Digital Presence Management – What Do You Need to Know

Fire up Your Online Presence to Increase Leads and Sales

You may do everything under your power to keep your marketing portal appearing fresh. Your efforts might include making important updates or making changes in your product offers every now and then. You may even be revamping your portal every two years or so.

However, is that enough?

Unfortunately no.

If your efforts are minimal and sporadic, you are simply at the mercy of your customers hoping that they would convert someday.

What you need is a robust digital presence strategy!

So, what is Digital Presence Management Anyway?

Simply put, digital presence refers to how your business appears online. However, it’s not limited to your marketing portal or website alone. It also includes content beyond your portal that you control like your social media profiles and also content that you don’t control like online reviews.

When you walk into a room, the first thing people notice is your physical presence. In the same way, in the digital world when customers first notice your brand, your digital presence matters.

Every day, you have the opportunity to alter communication, showcase various benefits of your products or services, and more to keep your audiences engaged. So why wait to make changes in your portal only when there is an important update?

The Importance of Digital Presence and Content Freshness

Did you know that content freshness has a direct correlation with search engine rankings? Here is a study that highlights the relationship between content freshness, crawl frequency, and rank position:

Thus, it’s critical to keep your content fresh and keep updating your portal on a daily basis as the search engines take content freshness into account when ranking pages.

Adding new content and images can boost SEO traffic by 111%.

If you have been making changes once per month or irregularly, why would Google check your site daily? However, if your site publishes changes each day, Google has to ensure to check your site to index the results and display them to relevant users through a querying technique called QDF or Query Deserves Freshness.

Even a small change can go a long way in increasing the effectiveness of your website and portal.

And, that’s what digital presence management is all about!

One of our clients, a financial services provider in Singapore wanted to refine their website which had several hundreds of visitors every day. We came up with a comprehensive digital presence strategy to track and maintain an inventory of every portal element. We then worked on a portal maximization yield framework to make continuous improvements based on real-time user feedback. During our implementation of the changes, we did a study to find the correlation between the number of daily portal changes and lead generation. Here’s what we found:

Beyond aesthetics and functionality, your website should also provide valuable content updates which are both current and accurate. Sharing news updates about your brand and publishing regular blog posts related to your brand and industry are other ways to draw consumers to your site.

Building a Stronger Presence for the Always-Connected Consumer

While keeping your content fresh is one part of a solid digital presence strategy; the other important part is to orchestrate a strong web presence of your brand across all digital mediums.

As hyper-connectivity has become the norm today, consumers are accessing information from desktops, smartphones, and tablets on the move and hopping across those devices. Thus, it’s imperative for you to respond or you risk losing relevancy and consumers may turn to your competition

Here are some ways to carve a strong digital presence:

1. Standardize Portal Management Process
2. Maintain Consistent Messaging and Communication Across All Digital Channels
3. Track the Performance of Changes and Optimize

Ways to Grow Digital Presence

The process of creating and maintaining complete digital presence management is no easy and certainly cannot be done overnight. But setting clear goals and building a roadmap is the best way to go about it. Listed below are some actionable points to help you expand and extend your digital presence beyond your website:

1. Create a Strong Presence on Relevant Channels

A strong web presence starts with a well-designed and mobile-friendly website. Next, you need to focus on digital channels that are relevant for your business and where your audience hangs out the most. Ensure to build profiles with consistent branding and messaging to expand your brand’s digital footprint.

2. Engage with Your Audience on Those Channels

In order to boost your digital presence, you have to be active online. Determine the best ways to engage your audience according to the various channels, make regular posts, respond to comments, and initiate conversations with your customers.

3. Incorporate the New Channels in Your Inbound/Outbound Marketing Efforts

You can then work your way to capitalize on the channels with various advertising options including social media advertising, Google ads, email newsletters, and more.

Once you choose what you want to advertise, you can determine the right platforms that are best suited to promote your inbound/outbound marketing efforts.

4. Analyze Results

Track how each channel fares to modify and optimize your efforts further. Use the right metrics to assess results,  and make continuous improvements based on these insights to boost the effectiveness of digital channels.

The digital presence definition is easy to understand, however, the important thing is to capitalize and be in control of your digital presence. Digital presence has a lot to offer and impacts your bottom line. So, understand it, embrace it and make it work for you.

Are you in control of your digital presence? Do you make regular changes to your portal and leverage other digital channels to build your digital identity? We would love to hear about your experiences. Write to us at marketingfolks@xerago.com.

Apart from having a website where you make frequent content updates, you also need to pay attention to other digital channels to build a wide presence and provide engagement to your audience through a variety of digital touchpoints. Stay tuned to know more about the next step to expand your digital presence outside of your website in our next article. Coming soon…