When you start up a new business, or indeed if you have been running one for a while, you should never underestimate the importance of your online presence. Just because you have a website or a facebook page, doesn’t actually mean that you are staying relevant online, and with the majority of your consumers using the internet, you need to be as accessible as possible. We live in an age of technology, and the only way to survive in the world of business is to dive headfirst into that world. If you’re not familiar with computers, then find a class to attend to reach at least a basic understanding. You also don’t have to do everything yourself; you can easily hire someone to build your website, someone else to write your web content, and a third person to be your photographer. The gig economy is here to stay so why not use it to your advantage and hire freelancers to do the work that you can’t?
If you do want to create your own website then it can be so simple when there are so many examples and tutorials online. Which kind of proves the point; everything is online, and if you search ‘web building video’ you are going to be give millions of pages of content to choose from – and the ones at the top, which are the ones you are more likely to click on, are using what they know about the internet to make their online presence count.
Being present online means more than just being there – you need to stay relevant. Updating your website often with blogs and updates on projects and business keeps your site fresh and will make people want to revisit it. If it stays the same for months on end, then once you have read through it once, you don’t need to go back and it’s easy to forget. Use social media to reach out to customers on a more personable level. Yes you will spend a lot of your time on social media promoting yourself, but it’s also the easiest way to communicate with the people paying your wages; your consumers. It’s obvious in this day and age that you need to have multiple social media platforms running at all times. You don’t have to be active on them as much as you would on your personal ones, but you should check in on them at least once a day.
Again, you can outsource that job to a social media manager, which normally ends up being the same person who writes your content, which works perfectly seeing as the tone you set on your site and through your blogs should always be the same as what you put forward on social media. Yes, it is a much less formal platform, but you are communicating with the same people, perhaps just a slightly different audience, so you still need to talk in a professional manner. You see many hilarious comebacks from businesses to rude or disrespectful people complaining to the company in question, and where huge franchises can get away with it, and there are the odd moments where humour is always the best option, it can do a lot more damage than help.
Always set out to treat your customers with respect – no matter if you’re talking through Facebook messenger or face to face, and if you are outsourcing the work then you need to make sure that your employee is doing just that, meaning, that even if you aren’t updating your company’s social media everyday, you still need to be checking in to make sure you are happy with the content. The bigger your company gets the more employees you will have, and you will be able to trust the checking up role to a department manager, freeing up that time to work on other things, but as a small or start up company, a lot of things fall under your job description.
Creating an online presence as a brand new business always starts with a website. You can use online web builders, or can hire a person or company for cheap web design, either way, you need to be ready to say exactly what your company does, what information about your products or services you want on the site, and cosmetic things like colour and image choices need to be made. A website includes more than you would think, even though most of them follow a similar, simple template, there is a lot tucked away under different tabs and categories. You need to ensure that your website is as accessible as possible – you might know exactly what a deep compressor system is, but will the average person reading your site? Be explanatory, but don’t talk down to people – it’s a fine line that all content writers will be able to follow with no difficulty and something that new business owners don’t think about when writing their own content.
As we mentioned, you can hire a photographer for your web images, and you definitely need to have original images on your site. However, for things like blogs (particularly filler blogs) you can look at using royalty and copy-free photos from sites like pexels and flickr – just make sure that you have the settings right when you search and that each image you use is referenced somewhere on the page. You can also include a disclaimer somewhere about your image use just to cover your own back.
Blogs are a great way to stay relevant online – you can write things with a more journalistic approach, or a slightly more informal way like this blog you’re reading right now. This gives you the chance to talk about things that are relevant to you and your company – like business advice is on this site. You can also write blogs that go into more detail about current projects or advancements you are involved in, any successes your business has, and community events you have given a helping hand. You can delve and little deeper in a blog that you can through a Facebook post or tweet – giving you the opportunity to link the two together.
Don’t forget that everything you do online should always point back to your website, as that is where the information on the product is. Your online presence, at the end of the day, is all about attracting the customers and gaining their custom. And to do that, you need to be up there at the top of their searches – it’s a vicious cycle that needs more attention than once a year.
Being at the top of that search page does rely a lot on your use of SEO (search engine optimisation.) These are key words and phrases that act as a link for search engines between your site content and what people search for in that search bar. The more often a specific phrase is used around the world through Google, the higher it is ranked and the more important that phrase becomes to you and your website. Obviously, language changes rapidly, so those phrases change too, so you need to check in every so often to keep things up to date. You should also use a mix of simple and more complex phrases to expand your audience reach – like using ‘photography’ and ‘equine photography.’
The internet isn’t that scary a place for your business – you just need to remember to stay relevant, stay updated, and to hire people to do the things you have no clue about. Sometimes spending a little now really pays off in the long run. Even if you just pay for filler blogs and you write the important things, or you pay for the website set up and you do the small updates as time goes on, you are giving yourself the best start.
