What You Don’t Know Can Hurt Your Business

Sound like fear-mongering? Well, it isn’t. It’s a wake-up call. If you are getting leads from your website, calls from people finding you on Google and actual paying customers from your social media activity, then carry on, you don’t need to read any more of this article.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first to remind us of the “new” customer journey. (I mean “new” for those of us who grew up with a phone book that actually got used). ¹According to Curalate, more than 50% of consumers will purchase from a brand they are familiar with on Social. ²97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else. (Source: SEO Tribunal).

In today’s digital environment coupled with the information at the hands of every consumer, it is critical for businesses to have their arms around their digital footprint (online presence). A business must leverage this resource in order to survive and grow. Your online presence (or digital footprint) is often times the only first impression you get. It can be the deciding factor for a prospect to continue to look at your company or move on in their search.

Think of your online presence as your virtual salesperson, working just as hard as you do even while you’re sleeping! Yes, you CAN sell while you’re sleeping.

Your website should be bringing in leads and your digital activity should be bringing in more business.

Your website should be bringing in leads and your digital activity should be bringing in more business.

If it’s not, you’re not alone. I hear the same thing from prospects and new customers. “I don’t ever get anything from my website.” or “Social media and ads don’t work for us, we’ve never gotten results.” “SEO is way to expensive, we’ll never rank on Google.” Once we take on the client and begin to investigate on the backend, we find the same key things missing. No blame to a former developer or digital manager because much of this can increase the cost of service. Yet, I would hope they raise a red flag. Enough of the finger pointing, let’s just fix it.

So what are the few critical areas a business can do to make their online presence more effective?

• Call to Action – Tell your website visitors or social media audience exactly what to do and then what to do next and next. Handhold them through the journey. “Click here to get your coupon.” “Click here to see our products.” “Download The Case Study.” You get the point.

• Lead Magnets – Providing highly valuable content or offers in exchange for a prospect’s information. You can do this with gated content or opt-ins. When done strategically, your lead magnets can tell you what phase of the buying process your prospect is in.

• Google My Business – The most underutilized resource for small local businesses. Get your account verified. If it is, then posting content to it and asking for reviews should be a weekly activity. A local service provider should pay more attention to their GMB account than they do their FB page because most consumers will search Google for local service before they search FB.

• Basic On-Page SEO – Even the nontechie can implement a few key things to help with your page ranking. A page description is CRITICAL! Depending on your platform, the page description is in the settings of your page. Every page on your site should have a keyword associated and the content should be relevant to that keyword. Content should be structured in a way that Google (or other search engines- are there other search engines?) can easily tell what the page is about and what information is relevant to its user (the person searching). Images can be the most common culprit for poor page ranking when they are too big because it can take your page loading process to a crawl. You’ll be punished by search engines for slow loading pages.

• Content Is King (everywhere) – Relevant, valuable content is important to your prospects and customers. You’ll be able to quickly identify if your social media posts are relevant or valuable by the amount of engagement. You’ll also be able to tell if your content is good on your website by how long visitors stay on your website and how deep they go in (click-throughs). The numbers won’t lie. This is by far the easiest to identify, but the most difficult to fix, that is, unless you know your customer as well as you know your best friend.

• Paid Ads – You can skip to the head of the line with paid ads! Paid ads can be highly effective in getting traffic to your website and leads into your business and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Spending just $5 dollars a day can be a great enhancement to your SEO strategy or even better, a great way to get the word out about your next sale. Yet, most people miss the important stuff on the setup. You have to know who your audience is and what copy (text) will resonate with them. This isn’t set it and forget it either, you’ll need to track activity so you can understand what is working and where things are falling down, then pivot accordingly. It takes good business data and strategy (along with a budget) to make them work for you.

By now, you should have a glazed look in your eyes and a sudden urge to punch me. It just means you’re bothered you don’t have these things figured out and you have no idea what I’m talking about. Well, I’m challenging you for 2021 to raise the bar on your digital footprint and give it a much needed Pedi.