How to Establish Your Brand Presence Online
When it comes to managing a successful business in 2024, it’s all about visibility and brand exposure. Customers today expect discoverable social media profiles, polished websites, and an abundance of online referrals when vetting new businesses to utilize. It’s important to provide potential clients with a professional website and carefully curated social media profiles to ensure you are up to par with existing competitors and visible in your marketplace.
Your online and social media presence refers to your brand and business’s public face. Through relevant social platforms, your business can connect with its target demographic on a large scale, giving direct access to your customers and allowing your business a channel in which to promote its services and values. With the right approach and consistent efforts, social visibility will not only help your business to reach new heights with potential customers, but also build up trust and positive associations with existing and future clientele.
Today, we’re taking you through some key steps and strategies in establishing your brand presence online.
Define your goals
In order to maximize your online business brand presence, you should be clear on what your goals are.
Whether you are looking to establish your brand presence for a new business or looking to get your business updated online and expand your reach, having clear goals in mind is key when improving your online visibility. When you know what your goals are, you can better strategize and map out the next steps. Having clear goals and intentions provides you with a blueprint to refer to when deciding on things like platforms to participate in and content to publish.
Establish your target audience
Your target audience reflects your desired customer base and will help you plan content that will resonate with your audience. A few strategies for narrowing down your target audience include:
Auditing your existing social following
Review your marketing performance metrics (more on this below!)
Know your competition and take notes. Explore the existing socials of competitor brands that have a strong social presence - what does their content look like? What are some clear content and branding strategies they are implementing that you could adopt for your online branding?
Define who your target audience isn’t. Knowing who your customers are is one thing, but there is a lot of value in knowing who they aren’t as an effective way of narrowing down your target audience further. The goal is never to isolate any potential customers or create content that is so “niche” that it might deter clients who might lie outside of your estimated demographics, but to establish a general awareness of who the majority of your customers are.
Narrow down which social platforms are the most useful / relevant to your branding
Not all social media platforms are the same, and some will prove to be more useful to you - and your business - than others.
This is another reason why having a set of clearly defined goals is so important. Understanding what your specific business branding goals are will allow you to arrive at the best platforms for your needs and purpose and avoid wasting any time on platforms that do not serve your business positively or productively.
According to Forbes.com, these are the 7 most popular social media platforms of 2024:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Pinterest
LinkedIn
TikTok
Optimize your social media profiles
Optimizing your social media is all about refreshing your content and polishing up your profiles to ensure they reflect professionalism and clear messaging.
If your personal social media accounts are going to be linked with your business, then the priority should be to streamline existing content and carefully curate new content with your business and branding top of mind.
This isn’t to say you can’t incorporate personal elements into your content in order to humanize your business, but always with your business’s best interests and core messaging in mind.
Now more than ever, customers need to know there is a real face behind the business, as this boosts confidence in brand accountability - but they also need to be confident that the business they choose to work with reflects high standards and a caliber of service they can rely on.
Make your content stand out!
Today’s customers are tech-savvy and wary of inauthentic content. While you can - and should - take advantage of modern resources for facilitating content generation, it’s important to make sure the content itself always reflects your values and accurately represents your brand’s unique edge.
When it comes to your business, don’t overlook the importance of humanizing your content and leading with an authentic voice. In a time where so much of the content we are exposed to is automatically generated, pre-packaged and polished to perfection, it can be easy to take the content shortcut and put your business’s media “face” in the hands of companies and apps that take the added work out of the equation.
When it comes to the content you share for your business online, every word and visual should pass your first-hand inspection. The content should be fresh, aesthetically-pleasing, clear in its messaging and authentic.
Cookie-cutter websites and overly-polished social profiles lack personality and often reflect a business that’s run more like a machine than a customer-focused company with a real face behind the name. Personalizing your content will give potential customers a better chance of investing and relating to your business.
When deciding on what content to post, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Is this the kind of content that would catch your eye? Would you feel compelled to stop scrolling and check out the business being promoted? Does the content instill a feeling of professionalism and confidence?
It’s understandably challenging for us to be objective when judging ourselves, and that’s why it’s so important to seek unbiased feedback and constructive criticism wherever possible. In terms of your content and customer strategies, workshop your content plans and see what kind of responce and critiques you get back.
Stay organized with an editorial calendar
To achieve consistent results with your social media brand presence, your efforts, engagement and content-posting must also be consistent. An editorial calendar is a simple and effective way to keep yourself on track, adhere to a basic schedule, and keep yourself accountable every day.
Engage, engage, engage
The key to any successful social media profile? Engagement!
Consistent content posting and engagement is a non-negotiable when it comes to growing your business’s online brand influence and impact.
On Instagram, for example, the best way to not just grow - but maintain - your follower base, is by publishing quality content consistently and then following that up with engagement. In showing your followers that there is a real presence behind the profile and that presence is actively monitoring and engaging with content, it instills a sense of confidence and feeling of acknowledgment for those followers who interacted with your account.
Make sure you monitor your insights to track your progress
One of the best ways to gage whether or not your online branding strategies are working is by monitoring your analytics and using that as a basis for determining what strategies are working and what might need some tweaking.
For example, Instagram insights for business or content creator accounts allow account owners to learn more about their overall trends, as well as specific insights for individual posts, stories, reels, videos, and live video content. With this information, you’re able to gain an understanding of how your social content is performing, what your levels of engagement are more.
Ultimately, establishing a strong brand presence online comes down to setting clear goals and putting them into action with curated content, an authentic voice, clear brand messaging, and consistency.
Know yourself, know your business, and let the online world see that value!