Digital Presence Must-Haves for Startups
Your business – no matter the industry– is going to benefit from an effective digital strategy. Developing and honing your digital space is critical to standing out in a city as competitive as New York City and it may not be as complicated as you think. Here are a few tips and strategies that any entrepreneur should employ to make the most of your digital presence.
Building Your Website
As your website is your primary presence online, you are going to want to ensure that it is well designed. This doesn’t mean you need to start designing or coding to get your website up to par, there are a number of great resources to connect entrepreneurs with talented and qualified designers to create beautiful and functional websites.
Crowdspring.com is one such resource. The idea behind CrowdSpring is that many designers compete for your business, and you can choose whichever best meets your needs. When you submit a request for a web design to Crowdspring you are given a number of mock-ups from various designers . Once you have found a design with which you are satisfied, you can then commission the designer to complete the work. This is a great way of seeing many ideas and designs without needing to spend lots of time and money and enables you to build a beautiful and useful online space while ensuring all of your requirements for the project are satisfied.A similar resource is elance.com, connecting freelance designers (as well as writers, programmers, translators and others) with those looking for skilled workers. Although there is less competition among designers, the price can be much lower than other outlets, making this a great resource for low-cost design needs.Some entrepreneurs may want to take their website and its design into their own hands, which is also an option. Two popular and easy-to-use tools are Weebly.com and Wordpress.com. Both of these services offer users the ability to build a website from scratch; neither require coding, and both offer templates that even the most basic user can work with. There are also a number of downloadable templates (some free – some paid) should none of the templates provided fit your design approach.Keep in mind that it is important for your website to be memorable – and this branches beyond the design. Be sure to choose a domain name that is easy to remember, recognize, and spell. Domains that are simpler and shorter have been proven to be easier to remember for consumers – which will help you bring customers back to your website.
Make it Mobile
With the rise of smartphones, having a mobile site has become increasingly critical as mobile traffic continues to grow. According to a Google study, 75% of users prefer that a website have a mobile version, more people use mobile devices to access the internet than desktop computers, and by 2015 the number of mobile devices produced will eclipse the global population. The time for mobile has come.So how do you make your website smartphone friendly? It isn’t as complicated as you may think. For an easy way to mobilize your current desktop site, Google recommends Dudamobile for their ease of use both for website visitors and for those building the backend of the mobile site. They make sure to address the key issues with mobile sites – thumb-friendly buttons, quick-to-read layouts, and easy conversion techniques, to name a few. The options available are relatively low cost and can be applied to any website.Another option is to use a responsive design when building your site. This means that each piece of your site is designed to adapt or move when viewed on a mobile device for optimal user experience. Wordpress and other services like it offer a wide range of responsive template designs.
Make it Relevant
Once you’ve built your site, you are going to want to give visitors a reason to return. While many businesses stop after listing their services, portfolio, and contact info, the best way to improve your search engine rankings and keep your audience engaged is to provide regularly updated content. This can be in the form of articles, a blog, or even sharing relevant articles from other websites. According to HubSpot companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5 times more traffic than companies that don’t blog.
Given the time it takes to sit down and write content on a regular basis, bringing in additional content from outside sources can free up considerable time. There are a few ways to approach finding good content.First, approach bloggers who write on topics relevant to your product or service and ask them to be guest bloggers on your website. This gives them the chance to reach a larger audience while giving you relevant content to share with your visitors. Another approach is asking those involved in your industry for interviews, showing their recognition of your operation while also providing fresh content for visitors.Another great tool comes in the form of content curation platforms, such as Atomic Reach. A relatively new concept, content curation companies gather together groups of bloggers who already write about your chosen topic and allow you to choose blog posts from them to publish on your website. Through this, you have the ability to review a number of blogs and publish only those relevant to your audience. You can also categorize them to ensure your visitors can find what they are looking for under specific topics, and build a community among the bloggers published on your site. This is a great way to bring fresh content to your site continuously while simultaneously growing your network. For an example of content curation in action take a look at New York International’s NY Blogs section which allows us to provide many perspectives on living in New York.If you are not using a curation platform, you can also curate your content on your own. If your business covers a certain topic or theme, picking some of your favorite articles on the topic and compiling them in one space is going to make your website a great resource for visitors interested in that space. "Pick a theme and then go about finding some of the best articles on the Internet about it. Put them all together in one post and your readers will have a handy hub of useful info and the guys whose posts you reference will love it too," says Vicki Dean, Project Manager at Inbound Digital Marketing.
Make it Social
With your website built and the content coming in, you’re going to want to ensure it is being seen. Some of the easiest and most affordable tools to do this come in the form of social media and email marketing.
Social media has grown into essentially its own category of marketing and advertising over the last decade. As Facebook becomes one of the largest companies in the world, other networks continue to grow both in size and relevance. Social media is the best way to quickly reach already established groups of people and specific demographics. If you are posting unique, relevant content people will naturally share it and spread the word. This increases your audience effortlessly while also showing search engines such as Google that you are a valuable resource.
The best social networks to use will vary based on your industry. If you are a restaurant, for example, you should make sure that you have active accounts on Yelp and FourSquare, both of which allow users to check in and share their experience with your establishment. If you’re offering professional services, LinkedIn is going to be a more valuable tool as it is targeted at business professionals. Pinterest and Instagram are great for companies that have great images of their products – fashion, food, or art, for example – which would garner interest online.Be sure that you don’t spread your resources too thin; focus on building a strong presence on a few social networks before attempting to branch out. Some helpful tools such as HootSuite or TweetDeck can help you spread your content on all your social networks through a single platform.
Stay in Contact
Another basic digital tool is email marketing. There are a number of free or low cost email marketing services – MailChimp, ConstantContact and iContact, for example– that make it easy to collect and organize your customers’ contact information and design custom email messages to send to your subscribers.You can collect email addresses in a number of ways – through asking visitors to sign up on your website, on social media, or in person. As a general rule of thumb, you should have all of your contacts confirm that they want to be on your email list (via email) and add you to their address book to ensure you do not land in their spam folder. Remember that it is illegal to add people to your mailing list without their permission; be sure to have a confirmation sent out as well as including an unsubscribe option with each newsletter. Be mindful about not emailing your list of contacts too frequently; reserve it for special promotions and regular updates – bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly.These five fundamentals: a well designed website, a mobile site, regularly updated content, social media, and email marketing will ensure you build a strong online presence that your prospective customers can easily find. Article updated December, 2014