With the pandemic forcing businesses to shut up shop and move to the online world, you have probably begun to pay more attention to your online presence.
Whether your focus is on websites or social media pages, these are both key ingredients to being successful online.
The technological world has made online searching, downloading, streaming and purchasing very easy and very accessible, something which is helpful in these new and difficult times. If you are finding yourself wanting to improve your online presence – whether to change up the design of a website or to reach new audiences – we have detailed some easy ways to do that and more.
Consider the Design of Your Website
The first and most obvious thing to consider when assessing your online presence; do you have a website? If you do not, this is the first thing that you must plan to create. If you do have one; what does your website look like to the audience? Is the frontpage easy on the eye, telling the viewer enough about your website without being overwhelming? Are you able to easily navigate the website and find the information/section that you are looking for? Making sure that there is enough information to keep a visitor on your page is important, you don’t want them going to a competitor!
Ensuring that there are not too many photos on the website is also important to its success. Of course, there must be a balance of photos to words on a page but remember to not overload the website with too many photos; this can drastically slow a website down and make it load extremely slowly. Not something that visitors to your website will want, and not something that you want either! One further thing to consider, is if the website works well on both desktop and mobile. Usually, mobile searches outdo desktop, but given the pandemic this has changed. Websites must be adaptable to both these platforms and is a vitally important factor to be considered.
Outsource Your Web Development
If you are finding yourself wanting to improve yours or your businesses presence in the online world, but do not have the time or understanding on how to complete the sometimes-complex task, consider outsourcing the job to a web development company. The prospect of building your own website or making significant changes to an existing site can be rather daunting, especially if you do not know much about what is required. Consider finding a reputable outsourced website development agency. 6B Digital Agency are just one of the agencies providing this web development service along with hundreds more like this up and down the country; whether wanting web development agencies in Leeds or an SEO agency in Southampton, there is a company which suits your needs in a reachable distance. Outsourcing a job such as this, leaves you ample time to manage the other demanding aspects of running a business, while ensuring that the vision you have surrounding your website is completed to the highest standard. An expert in the digital field will work with you from the design and planning stage through to the launch of a website, ensuring that the website is exactly as you had imagined.
Social Media Accounts
Having business accounts on the major social media platforms will increase the amount of people that you are reaching. Different demographics use different platforms, so you are guaranteed to be reaching several different groups of people. While creating the social media accounts, make sure that there is a link of some sort from your website to the social media accounts. Not only will this make navigating between the two easier for visitors to your website, but will also allow you to interact with your visitors easier. Having social media accounts for your business allows you the opportunity to host giveaways and competitions, to get the audience interacting with your brand. Furthermore, you will want to ensure that any sort of branding or logos that have been used on your website are also being used on your social media accounts. Being consistent with colour themes, logos and branding across all networks will encourage visitors to recognise your business through that.
Social Media Calendars
As a continuation of what was said previously surrounding the creation of accounts on social media platforms, knowing and understanding the optimum times for posting will also boost your audience reach and engagement. If you are posting a competition in the middle of the night, people are not going to see it. Posting at peak times of the day will guarantee that you are reaching as many people as possible. However, you must take into consideration that posting too much will mean that some posts get more engagement than others. Make certain that you are posting regularly enough to keep your audiences engaged, but not so much as to bore them or fill up their feeds.
Using analytics to measure how many people see and interact with your posts, can help when creating a social media post calendar. Website development agencies like the ones mentioned in the section about outsourcing, will also be able to provide you with the tools to measure analytics on your website. Furthermore, taking into consideration national holidays will also help when planning an online calendar. You will also be able to tailor content on your platforms and website toward this type of thing. For example, putting hearts in the design of your website around Valentine’s Day, Easter Eggs and Bunnies for Easter, and Reindeer and Santa for during the Christmas period.
Engaging with Your Audience
Another important part of having a successful business online, is to engage with your audience and learn their patterns/habits. Conducting some form of market research will enable you to understand the types of content that they want to see on social media, but also the types of products or services that they are searching for, and whether you are providing these. If you find that there is a demand for something which you do not provide, is there scope to implement it within your business? Discovering these types of search patterns and learning from them, will help your online presence to grow and continue to be successful.