How to Improve Your Digital Presence While Working From Home

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If you are among the many business owners, employees, or managers who have found themselves unexpectedly working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a great time to learn how to improve your digital presence while working from home.

As some businesses were forced to shutter their doors and dive head first into the online space, many industries have come to the realization that remote working opportunities have a lot of added potential. In some cases, companies have begun to consider permanent work from home positions to save costs on office space. Regardless of the reason you’re doing so, working from home has become the new norm for many people across the country and the world, and you’ve likely found yourself trying to navigate this new remote working space and adjusting to a new work-life balance that looks quite different than what you were used to before.

However, at this point in time, you may discover that you have plenty of time to explore new avenues for your digital presence. Now is the perfect time to implement new projects, invest your time online, and create a name for yourself within the digital world. The great thing about the digital space is that your presence can be created and updated from wherever you are as long as you know what to do. Here are some great ideas you can try.

Build Your Contact List

A contact list is an essential tool to have in your digital toolkit, no matter what industry you work within. With a list of contacts, you can increase conversions, nurture leads through the sales funnel, share valuable content, test out new products or ideas, and get valuable feedback to help you with your marketing decisions.

More importantly, a contact list is the backbone of your email marketing strategy. Nowadays, in 2020, some businesses may look at email marketing and think it’s an outdated practice. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Research has indicated that email provides a high ROI, helps lead to more conversion, and is the preferred contact method for people in many demographics.

With more time on your hands to work on an email strategy, you can start to flex your creative muscles and try new ways to send content to your audience. Consider creating monthly newsletters, smaller targeted email blasts to specific segments of your audience, requests for feedback, or small news blasts if you’re planning to drop a new piece of content or host an online event.

Organize Your Content Strategy

Working from home gives you the opportunity to explore new ways to maximize your content and optimize it effectively. Do an overhaul of your content strategy and plan out new ideas to implement that could help forge stronger connections with your audience and future customers.

Consider new types of content to offer, and go through and update all of your strategy points, from your buyer personas to your tone and messaging systems. Take a deep dive into your analytics and look at the content that resonates most with your audience. Where is your audience engaging the most? Do you see any patterns where users are spending more time on certain areas of your website? If so, add new ideas to your content strategy that can help you capitalize on those topics or subjects.

Your keyword research should also be updated. Many companies, brands, and businesses tend to create one vast keyword research document when they initially create their content strategy, but neglect to keep updating it as time goes on. Keyword data is always changing, and you may find that by updating this part of your strategy, you can find new SEO opportunities you missed the first time around, or you can determine where your strategies are no longer working.

Create Quality Content

With more time on your hands to focus on your digital efforts, you have an opportunity to work on creating high-quality, long form content that provides a lot of value to your audience. One solid piece of 3,000 word content can have better results than a few quick 500-word blog posts, but it takes a lot longer to create. That’s why many businesses and brands opt for the second option.

Long-form content has many advantages. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s better for your SEO rankings. Since 2016, research has indicated that long-form content largely dominates the search engine results pages. Google’s algorithm is constantly updating, but what it has skewed to focus on in recent years is user experience and topic authority. Basically, if Google thinks you’re an expert in a particular topic or subject, it will rank you higher. To get Google to think you’re an expert in something, you have to write detailed, in-depth content that covers that topic with broad expertise.

Secondly, long-form content provides more value to your audience. Think about it from the perspective of a consumer. If you’re looking for information on how to build a fire pit, you’re going to trust a detailed, step-by-step guide over a 500-word blog post. Therefore, you would get more value from the website that provided the guide, and would likely remember where that information came from more so than you would a brief blog post you skimmed through.

Experiment With Social Media

Branching out to new social media platforms is often a trial and error process. Most of the time, if you’ve been reluctant to join a new platform and reach more audiences, it’s likely because you haven’t had the time to explore and learn how that new platform works. Now that you do have some time, you can start to test the waters with different ideas. Social media comes with many valuable opportunities to provide quality content, engage with your customers and/or audience, and even learn more about your industry.

One of the key goals in social media marketing is to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time in the right place. Do a little bit of research on your target audience and determine where they like to spend most of their time. For example, if you run a business geared towards Generation Z, consider making some fun and creative Tik Tok videos. Approximately 44% of Tik Tok’s 800 million active users are between ages 16 and 24.

To help you figure out where you should be experimenting, here’s a quick breakdown of which audience is most active on each platform worldwide according to SproutSocial:

  • Facebook: While a large range of people of all ages still use Facebook, as of 2020, the largest audience between the ages of 25 to 49, followed by 50 to 64 year olds.
  • Twitter: Twitter has a lower number of users than most other platforms, but its largest audience is users between 18 to 24 years old, followed by 25 to 30 year olds.
  • Instagram: The largest audience is age 18 to 24 year olds, followed by 25 to 30 year olds. It should also be noted that there is also a large presence of 30 to 49 year olds that has risen significantly on Instagram in recent years.
  • Snapchat: Known for its popularity among millennials and Gen Z, the majority of users on Snapchat are between the ages of 18 and 30, as well as under 18.
  • YouTube: Popular with audiences within almost every single age demographic, YouTube is popular with users between the ages of 13 and 64. Additionally, 38% of internet users over the age of 65 are also active on YouTube, so this is a promising platform.

Network (From Home)

Nurturing a relationship with an influencer or industry expert takes some time and effort, and for this reason many business owners tend to put off this type of strategy. However, in business, networking isn’t all about shaking hands and mingling at big events – you can create plenty of meaningful, valuable connections within the digital sphere. However, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about networking online. Don’t become one of the pushy influencers who slide their way into inboxes and constantly push their brand, services, or products on others.

Reach out to other experts and influencers within your industry or niche and create a relationship with them. This can help you land guest blogging spots, shoutouts, promotional partnerships, backlinks to your site, and excellent word of mouth marketing overall. Leave comments and reviews wherever you see an opportunity (but make sure you don’t become a keyboard warrior by accident) to get your name out there and engage.

Look for online communities you can join, and when you do join them, make sure you contribute and offer value to others within the group. The goal is to make sure you provide a lot of up front value so others will want to provide you with value in return. This is a great idea, especially if you’re working within an industry where referrals are a big business generator, like wedding planning, photography, website design, and so on.

Find Instagram, Tik Tok, or even Snapchat influencers within your niche who have a large online presence, and reach out to them. You can search for them through hashtags or location to get a sense of the most popular people within your industry. People trust what they see from other people over what a brand tells them directly, so this can be a great (and inexpensive) way to put your name out there.

Host an Online Event

One of the strategies many people have started to do during the COVID-19 pandemic, and continuing even as many countries head toward a reopening strategy, is hosting online events. From bands and musicians to yoga instructors, tons of influencers and industry experts have taken to hosting live sessions to gain new audiences and put their name out there.

Going live helps you connect with people from all over the world, helping you tap into new markets you may have never considered before you started working remotely. The more your presence increases, the more eyes you can get on your content, which can have a drastic impact on brand retention later on down the line. If you provide something really valuable, like a beauty tutorial, for example, people will want to share that content with their networks, further increasing your reach.

After you host a live online event, you can save the video and use it for microcontent later on, giving you plenty of repurposing options and increasing the value you get out of one event. The best part is that it doesn’t cost you anything to host a live video, unless you’re going to be hosting a giveaway. You can use free tools like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube to stream anything from DIY tutorials, classes, live auctions, performances, and more.

Work on Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

If you’ve been using digital marketing and operating under a “set it and forget it” type of PPC campaign because you’re too busy to constantly monitor and check your ad, it’s time to update your strategy. Take this time to go over your past and present campaigns and look for data that shows which of those campaigns were successful or not successful.

Try out some new online marketing strategies while you have the opportunity to stay on top of your metrics. Run A/B tests, make tweaks to your copy and design, and try looking for new angles you haven’t used before. The worst you can do is spend a little bit of money on an ad that isn’t really working, and then learn from that experience to get a better idea of what campaigns actually will work for you.

Run an SEO Audit

SEO is an important component of a good digital presence. Take the time to run a full, comprehensive SEO audit of your website to look for any areas that leave room for improvement. This is something you should actually be doing regularly, but many people don’t actually get the time to go through and analyze these aspects as often as they should.

An SEO audit will tell you where your SEO is working, and which areas you’ve potentially overlooked or could just improve overall. This is a great opportunity to find those little things that make a difference, like broken links or complicated URLs. Often, those small things can be fixed relatively quickly so you can get your SEO where it needs to be as soon as possible.

Make Sure Your Website is up to The Task

As you work on new changes to implement to your at-home work routine to strengthen your digital presence, you’re going to be drawing more traffic to your website. It’s worthwhile to talk to a professional website developer who can help you make sure your website is up to the task to handle your new, expanding audience. At Web Sharx, our team of experienced, highly knowledgeable developers and designers are always on hand to help you manage your online space and customize it to help you reach your goals.

Get in touch with our team to talk about the options available to you, and the ways we can help you make sure your online home does everything it’s supposed to – and so much more.

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