5 Tips to Give Your Online Presence a Spring Clean

Presenting a carefully cultivated impression of your brand, services, and products online can generate lots of opportunities to engage with potential new customers.

According to Statista, over 60% of UK SMEs are investing heavily in developing their brand online, with increasing numbers due to the continued shift towards online businesses and eCommerce. As a result, cultivating and maintaining an online presence has become essential for any business to remain relevant amongst its competitors. This blog discusses why an online presence is essential in 2023 and five ways you can improve yours and give it a well-deserved spring clean.

Why Is a Digital Online Presence Important?

A digital presence works for your company 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even minor improvements to your existing offering can provide noticeably increased engagement with your brand compared to not having a presence at all. For example, an attractive online portfolio will make it clear to viewers what your brand offers and can be updated quickly to show changes.

Combining a website with a strong social media presence will give your brand a more active voice and enable your audience to connect with you directly. This makes your business more relatable to customers, meaning they’re more likely to choose you over one of your competitors.

The internet is a constantly changing market that needs to be continuously monitored. Simply owning a website isn’t enough anymore; you need to make sure it’s relevant to the current search engine trends while making sure it’s as user-friendly as possible.

One essential thing to remember is that Google rewards websites that are updated regularly with fresh, relevant content. So, to get the best return on your investment, you should ensure your site is regularly updated with fresh, SEO-optimised, quality content.

Improving your Online Presence

There are lots of online platforms you can use to help create and build your online presence, regardless of the size of your business. These include websites, social media platforms, video-sharing sites, review and testimonial sites, and much more. Additionally, there are several resources you can use alongside these platforms, such as SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay-per-click), to enhance your presence and gain the attention of your desired customers. Here are some of our top tips to help you master your online presence in 2023.

1. Invest in Email Marketing

Email marketing is a simple but highly effective way of reaching your existing and new customers and can take your brand to the next level. In a nutshell, email marketing is sending an email to a mailing list which comprises email addresses you’ve gathered. For example, these can be previous or prospective clients who submitted an email address through a ‘newsletter signup’ box on your website. There are several reasons you may wish to conduct email marketing campaigns; the most obvious is to put your products directly in front of your audience and direct them to the relevant pages on your website. This type of email marketing can be very effective and requires relatively minimal effort when considering the potential return. Another very effective approach is brand awareness campaigns. This could simply be a monthly newsletter providing company updates, events, helpful guides and news to your readers, you may not be actively ‘selling’ something, but this ensures that you keep your brand at the forefront of your readers’ minds.

At SQ Digital, we take email marketing a step further by adding automation to our campaigns. This enables us to create highly effective and targeted campaigns. For example, we can create campaigns that will automatically email an offer to a client who hasn’t interacted with your brand in a given number of days or send reminders to users who have left an item in their basket after a set time. The opportunities with automations are practically endless, meaning you can create a campaign that’s as simple or complex as you like.

2. Improved Onsite SEO

SEO is essential to any website and is one of the key tools that will elevate your brand above your competitors. A powerful SEO strategy consisting of onsite and offsite optimisation helps your brand rank higher in search engines such as Google for the terms most relevant to your business. Better results will place your website higher on the list than your competitors and make your page more likely to be clicked. SEO is particularly important for SMEs as it significantly improves the effectiveness of your current digital marketing efforts.

3. Replace Image With Video Marketing

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth ten thousand. Video marketing is an incredibly successful tool for enhancing your online presence as it catches people’s attention far more than the static alternative. Improved connection speeds and higher compression rates enable websites and social media to upgrade to moving images with minimal impact when it comes to loading speeds.

Video marketing increases your engagements and conversion rates significantly when added to your website or social media platforms. Videos increase the time users spend on your pages and provide a more interesting method of sharing large amounts of information about your brand, services or products.

4. B2B Business Using Social Media

During the last few years, the popularity of remote online businesses has grown immensely, offering new opportunities for businesses to connect with their audiences via social media. There’s a misconception that social media is only useful to B2C businesses that regularly interact with the public, but this isn’t true. B2B and B2C businesses have significantly increased brand awareness by posting organically on channels best suited to their target audiences.

Businesses working in even the most specialist and niche areas will find their audience on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Even simple posts sharing business news, company ethos, and products will significantly develop your brand awareness, engage your audience and even promote sales.

With such a significant shift towards online business in recent years, it’s more important than ever that companies develop effective social media management strategies to keep up with their competitors.

As a digital marketing agency, we’ve assisted many B2B companies by creating content that positions them as thought leaders in their industry. This can be done by commenting on relevant industry news and responding to contextual subject matters specific to your field. For B2B clients, we often recommend establishing a presence on LinkedIn, as this platform generates the most positive results.

Finding the best social media platforms for your business will significantly improve your ability to find more buyers and build profitable relationships, similar to attending exhibitions and conventions all year round.

5. Choose a Digital Marketing Agency

Choosing a digital marketing agency like ourselves is the best way to give your online presence a well-deserved spring clean. This is because we can help you improve your digital offering cost-effectively while providing access to the latest expertise, tools, and technologies you may not otherwise have access to. These aspects of digital marketing allow us to generate great returns and measurable results for our clients, making choosing us an excellent way to boost your online presence.

At SQ Digital, we have over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and have established ourselves as a trusted industry leader by building a strong culture of continuous improvement. We’ve worked with many businesses to help them develop a new online presence or improve an existing one to meet their current needs and future goals. We are genuinely passionate about creating digital marketing strategies and campaigns that make a significant difference.

Choosing SQ Digital is the best way to boost your online presence this spring because we go to great lengths to ensure small to medium-sized businesses have access to the same high level of digital marketing services as large companies.

You can find more advice in our previous blogs on successful digital marketing strategies and brand promotion. Alternatively, contact us directly to discuss how we can help you boost your online presence.