What is one strategy to improve your startup business’s digital footprint and increase visibility online?
To help you best improve the digital footprint of your startup for greater online visibility, we asked content marketers and startup founders this question for their best strategies. From encouraging online reviews to adopting best practices to rank well on Google, there are several strategies that may help extend your startup’s digital footprint and make your brand stand out to online audiences.
Here are 12 strategies to improve your startup’s digital footprint:
- Encourage Online Reviews on Sites Like Angie’s List
- Showcase Your Brand and Post Consistently Online
- Improve The Search Engine Optimization of Your Site
- Create Content About the Problems Your Start-up Addresses
- Funnel Traffic Through the Right Social Media Platforms
- Offer Guest Blogs
- Create an Elaborate Founder Profile Page for Your Website
- Create Video Content With Compelling Storylines
- Draw from Your Competitors to Create Your Own Plan
- Collaborate With Influencers in Your Niche
- Focus on a Brand Personality of Your Startup to Reach Out
- Use Best Practices to Rank Well on Google
Encourage Online Reviews on Sites Like Angie’s List
Encouraging online reviews from customers on sites such as Angie’s List is the perfect way to increase your business’ digital footprint and gain more visibility online. Today more than ever, consumers rely on reviews to inform their buying decisions. Oftentimes, it is easy to ask for a review; it can be something we overlook. Especially when a customer is vocal about their happiness with your product or service, ask them to submit a review online. Finally, ask content customers who else might benefit from your products or services.
Jonathan Zacharias, GR0
Showcase Your Brand and Post Consistently Online
Stay consistent on social media. It’s not just about having accounts on different platforms – every brand should these days. It’s about staying consistent with your brand identity and posting frequently to those platforms. Regular posts drive more traffic and build out your brand awareness. A smart thing to do is create a social media content calendar so you can stay organized and always have posts planned. This will help you stay consistent and keep your accounts from stagnating.
Rachel Reid, Subtl Beauty
Improve The Search Engine Optimization of Your Site
Your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) is the biggest way to increase your business’s digital footprint to increase online visibility and web traffic. Your main goal with improving SEO for your business is to appear on the first page of the Google search results page, allowing more traffic to your site in general. SEO depends on a multitude of factors, from keywords your site is ranking for, the design and interface of your site, and how many internal and external links you have to and from your site. Overall, SEO can take a ton of time to fully learn and understand, but you can partner with an agency or SEO expert to help your site increase its visibility.
Rich Rudzinski, Drivey
Create Content About the Problems Your Startup Addresses
Rather than simply writing about what your product or service does, you should create content about the problems it addresses. Use Reddit, Quora, StackExchange, relevant forums and other similar sites to find all the different issues the target users of your product face. Then create content pieces around these issues and outline how your product helps solve these issues. Writing about problems your product addresses, rather than just explaining what your product does, will help your content appear when users are searching for their problems in Google and should untimely lead to more user signups.
Max Peters, Technical SEO Consulting
Funnel Traffic Through the Right Social Media Platforms
Everyone knows this, but not everyone does it properly. How do you actually leverage social media for a startup’s visibility? Choose a priority channel. Most people tend to go for every social media platform, dispersing efforts that may not even be targeting the right audience.
Choose between Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. FB tends to be used more frequently by older generations and is a great place for cultivating a strong community through groups. It’s the only social media platform where ads make sense. Users in the remaining platforms tend to disregard them. Instagram is good for targeting millennials. You can build and solidify your business’s branding, which is important when improving its digital footprint. TikTok’s greatest advantage is the potential it gives for natural growth. The target audience is Gen Z. Posting consistently ensures growth, and there’s a chance your content goes viral.
All in all, research the platforms but remember to prioritize which ones you utilize.
Nicole Ostrowska, Zety
Offer Guest Blogs
Content marketing is a must for any business growing a digital footprint. But when you’re first starting out and resources are limited, a crowdsourcing approach is the way to go.
Guest blogs give you tons of ready-made content to share, plus it builds instant brand awareness. You’ll get tons of backlinks from guest bloggers and their audiences, which will grow your domain authority and generate traffic to your website. It can also help you expand your professional network, another key to brand growth. People are more likely to care about your brand and take notice when you have something (like guest blogging opportunities) to offer them in return.
Alli Hill, Fleurish Freelance
Create an Elaborate Founder Profile Page for Your Website
When you’re just starting out and your brand name might not mean a thing to many, growing your personal brand can be a very successful strategy. A great way to stand out is to create a founder profile page on your website with your basic information, biography, headshot, things you are passionate about, and a list of topics you have expertise in and can comment upon.
Make it clear that you are open to giving comments to journalists, and make it easy for a journalist to contact you for comments (even outside of business hours in case of breaking news). Make sure you’re active on social media (wherever your industry favors) and, last but not least, just be yourself.
Amie Sparrow, Enough Digital Ltd.
Create Video Content With Compelling Storylines
Creating video content is one strategy to improve your startup business’s digital footprint and increase visibility online. Video content can help you reach more people than other types of content, and it allows you to tell your story in a way that is much more engaging than text alone. This can be especially important if you have a complicated product or service that isn’t easy to explain, as videos are excellent at demonstrating how something works and showing off the benefits of using it.
Video content also has the added benefit of being highly shareable on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which means that if you create high-quality videos with compelling storylines, they will spread far beyond your audience and reach new customers who might not otherwise have seen your brand before now.
Tiffany Homan, Texas Divorce Laws
Draw from Your Competitors to Create Your Own Plan
Investigating your competitor’s strategies can help your startup business’s digital footprint so that you are always able to plan around their strategy and take yours to the next level. Competitors aren’t always a bad thing- their strategies can inspire you to increase visibility online by building off their ideas and thinking outside the box.
There are lots of ways to research competitors by checking search result rankings, signing up for their email marketing campaigns, and watching how they get follower engagement over social media. There are also tons of online platforms that can break this down on a more technical scale such Ahrefs, where you can research your competitor’s search results rankings.
Todd Jensen, Nursa
Collaborate With Influencers in Your Niche
If your business is just starting out and you want to increase visibility, consider collaborating with like-minded influencers. An influencer collaboration can be more fruitful if you find someone who shares the same core values as your brand. This way, the collaboration is more seamless and you can reach an audience who is truly interested in what you have to offer. Remember, a small but impactful increase in visibility can work to your advantage more than you know; so make sure to choose the right influencers to collaborate with.
Benoit Lacroix, Portmoni
Focus on a Brand Personality of Your Startup to Reach Out
Focus on the personal brand of a key decision maker within the start-up. By contributing to thought leadership through media relations, focussing on the social presence of the CEO, and organizing meaningful industry discussions, start-ups can minimize spend, build trust within their industry, and build advocates more easily through genuine community engagement. At the end of the day – people like to engage with people, that’s why the decision makers behind the world’s most successful start-ups are known, admired, and listened to.
Dan Simpson, The Remote Marketer
Use Best Practices to Rank Well on Google
If you want to rank well on Google, you should consider E-A-T content: Expertly written, Authoritative, and Trustworthy.
First, it’s important to make sure that your content is well researched and thoroughly edited with factual information, proper grammar, and strong readability. Your audience should be able to tell that you know what you’re talking about and that you’re an authority on the subject.
Second, your content should be trustworthy. This means being transparent about any potential biases you may have and ensuring that your information is accurate and up-to-date. Ideally, you can also attribute the content to an expert in the subject matter.
Finally, it’s important to remember that E-A-T marketing is just one piece of the puzzle. In order to truly succeed, you need to focus on creating a well-rounded marketing strategy that includes a variety of different tactics. By keeping these things in mind, you’ll be on your way to E-A-T-ing the competition’s market share.
Ryan Draving, Muhlenhaupt + Company
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