by Mitch Granholm, Web Developer at Soulo Communications
Are you an opportunist?
Every opportunity you have to promote your business and increase visibility is valuable.
Without a strong online presence, your inbound traffic is limited more or less to people already familiar with your brand. A solid online presence campaign will increase brand awareness, increase inbound site traffic, improve brand loyalty, and increase opportunities to convert or gain leads. Talk about opportunity!
Social Media
Social media is often the cheapest way to increase your online presence. Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for a customer to convert. In building a following on social media, you'll have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, plus you can interact with all of them. That kind of public back-and-forth on a regular basis is a show of good faith for potential customers. When people want to brag about a product or service, how do they do it? Word of mouth or social media, the latter of which can reach... well, almost everybody. The more people talking about you on social media, the more valuable your brand will seem to new and potential customers.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is a very cost-effective marketing strategy. It targets users who are actively searching for your products and services online. Think about it: When you Google a product or service such as lawn care, what do you type? Most likely something along the lines of "Best lawn care service in [wherever you are]." These are called long tail keywords. They are the thoughts people have when looking for resources, answers to questions, or are looking for a product or service online. These long tail keywords are catalogued by search engines to help people find your content. Building keywords into your content in a tasteful way will help users to find you in their online searches.
Approaching SEO in this way simultaneously helps make your website more navigable for both users and search engines.
UX (User Experience)/UI (User Interface)
Now that you have all this increased traffic to your website, you're in business, right? Not so fast. Is your website built with UX/UI in mind? In terms of design, user experience is as important as visual identity. It doesn't much matter what your website looks like if people don't know how to interact with it. People won't spend the time figuring out a navigation system that isn't intuitive. Before you know it, they have bounced (left your website). If a user leaves your website in this manner they won't return. They could, sure, anything is possible, but they won't.
Good UX/UI design creates easy navigation for the user, is not off-putting, and creates a funnel leading toward a conversion. Good UX/UI design will efficiently get users from A to B without being too pushy. You don't want your website to seem like that ultra pushy salesman.
A strong online presence will inevitably increase your opportunity to gain leads, increase conversions, and grow your business. Take advantage of the opportunity!
