A business’ digital footprint is the complete expression of it’s brand online. This includes everything that you’ve said—or that others have said—about your business/brand anywhere on the internet. You could think of managing your digital footprint as online reputation management. Everything from content you’ve created and strategically disseminated to comments and reviews posted by people you’ve never met, your digital footprint is your brand’s online reputation and something that needs to be prioritized in a successful digital marketing strategy.
Are you surprised by what you see? Ideally, a direct search on your company name should return your own branded content on at least the first full page of results. Hopefully you’re seeing results like your company’s neatly indexed website, social media profiles, presence in online directories and review sites, as well as, in an online magazine.
Some results may pleasantly surprise you, such as a loyal customer praising your company on their own social media channels, but what should you do if the results look different than the ideal? Perhaps you’re seeing a few inaccurate directory listings or stray bits of outdated info such as an old address or telephone number. Or maybe you’re seeing your company named on a review website you’ve never even heard of! While we hope the latter is not the case, we do see this more often than you may think.
Online Brand Management
Essentially managing your business’ digital footprint is brand management and its the most important thing within your marketing portfolio. When you ran your Digital Footprint Snapshot report and your business is averaging a B or above you are in sufficent shape, but anything below that needs a plan to revive your business’ digital footprint.
In traditional brand management, a business owner wouldn’t dream of ignoring their brand’s reputation in the physical marketplace so why do some businesses ignore their brand identity online?
VSmith Media works with clients to ensure that all the information about them online is an accurate representation of their product or services.
Our plan starts with finding any inaccuraces and updating them efficiently and proactively.
Depending on the size and quality of your digital footprint, there may be some things you can do right away to improve and expand your digital presence. But there are other things you could (or should) be doing to improve your digital footprint that require subject matter expertise—such as SEO—that you may need our help with right away.
I have the expertise you need to conduct a thorough assessment of your company’s digital footprint and help you successfully manage your brand reputation online.
Starting Digital Footprint Management:
Now that you know more about what a business digital footprint is and how it occurs, you can actually use this information to your benefit. From remarketing to social media marketing, it’s now easier than ever to target an audience looking for information related to your business.
Before anything else, you should know that the end goal of every marketing campaign is increasing business revenue through your website. This means you need exactly two things:
- Landing pages that are primed to convert
- Website traffic
I put them in that exact order because there’s no point in having website traffic if you’re not converting them into clients, readers, customers, or whatever noun you want to use. It’s also a good idea to have the next few items:
- Email marketing (newsletter, discounts, etc)
- Search engine marketing (AdWords)
- Social media marketing (and a strong presence)
I wish I could say it’s as simple as simply starting up a Facebook and Instagram page. No matter what type of service you are using to get people to your website, you have to be there when they’re looking for you, they’re having a problem and your service or product solves that problem, or you offer them a solution to a problem they never knew they had in the first place (i.e. making their life a bit easier).
For example, I’m assuming, if you’re reading this article on business digital footprint then, you’re either interested in starting up a campaign or having a need support managing your digital footprint.
The purpose of this post is to be informative and offer you a solution to your problems.
The Customer Journey and its Benefits
While we feel like we covered a lot of information, it’s really just the beginning of digital footprints. Nearly everything you can think of is part of having a digital footprint:
- Owning a website
- Organizing a conversion funnel
- Climbing the ranks of your favorite search engines
- Engaging with your audience on social media
- Constructing an email campaign
- Keeping your blog updated and fresh
As you can probably tell, there’s a lot to digital footprint marketing. Now that you know more about it though, you can formulate and start your own digital footprint campaign.