Creating a strong digital presence for your business is essential for identifying customers, collecting data and expanding your brand. For your business to truly excel online, it is important to provide valuable information to customers while still inviting them to engage with your website and generate important customer data. This online journey can be a daunting process. To explain how that process works, it is best if broken into phases. From building a business website to attracting customers and eventually growing your business, here are the three phases to a strong digital presence.
Phase One: Build Your Website
Create a “Home Base” for Your Business
The first and most important step in any digital marketing strategy is of course your website. By creating your website, you are creating a place for people to go. This will serve as your “home base” or “headquarters”, which provides a first impression to potential customers. At your website, visitors can learn about your brand and mission. If you consider something important to the success and expansion of your organization – it should be clearly visible on your business website. Introduce yourself. Provide valuable information and engaging content that speaks to your customer base. Who are your customers? Well… that part comes in phase three.
Phase Two: Increase Website Traffic
You have your “home base,” now get people there.
Once you have a place for people to go, you need to get them there. With a mixture of strategies, technologies and techniques, visitors will find their way to your website to learn about your brand and organization. The strategies best used to attract visitors are unique for every business. Your website hits may come from engaging Facebook videos or viral blog posts, while another business might find success from reaching out to their target customers on LinkedIn. No matter what strategy works best to attract visitors to your site, it is important to continuously work to improve your website’s search ranking by making changes on and off your website as well as attempting new strategies for increasing website traffic.
Phase Three: Use Your Website for Business Growth
Analyze and utilize your website data to maximize sales.
When you’re ready to grow your business, it’s important to collect data about your website visitors, grade their interest, capture their contact details and communicate to your team when visitors are serious about doing business. Phase three is all about “growth,” and is the true purpose of any great website. Once your website has attracted visitors during phase two, converting those visitors into sales should be the goal of phase three. This phase involves creating a process that turns your nameless website visitors into real people with names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other data your business might find valuable. By collecting data on your website visitors and knowing “who” your customers are, your team can reach out when the time is right.
