The world lives on the internet and building an online presence isn’t just beneficial, it’s essential.
When it comes to what things to focus on, it’s all about playing to your strengths. Some options will work better for you, and some can wait. However, there are more than a few things that you should be doing regardless of your industry or type of business.
1. A Modern Website
If someone visits your website, and they think they may have accidentally clicked a link on the Wayback Machine, you have a big problem.
Do you have an outdated, hard-to-navigate, and slow-loading website? You might as well not have one. The bedrock of your online presence is your website. People will draw a lot of assumptions based on how it looks and feels.
The good news is that there are plenty of options out there for a range of budgets:
- A template website is the cheapest option and not a bad choice if you’re super tight on funds. Just don’t expect anything about it to blow your customer’s socks off.
- A full-custom website is more expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for if you choose the right partner to build it.
- The perfect in-between option is a Launch Website, which we actually provide. It gives you many of the benefits of a full-custom website, at a DIY price.
2. Utilize Social Media
For many, social media is either something they use on rare occasions, or they don’t use it at all because it seems like an uncrackable enigma.
Well, it doesn’t have to be!
While you can certainly build precise and effective social media campaigns, for small business owners, simply having a plan and being consistent is a good place to start. Choose the right platforms for your business (you don’t need to be on every one of them), come up with a series of posts you can make consistently, and plan to create those posts a few times a week.
The biggest challenge is to stop yourself from turning your social media of choice into an ad platform. That’s not what it’s for, and it won’t be effective. Be helpful, connect with your audience, and create and share content that they will actually find interesting or useful.
The unfollow button is just a click away.
3. Get Testimonials
If you’ve got a fantastic product or service, don’t be afraid to let people know! However, if someone from outside your company recommends you, it means so much more.
There are two places you definitely want positive reviews: the homepage of your website and Google. When people search for you, they want to see as close to five stars as possible!
The problem is that people are much more likely to leave a review after a negative experience than a positive one. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you have 100 happy customers and 1 unhappy customer, but the latter is the only one who left a review.
Don’t be afraid to ask for a Google review or reach out for a testimonial after you’ve satisfied a client or customer.
4. Automate Your Emails
To make getting those testimonials a little easier (among plenty of other benefits), take the human element out of it and automate your emails!
Now, when we say take the human element out of it, we don’t mean speak in your emails like a robot. We just mean using online tools to send mass emails to a large list of people or create automations. For example, you could create a delayed email that automatically gets sent two weeks after someone buys your product to ask for a review!
