Your company may as well not exist if it’s not online. In 2018, a huge percentage of customers will be funneled to you through your website. Word-of-mouth and foot traffic aren’t enough. Your customers might start searching for your social pages before they leave your store. If nothing comes up in a Google search, people will be left scratching their heads.
You need to beef up your website and bolster your social media. It’s so important that you should be willing to devote funds from your business to cover the expense.
Even if you’re strictly a B2B marketer, you still need to have a meaty online presence.
Here are your options.
Hire Professionals
Let’s say you sell bathing suits. Do you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of building a website yourself? What about handling your social media campaign? You’re in business because you know how to sell bathing suits. That’s what you need to focus on.
You can outsource your website work to a professional developer. WordPress, a content management system, powers at least 30% of the web. Finding a WordPress expert, then, should be easy. Look on sites like Upwork.com and Freelancer.com. The person you hire should be able to handle projects like optimizing your site for mobile experiences. Using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in WordPress isn’t a difficult task for an expert.
You can hire web developers, graphic designers, social media specialists, etc. You still need to be involved. Nobody has your company’s best interests at heart the way that you do. There’s no need to start micromanaging but you need to make sure that your contractors are completing their tasks.
If you hire the right people, you’ll see returns immediately.
Follow the Competition
Figure out who your competition is and you can probably find them online. Should you copy their strategy? Probably not. But you should be aware of what it is. Take note of how their customers are reacting to their brand. If you see something that works, improve on it.
Following your competitor’s online doings is almost as important building up your own website. That’s because you don’t want to be blindsided. If something is going on with your competitor, like a new product release, you need to know about this. Tracking the brand online is a good way to stay up-to-date on what’s happening.
Find Influencers
An influencer is someone who has authority in your industry. Having oodles of followers only helps if those followers are likely to be converted into customers. A beauty blogger isn’t going to be able to do much for your bait and tackle shop, even if she has millions of followers.
Find influencers who can speak to your audience. That’ll take care of a lot of your social media strategy. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone. A good influencer can be found almost anywhere. At the mall, among your current customer list, on social media. Search for people who are gaining a following or trending in a subject related to your business.
Provide Quality Content
If you want to hook your customers, you need to provide interesting content. Otherwise, why are they looking at your pages? Your website can obviously be devoted to your company but on your social media pages you need to branch out a little bit. People will be turned off if all of your posts read like sales pitches.
Online content comes in many forms. You can write relevant blogs posts and articles, you can post videos, etc. The only thing that matters is that the posts are engaging and semi-frequent.
If you don’t have some who can do this in-house, it’s a good idea to hire a freelance worker.
Be Social
Respond to your customers. Engage with them. If you can build a genuine rapport with a customer, they’ll stick around forever. This means ditching the clunky corporate language that your colleagues are used to but is repellent to consumers. Instead, try to connect with your customers on a more human level.
The brands that succeed on social media completely embody their voice. It could be sultry, funny, silly, it doesn’t matter. Just commit.
Building up your web presence may seem daunting, especially if you’re doing it from scratch. However, it’s actually pretty simple. Hire people you trust and oversee their work. Web work is becoming too complicated. Doing all of the work yourself would mean taking valuable time away from your business.
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