And how to stay ahead in the marketing landscape.
Does your business have multiple ways for customers to find you online—a website, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and maybe even a Tik Tok account? While having a marketing strategy across several channels can strengthen your brand, staying on top of the best practices for different platforms can get overwhelming quickly. Don’t stress! There are other ways to increase your audience without going all out on reels.
Your Website is the Most Important Place for Business
It’s great to have a strategy on different social media platforms, but don’t forget that your business’s website is the foundation. In other words, your website is the most important place for your business online, and the only place you own. All of your marketing, both online and offline, should lead people to your website as it’s also the only place where your customers can find everything they need in order to make decisions about your products or services.
Relying on Social Media Can Put Your Business Out of Sight
Social media is important when it comes to marketing and branding, but some businesses rely almost entirely on Facebook or Instagram as their main platform for doing business. There’s a time and place for Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, but they shouldn’t be your entire marketing strategy. Some people do this to save money in the very beginning… but that’s just a short-term plan. When you’re ready to get truly established, a business website created specifically for your company is key! And it turns out that without one, there can be devastating consequences…
Earlier this year, Facebook and Instagram went down for several hours, and in 2019, Facebook shut down for an entire day. Businesses that relied on the platform lost thousands in sales, disrupting their budgeting and leaving teams scrambling to overcome the outage.
Besides the anxiety surrounding random outages, it’s practically a full-time job to stay on top of social media’s changing algorithms. Try a Google search for “hashtag strategy” and you’re going to find conflicting information about best practices for creating posts on Instagram. Plus, each platform changes so quickly, it can feel impossible to stay up-to-date on the latest trends unless you have a dedicated social media manager on your team.
All Marketing Leads to Your Website
Businesses can’t beat owning a great website with custom, branded design, and functionality that is built around their needs. When you own your business’s site and work with a website design agency to keep your page running optimally, the ability for customers to find you is completely within your control.
Plus, a well-designed website is an investment that can deliver incredible ROI by establishing your brand online and helping you to rank better in search engines. Social media can help support your site, but it shouldn’t try to replace it.
It’s fantastic to use Facebook and Instagram to boost your business, and they can be amazing marketing tools. But without a solid business website designed to keep up with ever-changing online trends, you could find yourself falling behind for months at a time. As soon as you start to catch up, the algorithms are likely to change all over again.
Social media accounts drive people to your business website, so it’s important that you have a quality site with a custom design. When you are ready to expand your reach with social media, start with one platform based on where your audience spends their time online, and be sure to link back to your site regularly.
Want to take your knowledge of online visibility a step further and learn about algorithms and how they can affect your website? Check out How Updates to the Google Algorithm Can Impact Your Website Rankings.
