If you’ve been following me for any length of time you know that I concentrate most of my efforts on Facebook and online marketing. I strongly encourage you to use paid Facebook marketing regularly.
This is a profitable way to reach 10s of thousands to millions of people who might be interested in your products and services.
However, everyone needs at least a minimum presence online before you start using paid Facebook marketing, and possibly even before you use organic social media.
The nice thing about most of what you need is that it can be set up and then monitored easily and it can be done in a few minutes, every few days.
Once you have your Digital Presence in place, all of your other online efforts perform better including your paid Facebook marketing.
What is this Digital Presence?
Like street signs or billboards do offline, Digital Presence ensures that customers who search online find their way to your business.
To succeed, every business in the world needs a strong Digital Presence.
Recently my wife was searching for a new massage therapist, and you know what?
A great majority of the ones in our town, don’t even show up in a Google Search. They don’t exist online. That limits the choices people looking for a massage therapist have.
Or…
We were visiting a town we don’t go to regularly and we were looking for a place to eat. We searched for restaurants and found some, but I know that there are more restaurants in that town than the ones we had to choose from.
Without a digital presence, your growth is limited to word of mouth, past customers and people who drive by your location. Now those are powerful tools but over time you’re going to run out of new customers if you don’t have an active Digital Presence.
A complete Digital Presence includes:
- Google Business Listing
- Online Directory Listings
- Facebook and social media
- Reviews-Getting them consistently and responding to them
- Organic search ranking
- Website
Why is it important?
Today, 4 in 5 consumers search for local businesses online. When consumers find incorrect information about a business online, 73% lose trust in that business. And, incorrect information abounds — a 2013 study found that up to 40% of location info online is wrong!
Why is so much information incorrect? Because there’s no permanent record or single source of data location online. Every site, including Google, has to look for your information on various sites and cross reference it to find what it lists as accurate.
You can take control of your Digital Presence.
Some key areas to consider are:
- Get listed everywhere
- Correct and enhance your information
- Keep your digital presence fresh with real-time updates
- Track the performance of your listings
Incorrect or incomplete information online causes small businesses to lose potential customers at a cost of $10 billion per year.
As you can see it’s a sizable challenge, with a nice reward for overcoming it.
In the next few articles, I’ll be going over what you can do to improve your Digital Presence so you can relax and know that when people search for you, you’re likely to be found. And that when they do find you online, that they are moved to do business with you.
Have a great day!
Brian