Promoting your business online is no easy task, especially if you want to boost your visibility by attracting a new audience and increasing your conversion rate. Since visibility and brand awareness directly impact your business, it can be helpful to know a few tips for developing this aspect of your business.
Today, you want to build your online presence and, at the same time, increase your revenue. Unfortunately, if no one knows who you are, that makes things a little more complicated. So here’s a step-by-step guide to the steps you need to take to successfully build your company’s online presence.
Define a clear positioning strategy
In practical terms, your positioning should be as precise as possible. In other words, imagine yourself telling Google: “I’m an expert in such-and-such a field, and I offer such-and-such a product or service.”
Thanks to this approach, you can set yourself apart from your competitors by offering a unique value proposition for your business. If you follow the “crowd” of websites, you risk getting lost in a sea of other competitors who are doing exactly the same thing as you… Promoting your business online is, in itself, a way to stand out from the rest.
Define a specific theme and niche
By choosing a niche or topic that’s too broad, you’re making the mistake that most people make: becoming just another blog or website in the crowd. To stack the odds in your favor and avoid competing with all your main competitors, you need to stand out and choose a more specific niche.
For example, instead of choosing the topic of fine dining, choose a specific niche within that topic such as vegan cuisine (which is very trendy, by the way), savory and sweet petits fours, pastries…
Stop focusing on queries such as:
- "How do I learn to cook?"
- "How to Choose Your Kitchen Utensils?"
- Or: “Easy-to-make recipes”
But you should focus on these instead:
- "How do I become vegan?"
- "Vegan Chocolate Cake Recipes "
You therefore need to tailor your “offer” to the market and provide content and expertise that address the questions and needs of those specific users. This way, you’ll get a head start right from the beginning over your competitors, who are struggling with a topic that’s beyond their reach.
In fact, according to the author of the book “Brand Image Pays Off: The 5-Step System for Reinventing Your Personal Brand ” (French translation of *Branding Pays: The 5-Step System for Reinventing Your Personal Brand*) by Karen Kang, effective positioning starts with a series of questions that you must answer precisely:
- What audience are you targeting?
- What is the problem facing your audience?
- What is your topic/niche ?
- What value do you offer to your readers/prospects?
- And finally, what advantages do you have over the competition?
Showcase your positioning by leveraging your expertise
To be effective, your positioning must be linked to specific expertise in a specific field. The goal is to highlight your strengths so that your offering aligns with your target audience.
Let's go back to the previous example; a good ranking would be established as follows:
- Your target audience: anyone interested in the vegan diet and/or those who want to learn more about it.
- What you're offering: content that showcases your expertise and helps your target audience understand why and how to become vegan.
- Your Competitive Edge: A comprehensive, step-by-step guide to successfully transitioning to a vegan lifestyle in 6 months.
From there, you already have a strategic plan to follow and implement. Obviously, the more specific you are, the better your results will be. For example, you could narrow your niche even further by focusing exclusively on vegan pastries. If you’d like to learn more, we have an article dedicated to inbound marketing.
Strategic keywords: Boost your organic search rankings
At first glance, search engine optimization (SEO) seems like a very complicated strategy to implement, but in reality, that’s not entirely true. Obviously, if you really want to succeed in building your online presence, you absolutely must rank well in Google’s search results.
Unfortunately, there’s no secret to it—the sole purpose of this strategy is to identify your key strategic keywords. As a reminder, your keywords are the search terms your target audience uses on search engines like Google or Bing. To take it a step further, you can think about what your readers might search for to find your content—the content that solves their problems. Specifically, in France, internet users use an average of more than 3.5 words per search query on Google.
To put it simply, keyword research can be summarized in three main points:
- Make sure that the keyword is interesting enough.
- Check the keyword's competitiveness score.
- Verify the keyword based on its search volume (ideally more than 1,000 searches per month)
Make a list of the most relevant keywords
To keep things from getting too complicated, you should start by listing all the keywords that are essential to your search engine ranking. They should describe your business. For example, if you run a vegan restaurant, your essential keywords are: “restaurant,” “ gastronomy,” “vegan,” etc.
Next, you also need to identify your secondary keywords—those that are useful but less important, meaning they provide value to your readers. Honestly, these can be just about anything, such as your restaurant’s location, the use of a specific ingredient, or even a brand of vegan products.
Finally, add additional keywords such as “inexpensive,” “meat-free,” etc.
Check the competition statistics for your keywords
Once you've put together a good mix of your keywords, you need to make sure they aren't too competitive. What does that mean? It refers to the number of search results associated with that keyword query. Just type them into Google.
Ideally, if you want to rank on the first page, there shouldn't be more than one million results. In fact, prioritize those with around 100,000 results.
Validate your assumptions using search volume data
To wrap things up—and to make sure your efforts aren’t in vain—you can check whether the monthly search volume is high enough to rank for those terms and get real results. Optimizing your website for search engines is important, but only for keywords that have potential. Feel free to use the tools provided by Google to check the search volume:the AdWords Keyword Planner.
Optimize Your Website for Google Search Engine Optimization
Furthermore, it’s also beneficial, in terms of visibility, to optimize your website to make it “Google friendly.” This is an essential step for building your online presence, especially for a business. Three criteria generally take priority when optimizing a website: the site’s structure, its content, and the number of external links pointing to your website.
Offer a perfectly optimized structure
To improve the user experience, please note that your website—and more specifically, its structure—must be flawless. This is one of the most important factors for good Google SEO. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that the essential requirement is, at a minimum, to offer a site that supports navigation on mobile devices, tablets, and PCs—also known as “responsive design.” In fact, there are online tools that allow you to check your website’s source code to ensure that it complies with Google’s web crawler standards.
Content that is perfectly written and SEO-optimized
For a positioning strategy to be effective, you need to offer your readers a unique and informative experience. However, writing a blog post or website content is somewhat different from traditional writing. There are a few best practices to follow in order to meet the requirements of our friend Google.
For example, it's best to include your keywords directly in the body of the text, in the headings, and even in the URL of your web pages.
Get high-quality backlinks for your website
To increase your “popularity,” you ideally (and indeed, necessarily) need to have at least a few websites that recommend you—that is, that link to your website’s URL. This way, Google can easily deduce that you are an expert in your field. You will be considered relevant.
There are several solutions, but be careful not to get blacklisted if you do something reckless. Here are a few to help you:
- Always create high-quality content that has the potential to generate “buzz.”
- Write sponsored articles on blogs or websites in your niche or on topics related to yours.
- Share your content widely on social media.
- Form as many partnerships as possible.
Build a community using social media
Today, social media is at the heart of marketing strategies (such as social media marketing). However, there are a few tips you should know to effectively build your visibility on these platforms. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest… Which social media platform is best for successfully building your brand’s visibility on the Internet without spending a single penny on advertising?
How do you choose the right social media platform for your branding strategy?
Thanks to social media, you can grow your community and increase your online visibility very easily and at a low cost. Of course, implementing a social media strategy can be very time-consuming and tedious. So you’ll need to choose the right platform to avoid wasting time unnecessarily.
Depending on your persona, it will be important to determine which social media platform they come from. Ask yourself a few questions to quickly identify the source:
- Age of the target prospect?
- Male or Female?
- What does he do for a living (if necessary in your niche)?
- Does the target have any particular interests?
For example, continuing from our previous demonstration, keep in mind that if you own a restaurant, it might be a good idea to target a social media platform like Instagram or possibly Facebook. So don’t waste your time on Snapchat…
Also, if you decide to offer cooking classes for corporate team-building events, that means you’re targeting the B2B market. In that case, opt for a platform like LinkedIn. It’s up to you now to develop a content strategy tailored to your audience.
Capture your readers' attention and build long-term loyalty!
To continue building your community and raising your online profile, plan to automate one or more email campaigns. This strategy remains, even today, a powerful way to keep your readers engaged and convince them to take action.
Implement an effective communication strategy
To optimize the performance of an email campaign, you need to make your reader feel that they matter to you, that they play a significant role in your brand’s ecosystem. So there’s no point in spamming them with promotions all day long—that would be counterproductive. Talk to them, offer them value every day, and occasionally include a link where you suggest a product or service.
Always prioritize high-quality content that is extremely informative rather than so-called “junk” content— in other words, content that is worthless.
How do you build an email database?
Sending emails as part of your communication strategy is great! Except when you don’t have a database. To convince your readers to give you their email addresses, you have to “lure” them—kind of like the carrot and the donkey, you know?
Broadly speaking, there are many methods available, and each of them has already proven itself—no need to go over that again. So here are a few examples of what can be done:
- All too often overlooked, the people who are already part of your customer base are a very important source of leads. In fact, they are more likely to make a purchase, since they’ve already taken that first step.
- Offer a white paper as a guide, for example—an e-book that addresses an issue relevant to your target audience. Your readers can download it in exchange for their contact information.
- Based on any previous partnerships you may have established, try to negotiate a database lease to see if you can obtain a few email addresses for the duration of a campaign.
Here's another handy tip: keep in mind that you can export your LinkedIn contacts directly to a database. That's convenient!
In fact, another often-overlooked point is the signature. While it may seem insignificant at first glance, it allows you to include a link to one of your products or services without it being perceived as an advertisement. This is ideal for avoiding coming across as pushy to your readers.
How can you get the word out about your website or business more quickly?
In conclusion, there are other opportunities available to you for quickly building a presence on the Internet. If you’re in a hurry or tend to be impatient, you can adopt a “paid” strategy. This is an option that speeds up your progress online, but it can be quite challenging for those unfamiliar with it. Here are a few tips for getting results faster; however, you’ll need to spend a few dozen—or even a few hundred—euros.
Harness the Power of Facebook Ads
The number one advantage of Facebook Ads is definitely its ability to target your audience with extreme precision. To put it simply, going back to our previous examples, imagine that you can target someone who has already searched for information on the vegan diet, but who has also previously purchased a product or service online, is between the ages of 20 and 25, and lives in Paris, for example.
As you can see, Facebook Ads is a golden opportunity! If you have some basic knowledge, you’ll find it fairly easy to use this advertising platform. It’s quite affordable and lets you quickly attract a huge audience.
In addition, since Instagram was acquired in 2012, Instagram ads have been managed directly through Facebook Ads. This allows you to reach people on both platforms.
Launch a Google AdWords advertising campaign
Perhaps you hadn't realized it yet, but Google AdWords is simply the advertising platform of the American giant. It works a little differently from Facebook, since you don't target specific groups of people, but rather your target keywords directly.
Thanks to Google's advertising campaigns, you'll appear right at the top of Google's search results, without having to optimize your page for SEO. Of course, this isn't free…
A super-simple way to reach an engaged audience that’s looking for a specific solution or product. It’s up to you to choose the right keywords that match your offering.
Generate leads with LinkedIn Ads
With 16 million members in France, LinkedIn is one of the best sources for acquiring B2B customers.
With LinkedIn Ads, you can generate leads relevant to your industry, increase traffic to your website, and boost your brand awareness. The advantage of LinkedIn is that it allows you to target and learn about your prospects based on their job titles.
Please be patient!
If there’s one thing you should take away from this article, it would definitely be patience. If you rush through the steps, you’ll never be able to implement an online positioning strategy, and without that, it’s impossible to get the word out about your business!
With competition becoming increasingly intense online, the originality, creativity, and quality of your content are crucial for boosting your visibility. Follow these marketing strategies closely, and you’ll see results in no time.
Be unique and stand out from the crowd as much as possible. Why would a customer buy from you if they don’t know you from Adam? If you don’t have the time or motivation to develop strategies like the ones we’ve mentioned, you can hire an external service provider who can handle it for just a few hundred euros!
