If you want to reach beyond your existing network of followers, clients, and customers, you first have to make yourself known to new audiences. To do this, it’s essential that you establish a strong social media and search engine presence, and create valuable online content that inspires audiences and aligns with their personal needs and values. Through this process, it’s more likely that people from outside of your network will come to know, understand, and feel connected to your brand.
The value of a strong online presence
All over the world, every day, people are spending money online. The internet is vast, and competition among online businesses is fierce. In order to succeed in this limitless virtual space, you must develop an attractive, engaging, and persuasive online presence.
This starts with building a great website, which should be:
Functional and easy to use, so that anyone who browses it is untroubled by broken links, slow loading speeds, and complicated navigation.
Optimized for mobile browsing, so that it doesn’t just look good on desktop computers, but also on phones and tablets.
A surface with clear calls to action (CTA), so that users know how to take steps to engage with you (e.g., “Buy now” CTA buttons).
Above all, a quality website should be developed specifically to meet the needs, wants, and tastes of your target audience: Your website should look like the things they like, read like the things they read, and provide them with the content they like to consume. Once you build a website like that, your goal is to make sure the right people see it.
Maximizing your visibility on search engines
To make sure your website is seen by a wider audience, it must be optimized for search. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring that, when your target audience looks online for something related to your business, they’re more likely to see your website because it’s listed high on the search engine results pages (SERP).
You can optimize your website in three key ways:
Technical SEO. Make sure the website meets the technical demands of modern search engines—Squarespace websites, for example, come with built-in SEO that you can improve upon further with SEO best practices.
On-page SEO. Optimize individual pages so that they rank higher for specific audience searches—for example, writing a product description or blog post that’s rich with the keywords your target audience uses when they search for solutions.
Off-page SEO. Generate links to your website elsewhere on the internet—like getting a review of your products or services on another website with a direct backlink to your own website.
Search engine optimization practices like these will also help your business to develop its reputation with your target audiences. That’s because a website that has been optimized is well-built, easy to use, looks good, reads well, and is filled with targeted, regularly updated content.
The importance of social media
Billions of people use social media, so businesses that focus on their social media activity can potentially reach highly targeted audiences across the globe. If you’re wondering how to increase reach beyond your existing customer base and how to turn followers into customers, it’s vital that you invest some time and effort on your social strategy.
Using calls to action to drive traffic
One of the great things about social media is that it can be used to guide your social followers towards specific pages of your website. For example, you could post a short clip of a product unboxing video on a social media page with a call to action (CTA) that tells the viewer to “go to our website for the full video.” You can then embed the full video on your website on the product page. This tactic will help your audience learn more about a product, then drive them directly to the page where they can buy it, which helps to convert followers into customers.
Building customer relationships
Social media is also a space where you can interact with followers, enabling you to develop one-to-one dialogs with people far beyond your existing network. You can reply to their comments. You can message them directly. On some platforms, you can even collaborate on posts with them, which is mutually beneficial because it expands the reach of both of your accounts. By developing a community of followers based around your brand, you can create a close virtual relationship between your business and your target audience.
As you explore each social medium, you’ll see which audience demographics are most active on them—Gen Xers and older Millennial audiences, for instance, might prefer the more established platforms, whereas younger Millennials and Gen Zs engage more with emerging social media.
When using social media, don’t forget to help your target audience to find and follow you by using post features such as:
Hashtags: A metadata tag prefaced by the hash symbol, a hashtag enables cross-referencing of a topic. For example, if you add #yourspecificproduct to your posts, anyone searching for #yourspecificproduct will be served all posts featuring that hashtag.
Geotags: Adding a geographical identifier that identifies where each of your posts were published from will tell relevant social media users that you are in their vicinity. This is useful if, for example, you run a localized special offer, or if your online business has also established a brick-and-mortar location.
Both of these types of tags act as identifiers for your content, making it much more easily searchable and locatable.
Learn more about creating content that helps to grow your audience with A Guide to Creating High-Quality Content.