online presence for business as people would get attracted by the unique information or graphics that you will provide.

Here is an Infographic from QuickSprout stating the need of having a Social Media Calendar to schedule and manage your posts.

Publish the content on all your Social Media accounts by using hashtags, using attractive headlines, Captions and images. Grow your online presence step by step in the mean time.

Step 5: Engaging With Customers

Interact with the customers and try to put up articles that can help you in increasing engagement. Solve out the queries and problems that you receive from either from a new visitor or your avid user.

Reply to their comments, Hear to their tweets and work to build an online presence such that your customers feel a bond. This bond will become stronger with time and build an online presence for your company.

Step 6: Advertise

Due to the huge competition in the market, it’s obvious that many problems would be coming your way. You will see that no body is actually liking the profile, Sharing it with you and all your Social Media Accounts are just too Lorn.

It happens with almost every new business profiles because they are not that much popular offline. You can take the help of advertisements. Almost all social platforms allow you to create advertisements to reach targeted customers. With a small budget, you can actually make it through and find your end target users.

There are multiple tutorials on the Internet to get your advertisements ready and working. You can hire any Digital Marketing Consultant for getting this work done. You will also require it to work on your website so that it can get the visitors right from the search engines.

Step 7: Getting Leads and Handling New Customers

After performing the above steps in the right manner you will start getting new leads. Even if you start getting some queries about your services its a positive result. Now its completely up to you and your consultancy team to handle new queries and turning them into leads.

And here comes an end for the complete step by step guide to Build an Online Presence for Business. You can actually follow these steps simply and contact me about any query that you have. The process to build an online presence will take both time and dedication but the end results will be amazing.

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