If you’re a new company and you want to thrive in your industry, the first thing you need to get ahold of is your brand identity.

If you’re a new company and you want to thrive in your industry, the first thing you need to get ahold of is your brand identity. Branding is one of the basic aspects of online marketing, but it’s also one of the most important, if not the most. What do you want your customers to think of when they hear or read your brand online? Most companies and entrepreneurs tend to lose focus on this matter, especially if they are eager to “get by” and make a name for themselves straightaway.

However, establishing your brand identity should not be overlooked as it would build the foundation for your future marketing endeavors.So as you go and build a website for your business, it’s imperative that you keep everything in line with your brand identity.

Securing your online presence through different channels

If you want your business to get noticed online, you’ll need more than just a website—you’ll need the help of social media pages, blogs and local directories too. This is where securing your account names, profiles and URLs come in.

After establishing and securing your brand and your domain name, the next thing to take into consideration is optimizing these channels in order to strengthen your online marketing presence. But creating accounts for these channels is not as easy as it seems. Creating a profile online now requires a unique and personal touch to them, such as coming up with the appropriate logos, design and banners. Once every detail is up and polished, your next target should be finding ways to make your social media pages, blogs and local directories visible to customers searching for your business.

Optimize your social media presence

Do you know how powerful social media is for brands and companies? According to research, 80% of social network users prefer to connect to brands through Facebook, while 85% of fans of brands on Facebook recommend them to others. Half of the total number of active Twitter users, on the other hand, follow accounts of companies, brands and products.

Social media sites also prove to be one of the most influential channels for customer acquisition, with 62% of businesses acquiring customers from LinkedIn, 52% from Facebook, and 44% from Twitter.

Here are some recommendations to help you optimize your social media presence.

• Use the proper cover, profile and background images for your profiles. To ensure that your social media profiles showcase your brand in the best light possible, it’s important that you integrate your branding (logo, icons, identifying color/s, etc.) in your photos, especially since your cover photo is the first thing that a user sees.
  

You may also want to stick to the recommended image dimensions for the different social media platforms.

• Provide users with easy-to-find links to your website and other social media profiles. One of the best ways to ensure that your cross-platform followers follow you as well on another social media platform is to direct them to it. Simply cross linking to your other social accounts will do the trick.

It will also be extra helpful if you add your site URL to your social media profiles. Doing this will improve your branding as it can help users identify your official pages over unofficial ones.

• Ensure your profile descriptions are consistent among your accounts. Maintaining consistency in your profile descriptions doesn’t mean that you need the verbatim description. Using majority of the same keywords among your profile descriptions will give a sense of uniformity and authenticity to your pages. Additionally, it will also help you rank in search engine results pages.

• Fill out every profile field with quality information. Completing every profile field may seem like an irrelevant matter, but doing this will improve your followers’ association with your brand by letting them know your exact insights, topics and goals.

Optimize your blog posts

Research shows that although 60% of businesses have blogs, 65% of them haven’t updated in the past year. These companies are missing out on the opportunities blogging can bring to their businesses!

Make sure your content gets the attention it deserves from your customers and search engines. Take your blog to the next level by applying these simple yet effective optimization practices:

• Make use of relevant keywords throughout your post. Knowing the right keywords is the first step to creating compelling content. Researching the proper terms to use for blog posts can allow you to identify the subjects that are driving the majority of searches in your industry. However, be careful not to engage in keywords stuffing—you don’t want to get penalized by Google for filling your content with a lot of keywords.

• Optimize the images used in your blog. Make sure that you also include keywords in the file names of your images, as well as keyword-rich, yet brief descriptions for them.

• Link your posts to other significant sites. When publishing a blog post, don’t be shy about including a link to other important pages, especially if you used their information to add value to your content. Doing this wouldn’t just provide readers an opportunity to explore more of your posts, but it may also allow you to receive a link back from these pages.

• Share your content using your social media accounts. Publish your content to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ profiles to help you maintain an active online presence in these channels.

• Allow readers to subscribe to your blog. To give your readers a chance to receive notifications whenever you publish new content for your blog, place RSS or Feed Subscription Buttons in a prominent area.

Optimize your listings on local directories

In online directories, 76% of searches result in a purchase, 62% in a business contact by phone, and 31% in an in-person business contact.

Optimizing your local listings will definitely improve your business’ ranking in local search results. The more your business is seen in the first pages of SERPs, the more likely users will click on your site with intent to purchase your product or service. To ensure you get good ranking in local searches, start by following these simple tips:

• Include your business’ NAP on directories. Search engines assign more authority to listings with accurate business names, addresses and phone numbers. Furthermore, make sure that your business listing has the same format across all major directories—this will help search engines determine high quality listings from the low quality ones.

• Fill out every field in your local places pages. Just as how search engines love social media pages with complete information, they are also fond of listings without empty sections.

• Encourage review publication on aggregate sites. Do not be afraid to ask your customers to leave a review, especially if you know that you provided them with great experience. These reviews play a very big role in getting your site to rank in local searches.

These are just some of the best practices that can be done to optimize your social media pages, blog and local listings, but in order to ensure your online presence is fully active within these channels, you may need to seek the help of someone with enough knowledge and proven optimization strategies.

Well, this is a lot work. Plus, this requires technical and design expertise. Busy business owners like you need to focus more pressing matters to grow your business.

Through our Brand Establisher services, we can claim, secure, design and optimize for you your YouTube, Blogger, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook accounts, as well as accounts for other local directories, social network and blog sites even if you are not yet ready to aggressive on an online marketing campaign.

Aside from setting up these accounts, we are also loaded with the right optimization and design techniques that will definitely help you establish your brand!

Sign up now for a free consultation!