The Right and Wrong Way to Grow Your Digital Presence

Focusing on your digital presence is a sure-fire way to grow your business, but there are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding it. For instance, many people read outdated articles about how important advertising is, but the reality is that as the internet evolves the strategies we need to use have to change as well. So in order to demystify these problems and give you a better chance at growing your business, here are some tips on the right and wrong way to grow your digital presence.

Wrong: Focusing solely on advertising

Advertising is a great way to improve your digital presence, but there’s a single problem that makes it a terrible idea for most startups and SMEs; competition. While you could probably advertise on a similar level to larger companies, they’ll ultimately have a lot more money to spend, a larger marketing budget and ultimately more power than you. You simply don’t win when it comes down to who has more marketing power.

Right: Changing the approach depending on your budget

That’s why it’s incredibly important to change your approach depending on your budget. Smaller companies with less capital can focus on social media-based approaches. This involves joining communities, getting to know your audience and paying more attention to their needs as you try to meet them.

Wrong: Doing everything yourself to save money

There are far too many entrepreneurs and SMEs that would rather use their employees or even their own skills to try and grow their digital presence. This could include learning to design your own website, trying to use free SEO tools to get noticed on Google or even trying to manage your social media accounts alone. This is a poor approach because it takes a lot of your time and you simply don’t have the knowledge or skills required.

Right: Investing into services wisely

That’s why it’s important to partner yourself with an SEO agency, web design company or even a community manager. The idea is to always rely on specialists when possible because they’ll be capable of handling the tasks you’ve set while you can focus on striking more deals, developing new products and ultimately scaling your company. You can leave the design and technical work to specialists instead.

Wrong: Automating everything that you can

There are far too many services and tools that can help you automate tasks that really shouldn’t be automated. For instance, there are tools that will automatically update your social media pages with random bits of content, there are email templates and services that will spam emails to various accounts and there are tools to automate lead followup. This might work for larger businesses, but if you value customer interaction then there’s another option.

Right: Personalizing your content

Personalizing all of your content makes you more human and thus approachable. If you’re going to grow your digital presence then you absolutely need to write and send your own emails, curate content that you wish to display to the public and follow up on leads in person.