Five practical tips to help increase your visibility online

Gaining visibility online is all about capturing the attention of your target consumers. Before consumers can be affected by your advertising messages or brand promise, they need to first be paying attention. And honestly, that attention doesn’t come cheap because your competitors are also craving for the same chunk of attention you seek. So, you see increasing visibility online can be a bit complicated because the strategy that works for organization ‘A’, may not succeed with organization ‘B’.

Annually, billions of dollars are spent by large organizations to make their brands visible to their online consumers. The sad story however, is that only few have succeeded. A classic example of brands that have failed in their online campaign is the Coca-Cola company. In 2011, Coca-Cola launched a new marketing campaign called Liquid and Linked. The goal was to increase their online presence. About the campaign, Coke’s Jonathan Mildenhall was quoted as saying, ‘’Coke would continue produce the world’s most compelling content which would capture a disproportionate share of popular culture, doubling sales by 2020’’. The following year the company launched its digital magazine called Coca-Cola journey to attract online consumers. With all the money invested, over 3 years of its launch, it barely registers views. And it is not even in the top 10, 000 sites in US or the top 20,000 in the world.

The question is, how do we develop a strategy that will increase brands visibility online? There are two broad ways to do this, you can either ‘buy it’ or ‘earn it’. Buying it could cost a fortune and there is no guarantee for return on investment. Earning it however, requires strategic planning.

Here are five practical tips to help you increase your visibility online.

Post Relevant Content

Create content that offers value to your consumers. Lendoit is a decentralized peer-to-peer lending platform connecting borrowers and lenders from all over the world and one of the key to their success is posting relevant content on their blog.  They understand that a successful business is all about the consumers and so giving them useful information at all times has helped increase the number visitors to their site. 

It is important that the content you provide on your platform must be clear and should be so engaging that your consumers will want to share with their followers. Directing people to nuggets of content such as social media posts or email newsletters will do you good, keeping you visible and being seen as an authority in your field. One way to achieve this is by giving them a sense of ownership and involvement.

Make ‘Freemium’ work

Ever heard of the word ‘freemium’? Well, it is a combination of ‘free’ plus ‘premium. It is becoming a very popular business model especially among internet start-ups and smartphone app developers. Consumers or users get basic features free and can access richer functionality for a subscription fee. Even popular sites like Linkedln, Hulu, Dropbox and so on have employed this model. It is a good tack to gain visibility online and convert prospect to consumers.

Blog

Blogging is an essential inbound marketing strategy. Your blog is where you showcase your knowledge of the industry you are in, and where you can establish yourself as an authority in your field. The more content you add to your blog, pages on your domain become indexed in search engines. This will of course increase your visibility and it will drive traffic to your blog. The more content you post on your blog, the more your chances of being ranked for various words and the easier it becomes to find you.

SEO Marketing

Google algorithms are programmed with a focus on consumers. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. If you want to know the benefit of SEO to a business, check this statistics from the 2011 social shopping study; 50% of consumers spend 75% or more of their total time shopping engaged in product research.

Google uses keywords from users and interprets them, leading to ranking of different websites. A good SEO marketing strategy considers more than just keywords. You need to know which search engines your target consumers are using the most, and what exactly they are searching for. Ensure that your blogpost contain SEO key terms that you know your clients would like to see while searching online. It is not something you do once and stop, the rules are not always the same, search engines are constantly changing the way they work and the rule that apply to rankings.

Collect leads

Before you start building your online presence, it is best you start collecting leads. Lead generation is all the process it takes to introduce your brands to your prospective consumers and the steps necessary to convert the prospect to consumers. People won’t trust your brand immediately so you will need to take practical steps to build that trust.