Starting Points for your Online Presence.

You’ve decided that it’s time to get serious about what you’re doing online. You have the opportunity to expand your business online. The internet can connect you directly to your perfect audience or customers, but there’s plenty others out there competing for the attention of those perfect customers.

Winston Churchill famously said during World War II “He who fails to plan is planning to fail.” — This remains true for our online pursuits as well. You want to break through the noise and make connections with your customers, to do this you need a plan.

So why do you need to take the web more seriously? What are you hoping to accomplish?

More Revenue?
More exposure?
More leads?
More likes on Twitbookstagram?
Your unique path to growing your online presence will depend on the specific thing you are hoping to do online. Finding more leads requires different actions than one who’s looking for more shares on facebook.

Now think about your customers. Where do they spend time online?
If you’re looking to target young mothers, you’re probably more apt to find them on pinterest than LinkedIn.
If you’re looking to target gamers, you may want to play around with Reddit.
Some demographics are large, and their populations will be spread throughout the entire internet, spending time in Facebook discussion groups, blog posts/comments/ forum posts or instagram.

Once you know who your customers are and where they spend their time online, you can begin creating opportunities to reach them.

While these opportunities actually look like may be a little different for everyone, there is a common denominator with every successful activity online.

You are offering something.

You could be selling auto parts to guys who want more control of whats under the hood.
You could be creating recipes for smoothies to contribute to healthier families.
You could be running a community of church youth ministers, looking to connect leaders for accountability and encouragement.

For every instance, there’s both a different offering as well as a different thing that a customer values. Though a manly car guy might find value in a recipe for a green smoothie, they are probably going to be drawn more to videos detailing a special technique to soup up their vehicle.

There’s no one way that works to gain momentum online.

You could hustle off-line and push people to certain parts of your website,
You could focus on creating content on your site that interest and help your customers through challenging situations.
You could focus on working with other businesses that work with your ideal customers and find ways to offer your service alongside that other business for access to their customer base.
You could focus entirely on increasing your presence in social media, engaging customers wherever they might be spending time online, and creating opportunities for customers to see your offering.

In order to succeed, you must find ways to be valuable to your ideal customers.

At 5 espressos, we offer web design and development services, as well as different forms of website management. There are a few different things i’m going to experiment with over these next couple months to see what works for this business. Some of these include:

1. Spend more time in social media, starting and contributing to conversations.
2. Create a few small resources and begin curating an email list.
3. Creating a newsletter that is both easy to digest and helpful for my customers.
4. Write content that’s actually useful for my ideal customers.

I’ll check in with what I’ve learned as I go. There’s a lot for me to learn too!

How do you plan to better reach your customers in the near future?

We’d love to hear all about it.