When working to build your business from the ground up, there are always things you don’t consider at the time, either because you’re blindsided by money or getting the right people on board, but it’s a natural part of the learning curve to drop the ball with something. What you might have greatly underestimated is that your business has a bad digital presence. We all know the importance of why a business needs an amazing presence via social media, video platforms, and the website, but we may not realize how our business is impacted. So, what are these negative impacts, and what can you do to rectify them?
Your Customers Struggle To Find You
Every company starts locally, and the best way to grow a business organically is to work at developing your presence in your immediate surroundings. If your customers struggle to find you, there are little things you can do at the very outset to ensure that your presence is felt online. Making sure that your online profiles are up-to-date only takes a few minutes, but it’s a great way to keep your customers abreast of any changes. Services like Yelp, Google My Business, as well as your social media pages need to be kept on top of.
You Are Not Up To Date
User experience has to be firmly rooted in the present. The best way to do this is to undertake an audit of your website and user experience in general. You can get an SEO company to help with this, but when looking at your brand as a whole, you need to look for gaping holes in your customer experience. For example, does the website load properly on mobile devices? You’d be surprised as to how many businesses don’t have a mobile-ready version. And if you’ve found it a fiddle to navigate a website that’s not mobile ready on your smartphone, then you’ll understand completely how important it is to have this aspect. A customer wants to be able to get in, find what they want, and get out without trouble. User experience is everything now.
Your Customers Don’t Know Where You Are
If you pride yourself on having a web chat box open so customers can find out information from a “human” voice, but it’s not clear as to whether you are online or not, or you’re not responsive enough in your emails or messenger posts, it can give the impression that there is nobody pulling the strings behind the operation. While the progression of virtual reality is doing a lot to improve the customer experience, right now, we’ve got to give an impression via our website and social media tools that we are operating, in effect, 24/7. Even if we’re not, we have to update our automated responses, so the customer’s expectations are managed.
An online presence doesn’t just boil down to these aspects, but if you’re looking to engage with the consumer and rely on their return custom, you have to ensure that your digital presence is far from poor.
