3 Simple Tips To Expand Your Business’ Reach Online
A Strong Web Presence Is Crucial For Sustained Growth, Especially For Companies Without Traditional Storefronts.
The new millennium has seen the rise of a truly global marketplace, and with it fresh challenges for business owners. Increased global connectivity means greater access to potential markets around the world, but also greater competition from both local and global players. The custom integration and automation industries have seen additional disruption from a new wave of products marketed directly to consumers.
Taken together, these factors may seem overwhelming for local integrators looking to grow their businesses, but is the situation truly that hopeless? Aren’t there ways to make the online marketplace work for you? Online marketing can be an invaluable tool for business owners, and we have compiled some strategies to help your business thrive even without a physical storefront.
Get On Google My Business
The days of flipping through the phonebook to find a particular company may be mostly behind us, but there is one directory that remains essential for local businesses: Google My Business. It’s estimated that Google handles about 75 percent of all web searches, making it essential for smaller companies to have some sort of presence in Google’s Internet ecosystem.
A Google My Business profile offers tremendous benefits to local businesses at minimal cost. Post information about your firm’s services, location, hours and more. Upload pictures and video, to provide more detail to potential customers. When you have upcoming events or sales, you can post about those as well, which will steer more business your way.
Creating a Google My Business page also increases your web presence in other, more subtle ways. Your page synthesizes your business’ presence on Google’s platforms in one location, giving you more information about your traffic and online reviews, as well as updating your profile across Google’s Search and Maps results. Additionally, a Google business page creates another potential point of contact for prospective clients. It doesn’t matter whether customers come to you from your website directly or from your Google business page, as long as they’re coming to you and not your competitors.
Make Sure Your Website Is Up To Par
There’s no underestimating the value of a strong first impression, which makes a clean, functional website essential for your business. This problem is compounded for integrators who don’t have a showroom or other space to show off their products and services, as the website becomes the sole means of judging you and your work before they’ve committed to making a purchase.
While your website doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to be effective, there are some basic features that will increase your business’s online impact. First, be sure your website is optimized for mobile viewing. Second, keep your loading times low by compressing images and minimizing redirects. Third, make sure you have secure hosting to keep your data safe and minimize the chance of being hacked. Finally, go through the copy on your website to make it as search-engine-friendly as possible.
Maximize Your Online Presence
Once you’ve added a Google business page and cleaned up your company’s website, it’s time to see what else you can do around the margins to grow your web presence.
One place to start might be to create a company YouTube channel. YouTube is not only a common search tool, especially for younger customers, it’s an excellent marketing tool. You don’t have to sink a ton of money into improving your video quality; a simple slideshow video allows you to show off new products, demonstrate the capabilities of your best-selling systems and more. Plus, you can link your videos to your main website and your Google business page, driving more contact to those platforms and increasing your potential customer base.
Another aspect of your online presence to monitor is your online reviews. Industry research indicates 84 percent of consumers believe online reviews as much as personal recommendations, meaning you can’t afford to ignore what people are saying about you online.
Monitoring reviews means not only trying to minimize bad reviews, but also soliciting positive ones from clients in a non-intrusive manner (One Firefly’s Review Champ service can help with this). Having no reviews isn’t as much of a problem as a wave of bad reviews, but a business without any reviews at all looks like a business nobody has ever used.
These are just a few simple methods for improving your business’s digital storefront. To learn more about One Firefly’s digital marketing services, contact our team at 877.334.1144.