How To Improve Online Presence with a Virtual Receptionist
- February 3, 2016
In the modern digital era, having an online presence is crucial for businesses of all sizes. The internet has revolutionized how consumers shop and interact with businesses. A solid online presence is vital for building brand awareness, reaching potential customers, and driving sales. 20.8% of retail purchases are projected to occur online in 2023, showing that e-commerce sales will also increase.
Therefore, with more online customers, businesses will sell more and earn more. Besides, global e-commerce is projected to total $6.3 trillion in 2023 and $ 8.1 trillion by 2026. Online presence refers to the numerous digital channels businesses use to build and maintain a presence on the Internet. This includes social media profiles, online directories, social media profiles, and other digital platforms.
A solid online presence can help your business build brand awareness, reach new customers, and establish trust and credibility with its audience. In this guide, we’ll look at how to improve online presence and ways to do it best with a virtual receptionist. Let’s dive in!
Benefits When You Improve Online Presence
You’ve probably made several purchase decisions based on a Google search. You could’ve picked a store based on online reviews or even chosen an item over another because it looked more reliable online.
That’s how powerful an online presence is to your business, and if not managed well, it can be a deal breaker. So, the more presentable and robust your business looks online, the more likely customers will trust you. Besides taking care of your clients, there are more reasons to have a solid online presence.
It Does the Marketing and Branding for You
A strong online presence is a passive marketing stream for your business. Social media engagement and customer reviews can serve as sales enablers. Besides, your online presence assists customers in becoming familiar with your brand. A social media profile and a website help build a visual identity that potential customers can recognize and trust.
Makes Your Business More Accessible
Did you know that even if your business doesn’t sell anything online, a positive-only presence can help you sell more offline? So, your business can cost you customers or even leave them to your competitors by not being active online. Generally, people search for products and businesses before making a purchase decision.
It’s, therefore, a rule of thumb that you’re where your prospective clients are looking for you. Also, aspects like social networks and dynamic search algorithms are powerful in making it seamless to find different businesses online. Clients get information online; a search engine is an invaluable data source.
Makes Your Business More Credible
A strong online presence is vital to make your business more legitimate. For small businesses and startups, it’s often difficult to be recognized as a legitimate and valid entity in their early stages. Therefore, a solid online presence is the first step towards ensuring people take you seriously.
It’s hard for clients to trust a business if they don’t find your information online. Therefore, as a startup, you must ensure a strong presence on all online platforms where prospective clients are looking for you.
Provides Better Understanding of Your Audience
A strong online presence implies a two-way communication channel with your audience to gain insightful reviews or feedback. In addition, it allows you to better understand your prospective clients and what they want. For instance, through polls on a Facebook page, a store can identify what products or offers resonate better with their clients.
Helps Target a Wider Audience
Improving your online presence eliminates the constraints of physical borders. With a strong online presence, you can promote your products and services to global needs according to your business expansion plans and needs. You only need a strong digital marketing strategy and a planned business model to serve your clients.
In addition, being online also allows your business to earn trustworthiness and credibility in the industry and attract more business partnerships. It also allows you to reach your mobile customers, a fast-growing market recently. This can help you explore more business opportunities and increase your reach and revenue.
Can Increase Your Revenues
The most obvious advantage of improving your online presence is that it assists you in increasing your revenues by leveraging all the available digital channels.
Improve Your Online Presence by Identifying Weaknesses
Like any business, your company does some things perfectly and sometimes falls short in some areas. For instance, you may do well in distribution but constantly grapple with replying to customer complaints in real life.
Conversely, you may have a sturdy marketing message but lag in social media presence. Whatever the case, every business should focus on its strengths and weaknesses; otherwise, it risks falling victim to unrealized opportunities or losing to its competitors.
Review Your Website
Your website is a crucial representation of your business. That’s why monitoring your website is crucial to ensure it is attractive and well maintained, especially to customers and investors. Checking your website regularly for any concerns will keep it relevant and updated. You should always consider the website design and user experience, check the content, scan for technical issues, view your website on mobile, and focus on the data.
Analyze Your Social Media Profiles
By analyzing social media profiles across multiple channels, your business can identify the features of their products and services people like and which aspects of the services or brand may require improvement. This can also help beat the competition as the business will understand what approaches other businesses are doing better and assess the areas of the market where they may leverage.
Improve Your Online Presence with a Virtual Receptionist
A virtual receptionist is a trained customer service professional who comprehends the ideal way to represent the brand. In a nutshell, a virtual receptionist is a trained individual who answers all your business calls and handles clients on your behalf from an off-site location. Moreover, they can provide 24/7 customer service, answer questions, process orders, schedule appointments, and provide info about products/ services.
A virtual receptionist can also help manage social media accounts, respond to customer reviews, and provide customer service through chat services. They can also help keep businesses organized by managing calendars, tracking customer info, and automating tasks.
Optimize Your Content
Optimizing your content means ensuring that you write the content in a way that it can reach the largest possible target audience. The process involves including the associated keywords and adding relevant links, Meta, and title tags. The main reasons for content optimization include the following:
- Educate an audience
- Earn links
- Rank on search engine results pages, SERPs
- Increase lead generation
- Increase top of the funnel leads
- Drive social engagement
- And more
Craft Quality Content
Quality should always be your primary priority when it comes to content creation. Search engines consider value quantity when ranking websites and it significantly influences your audience and clients. The core of quality content includes originality, readability, voice, relevance, timelessness, grammar, and spelling. To write quality content, you should focus on the following:
- Write better headlines
- Make the story more meaningful
- Consult subject matter experts
- Be a thought leader
- Keyword research
- Include internal and external links
Optimize Content for Search Engines
If you want your website to rise the ranks to the top of SERPs, you should follow the following suggestions:
- Publish relevant and authoritative content
- Update your content regularly
- Use metadata
- Have a link-worthy site
- Use quality backlinks
- Use alt tags on the images and video media
Final Thoughts on How to Improve Online Presence
When you improve online presence, you are better able to market and brand your business, make it more accessible and credible, and help you target a wider audience as you increase your revenues, among other benefits. You can – and should – use a virtual receptionist to improve your online presence. They are trained professionals who can provide 24/7 customer service, answer questions, process orders, schedule appointments, and provide info about products/ services.
Click here to learn more about how a virtual receptionist can help improve online presence. If you want more information, contact us and get started.