Building an effective online presence requires you to embrace the three new pillars of marketing that I’m sharing with you today, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.
It’s about how you can you can use today’s technologies to build an online presence that give you a significant edge over most of your competition.
In many cases your competition don’t have the right online presence, or the answers they need. Nor do they know how do anything of significance online. If you “get” it and they don’t, it represents a massive opportunity for you.
Building Your Online Presence
This video and article touch on the basics for maximising your online presence and visibility. That includes building an engaged social media audience, and turning it into a goldmine.
Over the years I’ve successfully used a wide variety of sales and marketing approaches both for growing my own businesses and when advising clients. Most of the marketing approaches that built successful businesses and worked best for decades were first used in the mid 1800s. That’s when mass media first rose to prominence.
Those approaches included cold calling, database marketing, direct mail, print and broadcast advertising in the mass media and many other traditional forms of marketing.
But in the last few years everything has changed. New technologies have empowered buyers like never before. And that has changed their behaviour almost beyond recognition.
It started with the rise of the web, followed by Google search. The widespread availability of broadband soon followed. And that combined with the explosion in the use of social media and mobile devices changed everything. For the first time ever we could find whatever information and content we were seeking, anytime and anywhere.
Online search allows us to instantly obtain whatever depth of information we want. And we can get it wherever we want it, in whatever form we want, from text to images, audio and video.
These innovations have made many of the traditional methods of marketing redundant in little more than a decade. In fact, as far as millions of people are concerned, if you don’t the right online presence, you might as well not exist at all.
As a consequence, the results achieved by many traditional forms of marketing have diminished. And in many cases you have to question whether it is even worth continuing with the old methods.
Some Stats for You
Here are the results of a survey carried out by ComScore and Group M Search,
- 86% of consumers say search is very important in their buying process;
- 71% of people use search at the start of the purchase process
- 45% continue using search throughout the entire process
- 18% use it just at the end
Of those who go to search engines first, 40% turn to social media next to help make their decision. On the other hand 46% of those who start with social media then turn to search.
28% of people say that sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube help them learn about new brands and products. And 30% use social media to eliminate brands from contention.
Your online presence is therefore critically important in today’s world.
Build The Right Online Presence
Being found online requires you to embrace the three new pillars of marketing:
- Content
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media
1. Content
Content has been around on the internet from day one. But until recently the technology to enable it was slow, cumbersome and inefficient.
Today it’s possible to deliver large volumes of increasingly sophisticated content via 4G and WiFi, using many different mediums, including:
- Blogs
- Video
- Text
- Slide Presentations
- Podcasts
- Audio
- Forums
- Webinars
- Social media
Creating decent content is all-important today, if you want to be found. But it requires a dedicated mindset that is very different to what was required for marketing in the past.
The good news is that once you’ve created the content for a blog, you can easily adapt it for other mediums. Some bloggers routinely repurpose their content in 10 or more different mediums. And once you start doing that, you can really start to leverage your efforts and become ubiquitous.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
In essence SEO is the practice of maximising the ranking and visibility of your site in the main search engines. That’s important because it’s where most of your customers begin their buying process. And it makes it much easier for them to find your content.
You start by creating quality content that adds value to your ideal buyers. It also involves the use of relevant tags and keywords relating to your content. And it’s important to build inbound links to your site to maximise your search engine ranking.
Your ranking refers to achieving the best possible “organic” search engine results i.e. unpaid, algorithm-driven results.
Inbound links can be built by sharing your content on social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube; Pinterest and Medium. You can also build inbound links by commenting on other blogs and writing guest posts. In addition you can submit your posts to all the popular and industry specific directories; and get your posts shared on multiple bookmarking and sharing services.
Every time one of your links is shared, it pushes up your ranking and online visibility.
All of this means that it’s very beneficial to you to evolve your site into something that holds actual value to your prospects.
In contrast, it is NOT a good idea to garner incoming links that your site has not earned. So it is best to avoid such things as reciprocal linking schemes, link farms, the purchase of text links etc. All of these will downgrade the ranking of your site compared to “earned links.”
3. Social Media
Social media amplifies the impact of your content.
When your content is distributed across, and discussed on, networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced. It is therefore more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.
The leverage it provides can be astonishing as your “interesting, unique and valuable content” gets embedded and linked in blogs and websites across the web. It will allow your great content to be praised, commented on and discussed as you work, sleep and play. You will be amazed where it travels after you’ve been doing this for a while.
If you use a link shortening service like Bit.ly you can track the time, location and number of clicks on any links you share. And if you use analytics tools like Google Analytics and Woopra you’ll know a vast amount about who is visiting your site. You’ll also know when and what they’re interested in.
So what are the critical Social Media Channels you should be using?
- Blog
- YouTube/Vimeo
This Only Scratches the Surface
Online visibility is a very big topic with a multitude of components. I will be covering many different elements, in depth, in future blog posts, videos and seminars.
This only scratches the surface of an important, massive and ever-changing topic. Several future seminars will go into much more depth on building an effective online presence. And it’s an important topic that is ever more critical to your business success in today’s world.
If you do ANY of the ten things I’ve shared with you so far in this online seminar series, you’ll already have enough ammunition to outsell, outsmart and outperform your toughest competition.
Online Presence Questions
- What answers are your prime prospects searching for online? In what ways can you provide those answers?
- How and where do your prime prospects like to consume information online? List all the ways you can adapt any of your articles or blog posts to satisfy those different consumption preferences.
- List all the social media channels used by large numbers of your prime prospects. Come up with a plan for sharing links to your articles or blog posts on those channels.
Please share your thoughts and add your questions to the comments below. I’ll try to provide as many answers as possible in my future online videos, seminars, workshops, masterclasses and blog posts.
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