Starting your own business is exhilarating. To create a brand that you are proud of and to share your business with the world is a great accomplishment. Now more than ever, a digital presence is vital for any business to run and continue to run smoothly, a trend that’s never been seen with more validity than it has in 2020. Having a digital presence is a great way to promote your business to customers near and far and to connect with your customers more efficiently as well.
If you’ve just started your own business, here’s what you need to do to set up a strong digital presence online.
Your best bet for setting up your business online for success is to start with creating a business profile on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and possibly YouTube. You will also need to create a website for your business as well – that’s a biggie! These are the building blocks of creating a digital presence for your business. Once you’ve established these, you can move on to creating an e-commerce store within your website if you sell a product or your service can be sold online. But we’ll get to that another time.
It’s also important to register your business name ahead of time and ensure it’s not already being used by another business or person so that you keep yourself out of hot water down the road.
Creating a business profile on social media
It’s one thing to create a business profile on Google and social media, but it’s another to make it stand out and for it to be a successful marketing tool. When creating a profile on any of these platforms, here’s what you need to keep in mind:
1. Use your business name as your profile name
To avoid confusion and missing out on potential leads, when you create your profiles, use your business name as your profile name. If possible, too, if you don’t have a long business name, try to include your most popular keyword in your business profile handle name. A social media handle is different than your page name. It’s how people would mention your page when talking about it online. As an example, our business page name is 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions – our type of business is already in our business name. But take the clothing company Garage as an example. Their social media handles are “garageclothing” and their page name is “Garage” to allow people to know exactly which business they are when the page is being mentioned by others on social media. If it was just ‘garage’ it would be more difficult for customers to find their business online in order to mention them while tagging the right business.
2. Use images
Your business profile NEEDS to have images, both a profile image and headers. On your business’ website, try to have visuals wherever you can that best represents your business. If that means hiring a professional photographer to take headshots or photos of your products, that’s money well spent. You can always take them yourself if you have the ability and finesse with the skills needed, but the photos online are your business’ first impression. That’s why it’s crucial they look great! The same goes for your social media posts. When you post something, try to add images or videos wherever you can as posts with visuals tend to have more engagement, and viewers are – lazy. Yes, we said it. People are much more likely to read a caption in a photo than they are a paragraph or text, and they are even more likely to watch a video than they are to read a long blog post like this one. Unless it’s really engaging…you know, like this one 😉
3. Include as much information as possible
Your business profiles online give you the best opportunity to teach your audience about your business and what your brand represents. A big mistake new companies will make is skipping over certain sections they should fill in on their profiles. Wherever possible, fill in every field you can come up with an answer for when setting up your business profile. The more information you can provide your customer with, the better! If you don’t have a phone number or website yet, that’s ok to leave those blank, so long as you update them as soon as you have that information.
4. Update your info when necessary
Just as it’s important to have as much information available for your customer as possible, you should also be sure to keep this information updated. Let’s say for example that your regular business hours are 9-5 from Monday to Friday. For the holidays, you forget to change your business hours to read that you are closed the week of Christmas. This results in upset customers not being able to reach you when they needed to – which could mean losing business or that customer leaving a bad review. So be certain that you are updating your information online when necessary.
Do you need help setting up your business online? We can help with that! Some business owners like to set everything up themselves, some so they know how to do it, others to save costs when starting up but, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with your to-do list or you’re not feeling confident that you’re as tech savvy as you need to be to get the job done, the team at 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions can help you do it all! From setting up your business on Google to creating an awesome website that best represents your business — Heck, we can even set up your email addresses, purchase and connect your domain name and run your social media for you! Or you might want to check out our social media starter kits here. All you have to do is give us a call to get started at (705) 252-4180. Whatever your marketing needs may be, we’ve got you covered – 3SIXTY.
