Building Your Online Presence (Part 2)

A Marketing 101 Series

Welcome to Part two of our four part series about building your online presence. Last week, we looked at setting up a website, setting up social media accounts, and starting an email list. If you’d like to read the full article, you can find it by clicking here.

This week, we’re going to be building on what we discussed in our previous post about getting the fundamentals in place. It will become evident very quickly that the steps we are about to outline really aren’t possible without having the foundational pieces in place that we discussed in the last article.

We will be focusing on three (3) things that directly build onto what we discussed last week, which are Producing Content, Personifying Your Brand, and Mastering SEO. While you will not become an expert in these things overnight (especially SEO) they are important building blocks to understanding how your business functions and how to connect with your audience.

1 // Produce Content

Once you have your social media accounts set up, one of the first things we suggest is beginning to produce content for these social media profiles. Just having the account, unfortunately, isn’t enough. In order to start building a following on social media, posting content about your company, product, or service needs to happen. Whether you choose to do this yourself or hire it out (We can help here) getting your message out there needs to happen. At first, getting these posts up and created will take time, but it will become a faster process as you learn.

One of the great things that can help you in getting this organized is figuring out what your “content pillars” are. If you’re not familiar with the term content pillars, check out our post on “What are Content Pillars” here. Once you’ve figured out what your content pillars are, it will help you further speed up the content creation process, because it will give you the topics to post about for each day you choose to create and post content. 

2 // Personify Your Brand

Personifying your brand is really all about being a human and connecting with other humans. Yes, as a company, it’s important to be able to deliver on what you promise. It’s also important to show you’re not a robot and don’t have a soft side as a company. Personifying your brand can look like identifying employees on their birthday or talking about an afternoon in the community. If you’re a small business owner, it could mean sharing the photo of you watching a kid at practice or an event.
Regardless of what you choose, the biggest reason to do this is to show your audience you can understand and relate to their life. As a business grows larger, this can get more difficult, so start early with this. These kind of real life connections should be around 20% of your created content. 

3 // Learn SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s really about understanding how your potential audience is going to look for you on search engines like Google or Bing. As the interwebs have gotten more advanced, so have search parameters by users. Learning how to include search terms they will use into your site is a combination of art and skill. There are a lot of layers to SEO and it’s possible you won’t be able to do all of them. That’s ok. Focus on the basics like finding the right keywords and phrases that match how people find you, and you’re well on your way.

SEO is also not an overnight solution. If anyone tells you SEO is one and done, they really don’t understand it. It’s about consistency and tailoring your site to more closely match customer inquiries while still communicating your message. SEO also allows you to be a creative wordsmith and expand how you use language to convey your message. Be creative and make the Google Keyword Planner your new best friend.

I hope that you are starting to see how these build on each other to build your company’s marketing engine. In the next installment of this series, we will discuss creating value, developing relationships, and analyzing your results. 

If you’ve found value in this series, don’t forget to take a look at our other blogs and downloadable content on the website. You can also see case studies of our work and send us a message if you’re interested in seeing how our packages can help your business build an audience and close more customers.