You know your business offers great services and incredible products, but how do you spread the word and expand your reach? The answer is building a better online presence, and it’s accomplished by understanding how social media marketing and digital marketing work together to increase brand awareness. Here’s a breakdown of a few of the most essential marketing tactics to expand your reach online:

It all starts with your website. You need a hub where your customers and prospects can find out everything they need to know about your brand and products. We recommend employing the help of a professional web designer to build you an effective website, since it will be your first impression on many browsing customers. A good web designer can make your site visually pleasing and eye-catching, which will help keep visitors on your page and encourage them to make a purchase or contact you for more information. Our in-house Creative Labs designers can help you build a fully functional e-commerce website that pulls product information directly from ESP – no maintenance required! You can learn more about our ESP Website services here.

Once you have a website you can link your other digital marketing assets to, it’s time to shift your focus to social media marketing. You don’t have to open a business page on every single social media platform, but it’s good to start with at least two (consider the most widely used in our industry: Facebook and Instagram). Social media offers an incredible opportunity to humanize your business and connect with your audience in a more personal way. Try not to be overly salesy in your social media approach – customers will be more interested in the story of your business, the behind-the-scenes of your day-to-day operations or how your products can help them solve a challenge they face. You want to post and engage frequently on your pages to show you’re an active and trustworthy business partner.

Next, you’ll want to focus on two very important aspects of your digital marketing strategy: SEO (search engine optimization) and paid search advertising. This can be a complex portion of your online presence to tackle alone, so we recommend enlisting the help of local SEO experts or hiring a consultant. SEO is adjusting how your website appears on search engine result pages so you can get found more frequently by searching customers. Paid search advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads, display within search results as sponsored listings and can also help bring more awareness to your products and services.

The last portion of your digital marketing strategy you should consider is content marketing, which is building educational resources that are relevant and useful to your customers. Whether they’re infographics, blog posts, journalistic articles or white papers, building effective content can help you boost your SEO efforts and get more customers to engage with your brand. Plus, it gives you incredible content to share across your social media pages! Need help creating this content? Most advertising agencies offer content marketing services, or you can hire freelance writers and designers to do the legwork for you. There are also apps like Canva that can help even the most inexperienced designers build beautiful, eye-catching assets.

Your online presence matters, as the digital world is where most prospective customers will be introduced to your brand and products. You can start building a better online identity today! Need help? Contact your ASI account manager and they’ll let you know how we can assist.