Back to all articlesBuilding a strong brand profile and online presence is vital for businesses in the modern marketplace. You may not be a high street name or even have any aspirations of becoming one, but the connections people make with your business, and the image and personality you portray could make the difference between a sale or a fail…
Let’s face facts: even if you’re just a small fish in a big pond, one of the main things to build into your overall business strategy is marketing, and building trust in your ‘brand’. If you have a website, you won’t see it bring many results if you just leave it sitting there: you need to let people know it exists, and work to stay at pace with – or rise above – your competitors.
Increasing your brand profile means improving your offline and online visibility – but we’re going to focus on online for now.
Five ways to boost your online visibility
We could practically write a book about online visibility, digital marketing and SEO (after all, there’s one big Venn diagram happening there!), but here are 5 easy ways to boost your brand online…
1. Brand guidelines – before you even start, know what you want to say and how you want to be perceived. Think about your logo and ‘brand palette’, your images and graphics, how your content is structured and your tone of voice. This level of consistency makes you more easily recognisable, and builds trust in your business.
2. Better your meta – make sure your website is giving clear indicators to the search engines, so your audience can have a better chance of finding you when they search for relevant keywords. Optimise your page title tags and meta description for starters – but make it compelling to humans too.
3. Set up a blog section on your website – by creating GREAT content you can keep your site fresh and help improve your rankings, plus you have something to promote and share via other online channels. Don’t just stick with words either: try video, images, infographics etc. Create a content calendar and take advantage of seasonal and current events to inspire new ideas and make your content more relevant.
4. Social media – this is a great way of raising your profile and gaining better visibility, but you need to put some effort into it! LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube… choose the best platforms for your type of business and connect with your audience directly, build your network and create partnerships. LinkedIn is a great one for building your profile as an industry ‘thought’ leader. We can advise on the best social media strategy for you – or even run the whole show on your behalf if you want!
5. Local search – the value of this is often underestimated, but in the days of mobile search and the requirement for accurate results for local services, being a ‘near me’ business is brand visibility at its finest: in other words, showing up on Google Maps results when someone searches for ‘local [business type] near me’. It literally puts you on the map, right in front of your direct target market. Build this objective into your overall strategy.