Founding your own company is a lot of work. Writing a business plan, searching for an office, getting a loan, making investments and many more things are now on your agenda. But what about you online presence? How should I present my company to be found by potential customers?
Here are some suggestions based on my own experience over the last two years raising my own company.
Deutsche Version: refining-arts.com/blog
What you need for sure…
1. A website!
Doesn’t matter if you are working B2C or B2B - a solid website is in most cases the first thing a potential customer sees and reads about you and your ideas. Besides an appealing design you should definitely rely on interesting content to avoid your visitors to leave the page again bored after a few seconds. Furthermore on-topic and interesting contents are fundamental when it comes to improve your search engine ranking. Search engines love great content and want to give their users only the best results.
2. Social media channels
Being active in social media networks gives you the opportunity to keep your target audience informed and to capture your company, ideas and products on a regular basis. Specially for new companies like yours it is very important to stay in mind of your potential customers to show that you are still operating and to always remember them about your great product that should be seen!
Advice:
Before creating social media accounts for your company try to question in witch networks your target audience is primarily active. Also create a scheme about how often you want to post content that is interesting for your audience.
Okay - now you have already set two cornerstones for your online presence. Depending on your philosophy and the product you offer you can try to use further actions to mark yourself off from your competitors and to get as much attention as possible for your visions.
What else can I do?
3. Video content
Videos are maybe one of the most important online contents of 21st century. They are able to convey a lot of information in a very short period of time and they can get the attention of your own target audience. On the couch, the subway or in office - online videos are nearly impossible to think away from the life of a great majority of people. Most of the time its basically about being entertained with funny, emotional or shocking videos that people like and want to share with others. When creating online videos for your company the message of your clips should always lead to you and your ideas. Whether a classic corporate film, a product video, an interview of yourself - maybe even a short clip made with your mobile: When it comes to the decision between a text and a video, many people choose the video first.
Advice:
I recommend to work together with a production company for your video content to maintain a certain quality standard. As a small company with tight budget you could start with some self made videos and later try to combine professional content with your own videos. The most important thing should be that your content is creative and keeps in mind of your potential customers.
4. SEO
The word SEO is the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. Aspiration of this process is to optimize your content to be found easily on search engines. Besides technical requirements there is also a lot to note about your content. As mentioned above search engines really like high quality content and rewards that with highly ranked free listings for your website. When creating a new website it is very useful to make both design and content on a SEO basis.
5. SEA
Sounds a little bit like SEO, means Search Engine Advertising and is also part of online marketing. Additional to your free listings caused by good SEO you can improve your findability with paid advertises. One of the most popular methods for that is Google AdWords. Also you could try to advertise on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
6. Blogging
Having an own blog is a great opportunity to place additional content on your website. This can be interesting in many regards: First of all you offer further interesting content for visitors of your website what makes your website more versatile and helps to catch attention with different up to date topics. Those contents could be reports about current projects or works, helpful hints and tricks or other stuff that could be relevant for your audience.
Another benefit of your own blog is that the amount of quality content on your website rises what is also interesting for your status in search engines. Because of your writings about different topics there are different key words that can be triggered by search engines. People may find your article and catch attention for your company for the first time.
Of course you can share your blog postings on your social media channels as well and benefit from your own content one way and another.
I hope you got inspired a little bit by reading this posting. Doing self marketing is quite difficult and often frustrating (I can tell) so here is my final advise:
Try to find out where your audience hangs around in the WWW and convince your potential customers with your good quality content like videos and careful worded texts. When you notice, that you won’t get enough response to your postings in a social media network, try to question if its the right platform to get in touch with your target audience or if you might waste your time there. In my case it was Twitter - a great platform that can be a lot of fun - but most of our customers doesn’t even have a Twitter account. So sharing content there was just not effective as we hoped.
If you just started your own company and want to get attention online there is no way around an own website. You can start with a simple landing page and after some time you could relaunch it with a good marketing concept. If you need support or advice I would be glad to help you out!
Hope my English was not too bad 😜
Cheerio,
Mattis✌🏼