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The web is a living, breathing, and constantly-evolving entity that offers a myriad of ways for growth-oriented brands to make their presence known, raise brand awareness, and boost engagement with their target audience. Unfortunately, many business leaders fail to utilize the full power and potential of all online channels, and instead think that having a website means having a web presence. No matter if you’re running an Ecommerce business or a blog site, your website alone is not enough to ensure long-term growth.
If you’re trying to boost customer engagement across the board, and especially on your site itself, you need to complement your online presentation with other digital marketing methods that will drive traffic, boost business growth, and of course, engage your audience. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the five ways you can improve engagement through a powerful web presence.
Invest in social media management
Business leaders tend to get so hung up on the design of their websites, fine tuning it from every possible angle, that they forget about the lucrative opportunities that are passing them by in the world of social media. The importance of perfecting the aesthetics and functionality of your site notwithstanding, it’s important to invest in meticulous social media management as well.
Investing in social media will allow you to open a direct line of communication with your audience, expand your brand’s reach, and drive traffic to your website when you combine social media posts with landing pages and stellar content. Start by identifying all of the relevant social media channels for your industry and niche.
You want to establish a presence on all relevant channels. Next, you will need to follow a strict posting schedule to establish a rapport with your audience, and of course, you will need to weave your brand into the messages, stories, and content your post.
Brand yourself for maximum engagement
Brand-building is one of the essential and most important parts of a thriving web presence for any growth-oriented business. Whether you’re rebranding your company, or if you’re building a brand from scratch, it’s important to make this project a priority in order to infuse your web presence with a unique visual identity, a unique tone of voice, and a distinct set of values that will elevate your brand above the competition. Otherwise, you won’t have enough unique material to set you apart in the eyes of the consumers.
Here’s a quick branding checklist:
- Determine the goals of your rebranding or branding project.
- Craft a set of values. Make them unique and relatable to your target audience.
- Develop a tone of voice you’ll use to communicate with customers. Again, make it relatable.
- Build a visual identity that will set you apart, complement your brand’s personality, and produce the right emotional response.
- Optimize your brand for digital and print. Offline marketing is also important, you know.
- Disseminate your brand across the web – don’t just set it up on your site, but infuse it into every digital marketing tactic you use.
Take web design to a whole new level
Now that we’ve covered the importance of branding and have tied it into social media management, let’s circle back to your website in order to fine-tune it for maximum engagement. By now, you’ve hopefully filled out a detailed web design questionnaire in order to get a sense of your true website needs, and to give your web designers every bit of information needed to craft a truly engaging site in terms of aesthetics and functionality.
Firstly, pay special attention to the design. Keep mind that customers and visitors in general will feel more inclined to interact with your site (or simply stay longer) if its content and products enjoy an appealing aesthetic. Utilize white space to frame the design, choose a more minimalist layout to avoid clutter, and weave your brand into the look to make it recognizable.
Next, make sure your site outperforms your competitors’ sites. Leverage AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to speed up your website and optimize it for mobile browsing, and check your hosting plan to see if you’re providing a fast and seamless loading experience. Don’t sacrifice performance for aesthetics.
Don’t forget about SEM and SMM
All of this talk about various “pull” marketing strategies can lead an inexperienced business leader to think that paid advertisement is not worth the money. Oh, but it is. Search engine and social media marketing are two fundamental pillars of digital marketing, and a crucial element of your overall web presence.
No need to be spammy, though, as you simply need a few strategically placed ads on social media and Google to come on top for relevant search results and position your brand above the rest in your industry. If nothing else, these ads will build brand awareness and put your products and services out there for the world to see. Combined with the aforementioned methods, they will close the loop on your web presence.
Emphasize stellar content
And finally, do invest in content creation. Nowadays, customers want to read interesting stories that can help them achieve their goals, resolve their problems, and elevate their quality of life. Use your content strategy to position yourself as the authority in the industry, boost your SEO game, and raise engagement on your site, social media, and across the web.
Wrapping up
Building a powerful web presence is more than just building a beautiful, responsive website – it’s about complementing your amazing site with other marketing tactics to ensure customer engagement across a multitude of online channels. With these tips in mind, go ahead and pave the road to become the leader of your industry in the online world.
