Let us accept the fact that today if your Startup is not online, it is meant to fail. Business owners must understand being online is not a privilege anymore; it’s a need.
Few offline business owners are hesitant to go online, and some have a perception that creating an online presence is difficult.
However, it is not true. Today there are multiple options available for a company to mark its presence online.
There are a few factors that can motivate you to take your business online:
- Easy access to the internet
- Availability of multiple social media platforms
- Cost-effectiveness of the internet over an offline business
- Availability of Website Builders for website designing
Now let us assume you are already online. But what you need to do to boost your online presence?
- Introduce on Social Media Platforms: As discussed earlier, there are many social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc. Make a beautiful looking company page on these platforms and create communities to engage with your clients and customers.
- Have a well-defined goal: Before launching a company on social media, create a goal to define how that platform would serve the purpose. If you want to generate leads, then you may not even want a Snapchat account, instead, you should create a LinkedIn account. For brand awareness, you might want a company profile on Facebook and YouTube.
- Get the most out of Influencers: You may be online, but you are not getting engagement from the social media users. In such a case, you should identify influencers who have a customer base matching your business profile. These influencers could do the marketing of your products and services on your behalf in return of a small payment. They are very creative and usually talk about the products very similar to yours. Hence their audience is what you want to target.
- Provide online payment options: If you are an e-commerce company, try to integrate online payment gateways on your website. Cash on delivery payment option is good, but it’s better to have a credit card, debit card or net banking payments.
- Integrate CRM: Keep updating customers with products and services that you offer or have planned to launch in future. Let them interact with you through queries, discussion forums, or posts. Have Chatbots to provide quick response to the customers. Let them know you respond to their questions and have a keen interest in resolving their issues.
- Monitor Brand Mentions: Have Brand Monitoring tools and team in place to track what others are talking about you on social media. Few may not like to tell your customer service team how they felt about your product or service. Instead, they will post feedback on social media platforms. The feedback might be an appreciation or a negative comment. You need to address such brand mentions and also share the same with customer service team in case area of improvement is identified.
- Emphasize on Brand Awareness: Many companies run ad campaigns for generating ROI and sales. However, you must always look for a new audience who are yet to know your brand or products. You must use beautiful and attention-grabbing images, videos or contents to educate new prospects. More valuable traffic means more long term profit.
- Use Blogs and Link Building: You must have heard “Words are sharper than Swords”. This is true in case of brand and link building activities. Blogs usually narrate stories around your products and how they can solve customer’s pain point. Hire or get freelance blog writers to keep regular blog posts going on your website and social media platforms. A beautifully written blog gets more engagement and users share these posts with their friends and communities. Take advantage of Guest blogs to get traffic through backlinks. A higher domain authority site would have a better audience who is most likely to click on links redirecting to your landing pages.
You may decide to perform all these above activities to boost your online presence. Or, join ONPASSIVE to access free automation tools designed to take care of all these activities. ONPASSIVE does recruitment, scans the internet and identifies who can perform marketing activities on your behalf. How much more can be expected from this company which wants you to relax while the company takes care of your business?
