Online Presence Management: Building Your Brand Online – Online presence management allows business owners to increase brand awareness and positively influence customer engagement with a robust digital footprint.
In recent years, a new term to describe how an individual or business stands out in the online environment has become popular. Called “online presence management”, or OPM, this practice combines several distinct components to present your brand to the world.
Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of confusion about what online presence management is, how it works, and how it is different from other approaches. In this guide, we will explore online presence management, giving you everything you need to know about leveraging this strategy to create a visible and powerful business online.
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What is Online Presence Management?
Online presence management is the process of putting your individual or professional brand in front of the people who matter most: your target market. OPM draws strategies from a variety of digital marketing and reputation management disciplines with the goal of creating powerful brand awareness in the digital environment.
OPM helps individuals and businesses stand out in search engines results; when applied correctly, it ensures placement in the top rankings of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. More importantly, presence management helps to shape public perceptions of your brand’s identity and values. Ultimately, this process allows you to define yourself in the digital environment, bringing traffic right to your door.
Why Your Web Presence Matters
Let’s face it: the internet is a challenging place to do business. With billions of web pages to sort through, how can you stand out from the crowd?
In the modern business environment, visibility in online searches is a critical aspect that helps bring customers to you. If your brand doesn’t have great visibility, you may be missing out on business opportunities. Even worse, poor visibility in search results may mean that your potential customers are finding your competitors first, shutting you out of business growth.
Still not convinced of the importance of online presence management? Consider the advantages individuals and business owners can leverage when embarking on an OPM campaign:
- With OPM, a visible public profile can help you reach larger audiences, expanding your customer base
- OPM improves accessibility, allowing customers to reach you directly
- OPM improves engagement, an important consideration when turning potential customers into actual customers
- OPM serves as an extension of your advertising and digital marketing efforts by providing “free” advertising across online channels
- OPM increases brand awareness, helping others to learn about you and what you stand for
- OPM boosts revenue streams by giving people the knowledge they need to make purchasing decisions with your company
In the highly-competitive digital environment, any advantage you can gain over your competitors directly translates into greater revenue and market penetration. As a strategy to build your brand, online presence management serves as a pathway toward success.
Online Presence Management vs. Online Reputation Management
If you’re at all familiar with online reputation management, or ORM, you may be wondering, “how is online presence management different from reputation management?”
While these two strategies are very similar in many respects — and often have the same ultimate goal — there is one important distinction.
The main difference between online presence management and online reputation management is that OPM is concerned with building brand awareness for the purposes of increasing visibility for your target audiences, while ORM focuses on developing a positive digital reputation to increase trust between you and others.
Reputation management is an extremely important part of OPM — after all, a positive digital presence is even more beneficial to helping you to achieve your personal or professional goals. In a later section, we’ll illustrate how reputation management serves as a critical component of a robust OPM campaign.
Components of Online Presence Management
Online presence management consists of numerous parts all working together to help you and your particular brand stand out online. Think of OPM as a roadmap for establishing your online profile, then getting your story in front of others.
Online presence management includes:
Web Property and Content Development
An online portfolio of digital properties helps to establish yourself in the online environment. Obviously, your company or personal website is the central focus of this part of the OPM campaign, helping you to share relevant information with your target audiences. A business website is not the only valuable web property, however; personal blogs, niche sites, and galleries can all help you expand your digital footprint to increase awareness of your brand.
The OPM process combines web design with content development. In simple terms, your web design sets the first impression, while the content you create helps to share important details about you or your company.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
The best website in the world is useless if no one can find it in search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of using on-page and off-page factors to improve search engines’ ability to accurately categorize and index your web properties, helping them to stand out in digital searches. In simple terms, search engine optimization helps Google get a better understanding of what your site is about, allowing them to include your site in relevant search results.
SEO may include a variety of strategies, including targeted keywords and key phrases, web codes, image optimization, and external links from authoritative resources like directory listings or industry journals. In all, SEO helps you to reach a wider audience, drawing traffic to your personal or business website.
Presence on social media platforms
In today’s connected digital world, social media profiles have taken center stage as some of the most crucial elements of your digital presence. Creating social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn all help you reach new audiences and connect in innovative ways. Your presence on these platforms also provides opportunities for social media marketing, directing targeted advertising to your followers. Link sharing on these platforms gives you even more channels with which to share the content you developed for your website or blog.
As a marketing strategy alone, having profiles on every popular social network can help you drive business growth while improving awareness of your unique brand.
Content marketing
When you publish content to your website or add a blog post to your personal or company blog, you are embarking on an important presence management process called content marketing. Content marketing gives you the power to expand your online presence by sharing the details people need to make informed purchasing decisions. Content marketing includes the ability to manage content based on topic, audience, and goals. You may also incorporate email marketing into your content strategy, helping to improve awareness of the products and services that differentiate you from your industry competitors.
Reputation management
Online, your web reputation is perhaps the most valuable intangible asset you can have. A positive digital reputation helps to establish and reinforce consumer trust and is an intrinsic part of a long-term positive presence. Your good reputation is based on a wide range of factors, including positive reviews, online mentions, and favorable news articles.
By contrast, a bad reputation is the result of a less-than-favorable customer experience, which often leads to negative reviews, negative comments on social channels, or negative feedback on third-party review sites.
With rep management, you can control the online narrative while shaping the public perception of you, your brand, and your business online.
Digital marketing
Online presence management is a form of online marketing, that helps you to stand out on the internet with a robust and visible personal or business brand. OPM supplements the power of traditional digital advertising tools like pay-per-click (PPC) ads, email marketing initiatives, and social media marketing.
Getting Help with Online Presence Management
Unlike big brands, small businesses may not have the personnel or the experience needed to get the most out of online presence management. If that’s the case, you may benefit from hiring an OPM professional to assist you.
OPM services often include a wide range of tailored services to help you establish, build, and maintain a positive digital presence. These services may include:
- Management of digital reputations
- Inclusion in directory listings
- SEO to help customers find you in Google searches
- Content development and marketing
- Review management, helping you encourage customers to leave glowing reviews while removing the bad reviews that are harming your reputation
- Internet marketing and other avenues for advertising
OPM is a powerful strategy to help you stand out in competitive marketplaces. This strategy pays big dividends, with a great return on investment for small business owners. Can your business afford not to take advantage of this essential internet tool designed to put you in front of your audience in the best possible light?
Contact NetReputation Today
Ready to supercharge your web presence? NetReputation can help.
Our team stands ready to assist you with proven strategies and results-driven methods that improve brand awareness, search visibility, and customer trust. We have helped thousands of clients with their online reputation needs since we first launched in 2014.
Contact NetReputation today at 844-461-3632 or fill out the online form below to get started with a free consultation.
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by Net Reputation