Your Guide to Digital Presence Management

Digital presence management is a must for every company that aims to connect with consumers and stay relevant.

With more people than ever becoming accustomed to searching for, discovering, and assessing businesses online, you must have an effective digital presence management strategy to increase brand awareness and grow.

How to Manage Your Brand’s Digital Presence

Your digital presence includes various touch points that a consumer may have with your brand online. These include your website, local listings and search results, social media, and online reviews.

Being present and engaged across these touch points and bolstering aspects of your brand online should help you achieve a stronger digital presence. Let’s take a look at 4 best practices:

Design a User-Friendly Website with Relevant Content

Your company or brand website is one of the best ways to establish your legitimacy as a business. It also gives you an opportunity to make a great first impression.

According to research, 55% of people will search for online reviews and recommendations before making a purchase. Meanwhile, 47% will visit the company website, 26% will check out the physical store, and 23% will talk about the business with friends and family.
According to a Stanford study, 75% of consumers have admitted to judging a company’s credibility based on its website design.

Building a user-friendly website that showcases your brand to your potential customers is one of the most important things you can do to grow your digital presence.

An attractive, modern website design is easy to achieve with an expert in tow or any of today’s website builders. For your website to generate leads, focus on delivering a great user experience that lets every page look and function exactly the way you want it to.

Showcase your products and services with high-quality images and engaging content.
Perform search engine optimization (SEO) so your website can rank in local SEO results and “near me” searches.
Consider adding location pages that include the Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) of each of your business locations.

Use a website review widget to add social proof such as customer testimonials and online reviews.

Claim Your Online Listings

One of the most crucial aspects of digital presence management is online or local listings.

You can think of the process of creating and claiming your listings as a way of planting your brand’s flag on digital properties where consumers are actively looking for you.

Local listings appear in search results when people search for your brand or business online. Not only do they display your business information; they also play a vital role in determining your brand reputation, search engine rankings, and revenue.

Listings and search result information will send 70% of consumers to a physical store that’s relevant to their search results. (Expand Digital)
Approximately 86% of people search for a location of a business on Google Maps, making it critical for brands to have updated online listings on Google. (99 Firms)
Consumers look for specific trust signals when looking at listings of businesses. The top 3 factors that influence their decision to choose a business are: photos, Google reviews, and position on the search engine results page (SERP). (Local SEO Statistics)

It can be challenging for marketers to get started on a local listing management strategy. It takes a lot of work to create effective listings that support your digital presence management efforts, accurately reflect your brand, and drive customers to your business locations.

This involves a good amount of research, data entry, verification procedures, and manually logging in and out of websites — which you have to repeat every time your business information changes: say, your store hours changed or you moved your business address.

To stay efficient, you must have an understanding of which online directories, yellow pages, social media and business review sites matter the most to your brand.

If you’re managing a brand with hundreds or thousands of business locations, consider investing in online reputation management software that includes local listing management features.

Case Study Westland Insurance has successfully automated the process of managing over 200 Google listings and optimizing the visibility of its brand online. Learn how they did it.

Engage with Your Audience on Social Media

Companies that succeed in digital presence management usually know how to harness social media as a marketing channel.

Whether you’re looking to market your brand on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or Linkedin, social media gives you a direct line of communication with your audience. If you’re able to take advantage properly, social media can help you build brand trust and loyalty among customers who like your products and services.

To effectively manage your brand presence on social media, you need to:

Start and participate in conversations with your audience.
Share relevant content that provides value (instead of posting only promotional brand content).
Respond to customer questions and complaints that are posted on social media.
Learn how to respond to negative reviews and social media comments.
Follow positive review response examples.

One of our favorite examples of brands that savvily use social media to manage their digital presence is natural skin care company Burt’s Bees. The company’s tweets and replies serve to demonstrate Burt’s Bees commitment to engaging with its audience on social media.

Have a Proactive Online Review Management Strategy

Online reviews play a big role in how today’s consumers judge brands, and therefore in digital presence management. Before your potential customers even go to a physical location, they read customer reviews on websites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Tripadvisor.

According to online reviews statistics:

Star ratings matter. Approximately 70% of consumers use rating filters to weed out unwanted businesses. The most common filter is applied to see only businesses with 4-star ratings (out of 5) and higher (35%).
Review readers are ready to make a purchase. 53% of people who search online for local businesses typically visit a business within 48 hours. The main types of information they’re looking for are: photos (24%), online reviews (21%), and search rankings (21%).

With proper online review management, you can protect and improve your online brand reputation, grow your digital presence, and foster brand trust among existing and potential customers. Tracking reviews is only the first step. To effective manage reviews, you need to: