The online world has proven to be fertile soil for businesses looking to make their mark and attract audiences. Social media, dedicated websites, blogs, video platforms, sponsorships, banner ads, there are so many different avenues for you to market your business. It’s almost impossible to use the internet without seeing marketing of some sort.
If you’re in business, this can make your job quite difficult as you quickly become one business of many, one single face in a sea of faces. To stand out, you need a clear idea of who you are—a personality and a strong sense of direction—but you also need to prove your mastery of the digital landscape that your business exists within.
Your Personality
This aspect of your business might seem obvious, of course, you need to have a unique identity to connect with customers and stick in their memory, but how do you actually achieve it?
Looking at other businesses that have a clear personality and message attached to them makes it seem easy, but that’s just part of their marketing. It’s supposed to look effortless. In reality, it takes a lot of people thinking very hard about what’s going to appeal most to the right demographic in order to land it. It’s why you see so many businesses undergoing constant redesigns and shifts—the landscape isn’t static, and getting too relaxed could see your favor slip away.
That’s another thing, what your identity actually consists of isn’t a singular component. In reality, this fact is based on your target audience, your USP, your marketing, and many other factors. It’s more of a culmination than anything else, and this means that cohesion is important. If the way you present your business is starkly different to the way that your marketing is or the way that the actual customer experience feels, then this disconnect could be more damaging.
Your Security
Being proactive in the digital space and taking advantage of what it has to offer your business also means being aware of the risks. It’s all well and good to think about how much attention you’re getting and see that as a straightforward positive, but it could also make you a target for malicious online threats.
That’s unfortunately par for the course, however. In order to defend yourself, you need to have a thorough understanding of what you need to do to stay safe online. Part of this is going to mean equipping yourself with the proper security software so you can be confident in your ability to simply exist without being vulnerable. Finding the right options for your business might lead you to learn more about what any given security service offers and how it works, with a deeper understanding perhaps leading to a wider appreciation of what you need.
Safety is multi-faceted, though, and it’s not just about a robust security network (though that certainly is important), it’s also about the basics. As you hire more and more people, you need to ensure that everyone is trained in how to function safely. Phishing scams and other threats that can arrive via email might sometimes look innocuous, but detecting them can prevent a disaster from befalling your brand.
Your Social Media
For many audience members, the way that they’re first going to discover your brand is by hearing your name and then searching for you on whatever browser they use. Once this happens, they’ll probably be presented with various choices for their destination. They’ll have your website, they’ll potentially have some reviews that are left on the browser itself, and they might have directions on how to find you. They’ll also have your social media pages. This is important because it might not be the browser that they use to find you in the first place at all, but the search function on these social media pages.
In this way, these platforms can act as an intermediary between your website and the audience. It’s a space where they might interact with you and your marketing more casually, and hopefully it will lead them toward your website itself. If they look you up, only to find that you haven’t updated your socials in a long time, they might assume that you’re not worth following on that platform and simply turn away. This means that consistent updates and relevant information is important.
Your Website
When you’ve done everything you can to lead your audiences to the central hub of your business, you’ll want them to be impressed. While the first impression might have already been made at this point, this is perhaps a chance to make proper introductions.
Showing that you have a proper understanding of high-quality web design can help to make your website both visually appealing and functionally accessible. It should be clear where your audiences need to go for the information they want, and they shouldn’t be overwhelmed by walls of text or animations that don’t serve the overall function. Also, your branding should be consistently present, allowing for a sleek experience that consistently calls back to what you do and why you’re worth your customers’ time.
Your SEO
That first impression might not always be fully within your control. At times, it might be a curated piece of marketing that first makes a prospective customer aware of your brand, at other times, a wayward review that you had no part in.
Your SEO content that finds its way across multiple blogs is going to connect to your brand either very closely or somewhat tangentially, and these more indirect connections can work to raise your awareness across the digital space.
The whole point of SEO in the first place is to subtly increase awareness of your brand in this way, but this also means that this first impression is going to be less focused than some of your more direct marketing. This isn’t a negative, it just means that it’s something to be aware of when you go about creating this kind of content.
