The best way to stay competitive in the face of crises like COVID 19, is to upgrade your company to a full digital transformation, one that provides a successful online presence and a clear methodology to convert people who visit your company's website into customers.
Do you know how well your company is doing? Find it out in this article and if the results are not so flattering, we'll tell you how to fix it. If your company has 2 or more of the following symptoms, then you don't have a good online presence:
Try making the following experiment: Run a Google search for a solution that your company offers or a product that you market. For example "legal consulting in the metropolitan area" or "running shoes for ladies". If your site didn't appear within the first results that Google offered as an answer, I am very sorry, but you practically do not exist on the Internet. The reality is that no one goes to the result's second page of. (Note: This is different from paying Google Ads to be shown as a first result, I will also address the disadvantage of doing this)
If you don't have this information and you have to pay Facebook or any third party to communicate with your prospects, interested parties, fans or potential customers, I am also very sorry to tell you that you do not have a useful online presence and, the bottom line is, you aren't really interested in giving your potential clients a proper follow-up.
If your company doesn't have a platform to give your prospects and clients a proper follow-up, such as a CRM, then you don't have the necessary tools to have a better presence online and communication with your clients.
Social networks are a very powerful channel yet, when customers are active on social networks, their main intention is to entertain themselves, not to solve a problem or buy something. If you don't have this clear, you will spend a lot of money on social networks without getting any ROI. Getting a community of real customers or prospects to follow you, is the result of a huge effort and can't just done by posting "babies and kittens" photos on social networks.
Do not worry if your company has 2 or more of these bad digital presence symptoms, you can change this situation! In order to improve your online presence, we want to give you the following tips:
In times of social distancing, it becomes more evident why having an online presence may be the solution that companies need. Yet, it's been important to do so for many years now, since there's a great movement of visitors and information on the Internet, it's just that, since we don't physically see these people, it's been like a "hidden world" for most of us.
When your company becomes easily accessible -digitally speaking- you'll see the following benefits:
For all these reasons, it's important that even if we don't have a pandemic, you begin to see the importance of digitizing your company. Therefore, we here share our:
These search engine's product and digital currency is information. Without information, Google wouldn't have customers and wouldn't be the huge industry it is now. It gets this information from the available websites, looking for those who have the best possible answer to the questions it's being asked. So, if you want Google to display your site within its top/best results, you have to feed your website with all the information that your client will want to know, strategically.
This information is the content that digital marketers are talking about these days. Answer to each and every one of the questions that your customers may be asking themselves. Google will find these content on your site and recommend it, if it's done well. You should then magnify the reach of that content via your social networks.
If you are paying to be shown as a best result (Google Ads), let me tell you that this is a strategy that should support all the content offered on your website, but IT IS NOT A STRATEGY BY ITSELF. The day you stop paying for this service, you'll have ZERO online presence! And every time you use it, it will be like starting all over again.
If you carry out a whole content strategy your company will:
Otherwise, you're a digital ghost.
2. Learn all about your clients / Have a database
You must be obsessed with learning all about your clients tastes and preferences so you can:
How will you achieve this if you haven't even worried about getting their data?
One of the primary principles of digital marketing is that all your digital tools should aim to start a conversation with a prospect or customer so that they share their information. This will help you to better understand, educate, and help this client so he moves forward in his buying decision. This will allow you to:
You should always keep a direct communication with your clients and avoid using third parties, like you do when using your followers network on Facebook. Understand that social networks make a living by not sharing your followers information unless you pay for it.
Once you start learning more about your potential customers, about how they make the buying decision, their tastes and preferences, you will then need to segment them so you can help them in a more intelligent and personalized way.
We know that a company offers many kinds of solutions for many kinds of people. When we communicate with someone and send him a message about a solution he doesn't need, from someone he doesn't know, at the wrong time, or via the wrong channel, we'll become SPAM. Our communication will be taken as rubbish which will only bother and interrupt our client.
On the other hand, if you have a good segmentation, you can give personalized follow-up to customers with communication campaigns that will really be interesting to them and that will actually help them solve an issue they may have.
If you only post kittens and babies in your digital communication, as we've seen Social Networks do millions of times, I congratulate you! You entertain people a lot, but you won't sell anything.
Good digital communication is being able to tell someone that you solve certain kind of problems, raising the question: "Do you have any of them?" and answering, "If so, I have a way to solve it".
If our communication focuses on how beautiful and great we are, on telling people we're the best, the boldest, then no one will listen to us. On the other hand, if people perceive that you are there to help them and not to sell something to them, people who have the problem that you solve, will be open to listen to your solution.
Creating content for the right person, with the right message (based on his tastes and preferences), content that will help him solve something, is to create a company culture. It also allows us to get to know our prospects and clients increasingly better.
It's not an advertising or marketing campaign. It's not a project that we are going to launch that has a beginning and an end. It's actually a change of mentality and culture that we must generate in our people and reinforce it with well-defined habits. We are going to run a marathon, not a short race.
The success of this digital transformation that your company will have lies in this culture. And this is the only way to give it real consistency and to fully experience the digital era.