8 Simple Tips to Improve Your Online Presence

Your website is the North Star of your brand’s online presence—but digital marketing in 2023 goes waaaay beyond your website. Here are 8 tips to help you improve your online presence across multiple channels. 

1. Build an Email List

Growing an email list is an excellent way to uplevel your digital brand presence. The ability to engage with people right inside their inbox is incredibly valuable, and much more personal than social media or your website. With email, you can deepen your relationship with customers over time, which is great for trust – and sales. 

Depending on your business, you can use email to share discount codes, helpful information about your product, or share stories that build rapport and build a repeat audience. If you want to sell digital products or a course you created, an email list is the best way. 

Lead magnets (also called gated content) are a common way to build your email list. You know, the old “give us your email and get this free guide” tactic. You should also have a simple sign up bar on your website.  Be sure to set up a welcome email series – welcome emails have a much higher open and click rate than other types of emails. 

2. Focus More on Benefits than Features

Have you ever heard the saying “Features tell, benefits sell”? It’s true!

While customers might use feature to compare two similar products, what they really care about is how your product or service makes their life easier. Your copy across your online presence should focus on what problems you solve for your customers, what tasks you help them accomplish, and how they will feel after using your product or service – aka the benefits!

Customers care less about “Advanced safety restraint systems” (feature) and more about “Keeping your family safe” (benefit). They care less about a “Dual-core 1.4 GHz ARM v8 Typhoon processor” (feature) and more about “Surfing the web, faster”! (benefit)

Learn how I use the Hero’s Journey and StoryBrand frameworks to tell a benefit-focused success story on your website (and beyond).

3. Know Your Audience 

Customer profiling helps you put yourself in your customers’ shoes—or in their minds, rather. Creating detailed customer personas will help you learn about their habits, behaviors, and interests. Before creating any content for your website or marketing materials, spend some time nailing down exactly who your target customer is. Determine their:

• Age Range
• Geographic location
• Income
• Marital status
• Interests
• Favorite online platforms

Combine this with the results-focused messaging above, and you’re on your way to building better customer relationships. Before I do any writing project for a client, I start with extensive customer research. It might be via surveys, interviews, or mining social media/Amazon/Google/G2 (or whatever platforms are relevant to your industry) for reviews to see how people talk about you.

4. Include Clear Calls to Action

Sign up now. Get started. Let’s chat. Learn more. Calls to action (CTAs, in marketing-speak) are a critical part of driving conversions online. We’re so used to seeing call-to-action buttons, we may not even think about it. But make no mistake, they are super important!

There’s no point in capturing your audience’s attention, getting them all excited about your product, or building trust if they’re not sure what to do about it. Calls to action make it easyfor people to call you, schedule an appointment, or BUY your product.

Calls to actions should contain simple action phrases, and they need to stand out from the rest of the design. Make it a button, use contrasting colors, animate it – whatever you need to do! Buttons will lead to pages on your site for more info, or directly to your shop page.

By the way, this goes for your website pages, blog articles, social media posts, emails…basically everything you do online. Not offering a clear next step is a huge missed opportunity.

5. Develop (and Document) Your Brand Voice

Documenting your brand voice can seem like a beast. Maybe the CEO doesn’t see the ROI of it. Or, you just don’t know where to start. But I’m here to tell you, establishing your brand voice is not something you can ignore! Putting this key piece of your identity on the back burner (or ignoring it completely) leaves you with:

💀 Inconsistency across platforms and campaigns
💀 Harder time getting what you want from external partners 
💀 And in many cases, internal employees too
💀 Confused customers
💀 A brand presence that’s flat, boring, and FORGETTABLE (aka the kiss of death)

Especially as AI-generated content becomes more common, brand voice is going to become even more critical for setting you apart.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are 5 questions to help you define your brand voice. A pro copywriter or strategist (hello there!👋) can also help you create a brand voice guide that you can use within your company as well as with external partners – don’t worry, they will do extensive research and iteration to make sure it’s just right.

6. Produce Great Blog Content

How often are you currently publishing to your company blog? If you want to develop a strong online presence, you need an active blog to help people discover your website. Even better, blog content provides information your readers want about how your product or service solves their problem, how to get the most out of it, how your process works, and more.

We’ve all heard that publishing fresh content can be great for SEO, organic traffic, and lead generation. Year after year, content marketing continues to generate more leads than paid search advertising.

So, what makes great blog content? It’s definitely not a thinly veiled sales pitch that’s stuffed with keywords, I’ll tell you that much! Google’s E-A-T principle defines the principles they use to determine the quality of search results: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In other words, be helpful. Provide value. Know your stuff.

Great content is also easy to read (or skim, let’s be honest). That means formatted in short paragraphs with white space to give readers a brain break. Using bulleted lists where appropriate. Short sentences and simple language. Images, videos, or quotes throughout to break up the text and provide extra context. I could go on and on about what makes great content…but these are a good start.

7. Don’t Ignore SEO

SEO is another great way to improve your online presence – but it’s not just about keywords, meta tags, and page speed. That’s part of it – but actually great content and good SEO are closely connected. Take the SEO concept of “search intent” for example. The idea behind fulfilling search intent is that based on what a user puts into the search bar, the are looking for a specific type of information. And the content that comes up for that search term should match that intention.

The four basic categories of search intent are:

• Informational
• Navigational
• Commercial
• Transactional

Let’s say you search for “financial planners Denver”. You probably want a list of financial planning firms with some information about what type of services they provide, where they’ve located, reviews, etc. But if you search “what does a financial planner do” you’re looking for a much more informational style of content. Probably a high-level post explaining the basics of how this type of professional helps people and how their services can benefit you.

Like creating great blog content, SEO is a topic I have a lot to say about! Here is some more info about how you can optimize your posts for SEO.

8. Be *Actually* Social on Social Media 

Social media has become such a major promotion engine for brands and influencers, that many of us have forgotten how to actually be social on these platforms. Social media is reciprocal, which means it’s not just about sharing your stuff and then peacing out. You have to engage with what others are sharing too.   

Next time you post something, make a point to stick around and comment (genuinely) on at least 5 posts from other people or brands. Like and react to stuff. Repost things and add your own thoughts. Think about how you can build genuine connection over “how soon can I pitch”? Doing so will get you more exposure in the notifications feed, and it will build your social equity. 

But remember, likes, comments, and shares are still just vanity metrics. Conversions are what you’re really after. 

Here’s my rant on LinkedIn about how we need to think of social media as a dialogue, not a monologue. And treat it like the community it is.

P.S. wanna connect on LinkedIn? It’s the place to be right now! And I promise not to cold pitch you in the DMs.😊

So, is your online presence on point, or is there room for improvement? If your message is unclear or your content fails to speak to your customer’s wants, needs, and desires, it might be time for a revamp. If you’re not active on social, why not? How’s your SEO game?

Keeping up with your online presence can be a lot, especially when things are always changing. But the time and effort will be well worth it for building brand awareness, increased sales, and standing out in a crowded market.

Think you could benefit from a brand voice guide, email marketing plan, SEO content creation, or content strategy? Let’s talk! Schedule a free 30-minute call with me.