Can your target market reach you online?

Most often, small businesses assume that organic search engine traffic with an excellent SEO campaign is all that is required to get the best results. For others, a combination of organic search traffic and various paid advertising like pay per click marketing will get the best results. However, these are not the only digital marketing methods you should use to generate targeted traffic that will convert into sales or leads.

If you have an online reputation management (ORM) strategy and campaign in place that you follow through, and if you are highly visible to your target market across the web, then that visibility and your good online reputation can deliver far more traffic than paid advertising and organic search could ever do. Having a good and trusted digital footprint online is worth gold and can directly influence your success online.

Are you visible enough?

With your own network, talk to a couple of people and they will each tell you that they have their own favourite websites and channels they visit frequently to consume and engage with content. Whilst social recommendations can play a major part in being found online, excellent service, products and user experience must always back it up. These “social” mentions can be formed with recommendations from a friend, through practical research, or because one particular company or brand stands out. When a company stands out online, you know that visibility is not a problem.

Are you visible so that your target market can reach you?

Online reputation management

Another way you can build more visibility online is with an online reputation management strategy, campaign and process. Many marketers online will tell you that ORM is only a way to counter negative comments and feedback online, but they are wrong. ORM can play an important role in building online credibility and at the same time make you more visible online so that your core target audience can find you. If you publish and promote magnetic content that pulls people in on a regular basis about your company, brand, services or products, these positive comments can flood the search engine result pages (SERP’s) with your awesome content.

Using various social media channels can also be used to increase your credibility online and it’s another way where you can make your name more visible. Social media provides you with the opportunity to market your business and your brand every time you go online. If you can increase your business/brand visibility, your target market will be able to reach you.

The key with any online reputation management strategy is knowing exactly what you want to achieve with one. Do you know what your current and passed sentiment is online? Are there any people talking about your business online? If there are, what are they saying? Start the whole process by doing a full analysis on your current digital footprint online.

After you have done this you can look for ways on how you can improve your footprint online by publishing content geared towards your target audience. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will only be text based content, but can also consist of other forms of content like videos, podcasts, infographics and other related rich media.