Do you ever imagine what businesses were like before the internet?

Picture it for a second. 

The year is 1979. 

The first model of the Sony Walkman has just hit the shelves, and the cool kids are blasting disco beats on them. 

In the business world, rhythms follow the dial tone and the clicking of typewriter keys.

Communication with audiences happens through traditional phone calls, letters, faxes, and face-to-face meetings. Marketing revolves around media channels like television, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Sales are conducted through brick-and-mortar stores, catalogs, or direct sales representatives.  

Four years later, the internet is officially invented.

Over a decade passes. The business climate has changed. Many businesses have embraced the potential of reaching global audiences through the Internet. It has become an integral part of business operations.

As the years roll, the traditional ways of doing things alone no longer suffice. There is a growing need to merge old-school values with modern technology. This innovative shift leads to businesses developing websites and digital marketing strategies to build an online presence.

And here we are today in a world where businesses without an online presence are doomed to have lesser reach and impact.

Downsides of not having an online presence.

Your friend has just told you about a brand that sells products she swears can help with your age-long, anxiety-inducing, energy-sapping insomnia. 

Now, you’re curious, maybe even hopeful. You want to find out everything there is to know about this brand.

You do a quick Google search. You read a few reviews before searching for their website. Each page you visit either convinces you or turns you off.

You go a step further to search for the brand on social media—LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and the like.

What are you doing?

You’re seeking out ways to experience the brand’s collective existence and authenticity through its presence online. But what happens when this brand has zero online presence in this day and age?

For starters:

• Reduced credibility: ‘Is this brand really legit?’ will be the first question on your mind. 
• Reduced trust: ‘Can I trust them if no one else has heard about them or used their products with results to show?’ will be your next question.
• Competitive disadvantage: There is a high chance you’ll prefer their competition with an active online presence.
• Limited engagement: You can only engage with a brand with content for you to engage with, right?

Did you know that this is what your prospective client’s journey looks like? 

Survey shows that 87% of consumers start their product searches online. This finding implies that not having an online presence is a recipe for failure.

Apart from the downsides listed above, brands without an online presence also suffer:

• Missed marketing opportunities.
• Reduced visibility and accessibility.
• Ineffective branding.
• Poor customer insights.

4 Tips for building an online presence

Now you know how essential an online presence is, let’s get into some tips for building a powerful one for your brand that can impact your potential leads and stand the test of time.

1. Build a website

In the pre-internet world, businesses heavily depended on their physical presence and location. One of the ways to gauge a successful brick-and-mortar store in those days was its visibility, foot traffic, and accessibility to potential customers. 

In the post-internet world, things are different.

While location still plays a crucial role in attracting the target audience and competing with other local businesses, that alone won’t do if you want to build an online presence unlimited by space. 

This is where a website comes into play.

Think of a website as your unique space on the internet where you showcase your products, services, unique selling proposition, brand personality, and stories. It’s your corner of the internet where you have full rights to show up and make an impression on potential clients.

Having a website is no longer a fancy strategy to have. It is a necessity you can’t do without—little wonder 71% of businesses have a website today.

If you don’t already have a website, you are missing out on a unique opportunity to build an online presence, and now would be a perfect time to build one.

Some tips for maximizing your online presence through your website include:

• Adopt a professional and user-friendly design: unprofessional websites with little or no consideration for user experience can be a counterproductive turn-off for your website visitors. 
• Social media integration: this integration helps your website visitors easily access your other social media pages through your website.
• Encourage feedback and reviews: People tend to engage more with brands that show social proof. 

2. Get active on social media.

Business owners from the sixties would never have believed the potential for global reach business owners have today. They only had television and radio, print media, local presence, and word of mouth. 

And guess what? It was a big deal. It still is.

I doubt they could have conceived the possibility of reaching over 5.04 billion people from the comfort of their homes. Thankfully, that possibility is your reality today. 

With more than half the world—62.3%(5.04 billion people)— using social media today, there is no telling how powerful an online presence you can build through active participation on social media. 

Depending on your brand offering, you can create strategies for reaching your audience through social media channels like LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, X, and Facebook, among others. These are the cool spots where your audience hangs out, and if you want to build your brand image and showcase its authenticity, you must hang out in these places, too.

3. Invest in SEO

More often than not, your potential may not know your brand enough, or at all, to search for it specifically. But they will be searching nonetheless. 

These searches start as keywords or phrases—typically describing their problems or the solutions they seek— typed into search engines. The good thing is you can anticipate your audience’s search intents, optimize your websites, and boost the chances of it being displayed by search engines as the best possible matches to search queries. 

One essential strategy for building an online presence is to pay attention to SEO—on-page and off-page. 

On-page SEO will require you to create valuable content infused with well-researched keywords. On the other hand, off-page SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website, like page load speed, backlink building, and guest posting.

4. Create content

Ever heard the saying, ‘Money makes the world go round?’

Well, it’s true. But I’d also like to add that in today’s world, content makes the world go round, too. 

As cliche as it sounds, content is king. 

Without quality content, your hands are tied as far as building an online presence is concerned. There is no way around it. You must create content consistently if your goal includes building a brand that audiences can relate to. Thankfully, you have several channels through which to distribute your content. 

Top of the list is your blog page. 

The first thought that comes to mind when I stumble on a brand’s blog page that has been dormant for a while is:

“Maybe, just maybe, they are out of business.”

And maybe it’s not just me who thinks this way. Maybe it is potential leads, too.

Think of it this way.

Your blog is like the rotor in an electric motor. It is normal for all the other parts of the machine to remain statutory. But the rotor? That has to keep moving, or else you can expect some malfunction. 

It is okay if your home page content stays the same for a while. The same goes for your Contact Us and About Us pages. Your blog page, on the other hand, has to keep rotating like a rotor.

Regular blog posting can do a lot for your brand:

• Build trust.
• Establish thought leadership.
• Search engine optimization.
• Engagement and conversions.
• And, of course, build an online presence.

But beyond all these, a consistently updated blog page also says:

“Hello, world! Our brand is still alive and kicking!”

You should also create customized content for your social media channels. You should note that what works for one channel may not work for another. This is where the studying-testing-and-adjusting approach becomes very vital.

The world is your oyster.

Look around you. You’re running a business at a time pre-internet owners could only dream of. 

The world is your oyster.

You’re not limited by time or space. You can build a powerful online presence that can impact a global audience from your small corner of the world. You’ll be doing your brand a great disservice if don’t take advantage of the many opportunities the internet holds for your business.