The golden rule of starting a business these days is that you must market it online, if you wish for your business effort to succeed. You cannot start a business and neglect a plan to grow your web presence. It will hurt your brand’s chances of getting discovered, recommended to others, and as a whole, your business’s capacity for profit-making.

While building an online presence for your company may seem like an overwhelming prospect if you’re starting from scratch, it does not need to be.

Things get much easier when you have a set business plan to follow and refer to. For example, if starting or growing a construction business, you should use a construction business plan template that includes your strategy for improving your online presence, since more and more construction companies are found via online searches.

Below are the key steps to building a successful web presence for your company.

Steps to Building a Dependable Web Presence for Your Company

If you’re still in doubt about why it is necessary to build an online presence for your company, let’s look at a hypothetical situation:

When faced with two different retailers for the same products you’d like to buy, which would you choose – the one with Google reviews to their name or the one without?

Now that we’ve agreed on the importance of building a web presence for your brand, let’s look at how to go about it.

Strategize on the Desired Goals

What would you like the returns from your brand’s web presence to be? Do you want to establish increased brand awareness? Are you content with providing a platform where your clients can interact with you? Once you’ve decided what your goals are, you will be better able to create a business plan that will grow your company’s online presence.

Build a Website for Your Company

No matter what the goals behind your digital marketing strategy, any company could benefit from having their own website. It allows you to tell your own brand story, and inform customers about the products and services you offer, as well as providing contact information where interested customers can reach out.

Get on Social Media

It is not enough to market your company from your personal social media handle anymore. Entrepreneurs need to have dedicated pages for their businesses on the various social media platforms. It is not necessary to be on every social networking site, choose a handful and focus on sharing valuable content on these on a regular basis. You will soon notice increased brand popularity and sales.

Don’t Spam

Many businesses do not get the idea behind social media marketing and end up spamming potential customers. Your motive, when interacting with customers on social media, should be to build a bond with them, and eventually, a trust for your company. When you are able to build a relationship with your clients, they are more likely to be repeat customers. Spamming your customers will only bring down your brand image and harm your profit-making.

Diversify

Once you have mastered the basics such as building and running a stellar website, mastering SEO, and getting your presence known on social media there are yet further steps you can take to up the ante and improve your online presence. Consider reaching out and investing in the services of a software development company to further expand your online reach. 

A software development company will be able to assess your business and its needs to help determine what kind of software could be used to best meet demands. This could be by creating custom software tools or by way of an application for example. The popularity and use of applications have expanded tenfold and will only continue to do so. More and more companies are developing applications to make their business operations and the user experience of their customers easier. It is certainly worth considering whether your business will benefit from the use of custom software or applications to improve visibility and take it to the next level. 

A software development company will start by creating a visual to help you ‘see’ and understand just what this new software will look like. Once you are happy they will begin building and creating the software to bring it to fruition and ensure that it is adequately tested and tried before being launched. Once you are happy with the finished product it will be ready for launch and marketing, which will also be done by your software development company. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Follow this plan for building your brand’s digital presence and see for yourself.