Stop with us for a second and answer: what would you have done 10 years ago to develop your business's digital presence if you knew what the world would be like today?
The internet has revolutionized humanity. It's not too much to say that there was a world before the internet and there is another one now, after it.
The way of relating to people, the methods of sharing knowledge and ways of buying and selling, among many other habits, have been drastically altered by the web.
And nobody was prepared for that.
Today, however, you know the importance of having a clear and well-defined digital positioning, don't you?
Being on websites, social networks and blogs no longer makes sense and, moreover, has proven to be a real waste of time and money.
Maybe 10 or 5 years ago, you didn't know that it was necessary to have a strong digital presence to be well positioned in the market. Now you know.
More than that, it understands that there is a large volume of knowledge and expertise available to apply in your business with great assertiveness.
Couldn't start your digital job a few years ago. However, today you have this awareness and certainly your future self will be proud that you started now.
If you've come this far with the idea that only a miracle can change your company's scenario, let's help you demystify that.
We will show you how it is possible to create a strong digital presence that brings real results, turning water into wine, but without miraculous methods.
With smart strategies and a lot of knowledge, it is possible to position yourself properly on the internet.
Let's understand how this works? So, follow along with us!
- What is digital presence
- The role of digital presence in online marketing
- Digital presence: frequently asked questions
- How an agency can help improve your business's digital presence
- Where to request a quote to improve your online presence
What is digital presence
Briefly, we can define digital presence as the participation of people and brands in internet environments, such as websites, blogs, social networks and others.
For companies, it is fundamental to conquer virtual territories in an intelligent and strategic way, generating results for the business.
So, you need to know the audience, create relevant conversations and direct people to actions that are aligned with Marketing objectives — which can be, for example, a purchase or registration.
The role of digital presence in online marketing
You may have heard of the conceptualization that Philip Kotler and other theorists did, categorizing Marketing from 1.0 to 4.0.
Basically, it is about changing the focus of companies, from the product to human connections:
| Evolution | Focus |
| Marketing 1.0 | Products |
| Marketing 2.0 | Consumer Rights |
| Marketing 3.0 | Human values |
| Marketing 4.0 | Connections and Collaboration |
Without extending the subject too much, we can say that, at the beginning of industrialization, factories produced the maximum number of products because there was a large unmet demand. So it was easy to sell whatever was produced.
Over time, competition increased and only material delivery was no longer enough. Companies began to accelerate their sales processes, focusing on the consumer to empty inventories.
But the customer, after all that, became more attentive. With the wide range of products and services, he can choose based on his own human values. The brands, then, began to make deliveries in line with the high expectations of consumers.
Finally, we reach the stage where the market is at its peak of maturity. Companies and customers are consolidated and, in this sea of competitors, those who manage to create close connections with people stand out.
In that time span, we are talking about more than 100 years — a period in which the world turned upside down with these changes and the emergence of the internet.
In Marketing 1.0, the physical presence of companies was a crucial factor for business development. After all, customers shopped where it was easiest to get to, right?
But after all this revolution, buyers expect brands to be easily located from anywhere in the world.
Thus, the digital presence becomes the key element of business success.
Digital presence: frequently asked questions
In this context, current times require brands to create and strengthen their positioning in virtual environments.
According to the recent OECD report, “e-commerce in Brazil has not reached the full potential of a market of 107,5 million adult internet users”.
That is, there is still a large volume of people that can be reached by your business. For this, of course, it will be necessary to position yourself and stand out on the web.
Want to know how? See below.
How to create digital presence?
Let's make a parallel with physical reality. If you want to open a store in your city, you need to at least carry out a feasibility study, right?
So, it will be necessary to evaluate the commercial points available, the neighborhood, the rent price, the access, the physical conditions of the space, the visibility of the property and other factors. Besides, it's crucial to be where your customers are, isn't it?
The same expertise must be done when a business wants to create its digital presence. This means that you need to evaluate different elements that can collaborate with the positioning of the brand on the web.
If you wouldn't open a company in a hidden, dangerous street and in a property without adequate physical structure and of dubious taste, don't do the same with your brand on the internet!
To position yourself virtually, you must choose the right mediums and carefully craft your digital strategy. Later on, we will go into detail about this.
How important is digital presence?
Remember we talked about the evolution of Marketing? Well, here we are back on topic.
In the past — and generally speaking — location and physical availability were essential for companies to develop markets. After all, the customer would go to the store and buy whatever was available.
Now, the same customer has any product or service just a click away. With a cell phone and internet, he has access to diverse items all over the planet that can be delivered to his door.
So, brands that previously needed to be physically well located, now must position themselves properly “on the corners of the internet”.
This means that businesses must be easily found and established in a way that they attract and retain the attention of the target audience.
But anyone who thinks that a digital presence is a requirement that only applies to those who want to sell online is wrong.
Second research carried out by the National Confederation of Shopkeepers (CNDL) and by the Credit Protection Service (SPC Brasil), “97% of respondents said they looked for information on the internet before buying in a physical store”.
That is, if your customer does not find your brand on the internet, he may not even continue the purchase journey in the physical store.
And between us: would you buy something yourself from a company you can't find good information about on the internet?
So, having a properly crafted digital presence is critical for today's brands, who want to attract and retain customers virtually and/or physically.
That is, digital positioning is an important task carried out by companies that follow the evolution of Marketing.
How to have an online presence?
As you may have noticed, the Marketing 4.0 talk we talked about right at the beginning is the basis for developing this whole topic. So let's get back to it.
If before the focus of the Marketing of the companies was the product and it starts to be the connections and the collaboration with the customers, the brands have a great challenge ahead.
In Marketing 1.0, the customer is just a buyer, who performs the task of acquiring a product or service.
With the evolution of Marketing, it becomes humanized and brands consider their needs, pains and desires.
The technological revolution brought several advantages to human relations and provided new means for communication — such as virtual social networks, messaging applications, chatbots and others.
But, at the same time, it robotized and “cooled” human contact between companies and their target audience.
So, in the Marketing 4.0, it is necessary to strengthen relationships between brands and people, generate real connections. This happens, in many cases, with a true collaboration that starts from organizations towards their target audience.
As such, businesses that want to develop a strong digital presence need to:
- Deeply understand your target audience — who they are, what they need, what they want, and more
- know where he is
- Deliver relevant content
- “Speaking the Language” of the Audience
Only with connections and collaboration with people will modern brands be able to position themselves properly on the internet.
How an agency can help improve your business's digital presence
We've already seen the concepts behind digital presence; now, let's understand how to put it into practice optimally.
Our focus will be on 2 central points:
- Understanding of target audience
Who is your audience? What are your consumption habits? How do they communicate? What do you expect from the brand? - Understanding of communication channels
What media is your target audience in? How to use them in the best possible way? What are the rules for using these channels?
These are the skills you need to develop a successful digital positioning strategy.
Next, we'll talk in detail about the main channels and how you can use them strategically.
Institutional website
The institutional website is your business card, your online office. Therefore, it needs to reflect the visual identity of your brand and, above all, have relevant information for the target audience.
Therefore, the web page must contain data such as:
- Products and services
- Contact: phone, email, profiles on social networks and others
- Physical address, if any
- Office hours
- Other relevant information about your company
Think like your target audience and answer: if they don't know anything about your company, what do they need to know from now on? Then enter that content.
Many companies do not take seriously the potential of institutional sites. But they can radically change your business numbers.
That's what happened to the FIT60, in an action held here at Crowd. The brand's main challenge was to show potential customers its unique work method.
After defining the target audience together with the agency, the company's institutional website was developed by Crowd using modern techniques, design aligned with the business's visual identity and key brand information.
According to Vinicius Rega, creator of the FIT60 method, the company reached the incredible result of an 85% increase in the number of customers since the site was launched in conjunction with paid media campaigns.
See how the FIT60 experience was:
Corporate blog
Have you ever thought about having a space entirely for your business to talk about matters related to it? Because the corporate blog is the right environment to deal with topics relevant to your brand's target audience.
Remember we talked about creating real connections with customers through collaborative actions? Publishing content of interest to your audience is an important step in sharing knowledge and, subsequently, generating conversation.
It is therefore necessary to plan, create and disseminate articles, images, videos and other materials that relate your offer to the needs and pain points of your audience.
Quite a lot of work that requires knowledge of readers, creation of content in different formats, optimization for search engines and distribution.
For this, Crowd provides an exclusive and complete service, which has thousands of professionals across the country.
QuinStreet, a performance digital marketing company, can prove and prove the effectiveness of this method of working.
With an intense demand for content, the organization turned to Crowd to organize the work and obtain the best results.
For Fernanda Hecht, the company's online media manager:
“The figure of a project manager to centralize all contact and the flow of production, revision and publication of articles was fundamental for us to choose Crowd as a partner.”
In about a year, Crowd produced more than a thousand pieces of content for the educational blogs of the Quin Street.
See what that experience was like:
Social networks relevant to the company's audience
Did you know that there are dozens of social networks around the world? Many of them have active users in the billions — like Facebook.
But not every channel is the most recommended for your brand. Therefore, you need to know where your target audience is and how they relate to these media.
B2C companies, for example, may have a good response on networks like Instagram and Facebook, while B2B brands may have better engagement on LinkedIn.
Understanding the audience and the channels was fundamental to José Salibi Neto, co-author of several books and speaker at JSN.
In a work of repositioning its image in digital media, Crowd planned and executed the professional's presence on social networks, with a focus on LinkedIn.
Salibi points out that, in addition to increasing the number of followers on his profile by about 6 times, Crowd's work was instrumental in increasing the fee for his lectures.
Thus, understanding the audience and the channels is essential for the digital presence to be strong and bring results to the business.
E-mail Marketing
Email is more alive than ever! In this sea of data, information, posts, photos, videos and so much other content, your lead's inbox can be a more receptive environment for your messages.
Second Radicati research, the probability of an internet user seeing a message sent by email is 5x higher than that sent by social networks.
In this sense, segmenting your audience and making a good email marketing strategy can be the solution to strengthen your brand's digital presence.
Google My Business
How many times have you looked up a local business phone number or office hours and couldn't find the data on the internet?
By inserting this and other information into Google My Business, virtual searches for brands can result in much more effective responses.
In addition to creating an objective and professional digital presence, the virtual space is a great place to collect customer opinions, with the possibility of bringing social proof and generating significant authority for the brand.
paid media
The attention of your target audience and the digital spaces where it is found are increasingly crowded.
In order to have more visibility in search engines and social networks, the use of paid media has become more relevant for brands.
Sponsored links, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and others become important investments to capture people's attention and lead them to the desired action.
A MindMiners knows well the importance of using this strategy. With Crowd, the technology company, specializing in digital research, bet on campaigns on Linkedin, Google and Facebook.
Even with a very specific niche audience, the brand had significant results in its sales funnel:
- 150% more website channel visits
- 50% increase in the number of followers on social media
- 50% more leads
See how MindMiners' experience was:
Building a strong digital presence is no miracle — count on Crowd
So far, you've understood what digital presence is, how important it is for business in today's market, and how it works in practice.
He also saw that understanding his target audience and conversation channels is fundamental to doing a well-done job of positioning on the internet.
But, knowing exactly where to advertise, how and when, requires technical and practical knowledge that, perhaps, is outside the reality of your business, isn't it?
In addition, all this work can require more time than you and your team have on a day-to-day basis.
This does not mean, however, that your brand needs to spend more time in obscurity, without having a relevant digital presence.
Remember the question we asked at the beginning of this text, about what you would like to do a decade ago if you knew how relevant the internet would be today?
About the past, not much can be done. You can change the future of your business by strategically positioning yourself on the web from now on.
So let's change the question: what should you do today to develop your business's digital presence so that it can be successful in ten years?
There is no magic or miraculous answer. However, with careful and strategic work, your brand can stand out on the internet starting today with Crowd.
For this, get to know all our web solutions. As a full service digital agency, Crowd offers services in Technology, Content, Media and Design.
From lead generation to sales, we have complete services that create and improve digital presence from small to large businesses.
Talk to us, learn about our offers and find out how we can help your business. Request a quote now.
