Marketing your business in the 21st century is a complicated thing. Gone are the days when marketing meant nothing more than printing out a few posters, or hoping that word of mouth would bring you in plenty of clients and customers. Modern businesses are now marketing themselves in more and more contemporary ways, thanks to the rise and rapid development of the internet. We now live in a world where gratification is instant, and this is the kind of speed consumers expect businesses to operate at. If you are not quick enough and are not using the right platforms online, you will soon find that your company ends up falling behind. This can have potentially devastating consequences, especially for startups, with many folding within the first couple of years. It is therefore of the utmost importance that you perfect your business’s online footprint, as this is the one thing that will always be with you. If a client decides to search your business directly, they expect you to do the hard work for them; explaining clearly what it is that you do, how you do it and how the service or product can work for them. Very few customers these days have the time to trawl through pages and pages of web copy just to find the snippet of information they are looking for. If it’s not there immediately, they will only move on to one of your competitors. This is the exact thing you cannot risk happening – so, with that in mind, here are a few tips on creating a clear and concise online footprint for your business.
Check that your website is functioning properly
How many times have you been sat on a website that is buffering for ages, before finally sighing and giving up on it entirely? Having a website is all well and good, but of course, you also need to make sure that it works! Many fledgling business owners make the mistake of thinking that the more they have on their website, the better; but this is not always the case. Of course, slow websites are largely down to the individual viewer’s server, not the website itself. But too many large images and videos on your page can easily make the whole thing slow to load up, as can too much dense HTML and Javascript. Look at taking your website back to basics, so it loads much faster – chances are a more simplistic design will also look better too.
Check that your website is appearing in search engines
The age-old problem of getting your company website to appear in search engines has never been so relevant today. SEO is something that many business owners find fickle – which is little surprise, as it can be so complicated. But if you take a look at the Digitalico Twitter account, you will realize that there are many companies and services out there whose job it is to help you achieve maximum SEO for your business. You can use as many tricks as you like to try and build your outreach – whether that is old-school link building, to content marketing, to pay-per-click ads. Speak to a professional about what would work best for your company.
Link up to your social media
A couple of decades ago, all you needed to promote yourself and your business was a fully functioning website. While it is still probably the most important part of your online portfolio, you need to be prepared to diversify into the world of social media. Many customers these days tend to avoid emailing or calling a business to enquire about something. This could be because, for the average working person, time is short, or it could be related once more to this culture of instant gratification we now live in. Social media is a miracle in the way that it provides real-time updates to users across the world. So, if someone is interested in your product or service and want to find out the most recent developments, they will head straight to your social media pages. Make sure your business is on all the necessary platforms; these are usually Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and sometimes Instagram (depending on the nature of your company). Link back to all these platforms via your website homepage, and vice versa. This way, your customers will be able to access the platform of their choice with ease and interact with you over it however they see fit.
Social Media With Rita 
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