What Goes Into Cultivating a Positive Online Presence for Your Business
Cultivating a positive online presence is one of the most powerful tools any business can have. It’s what makes your brand easy for new customers to find and memorable and reliable for long-term customers.
But a positive online presence is about more than just ranking well on search engines — it’s about your online activities, customer engagement, and overall online reputation. It adds to your visibility (how easy it is for people to discover you) and credibility (how likely a customer is to trust you), which both help your cannabis business achieve success.
Whether you’re maintaining your positive presence online or starting from scratch and cultivating a positive presence from the ground up, we’re here to support you along the way.
How Can I Create A Positive Online Presence For My Business?
There are quite a few ways you can maintain or improve your presence online. Let’s get into the most impactful tactics.
Go Mobile-Friendly
While the desktop-friendly version of your website is important, you must have a mobile-friendly version of it, too. More than three-quarters of Americans make purchases from their smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. A number that strong tells us we can’t rely solely on the desktop version of websites to get the job done!
When your site is mobile-friendly, it’s easier for smartphone users to make a purchase. Trying to make your way around a desktop-friendly version of a website on mobile is a major hassle, and it will, more than likely, only encourage customers to leave and find a different business whose site is easier to navigate.
Mobile-friendly content also enhances your ranking in search, placing you higher amidst the results. This can help you attract new customers and retain the ones who’ve bought from you before.
Use Social Media To Your Advantage
Social media is a great place to build a community around your brand!
Do some research to find out what social media channels your customer base uses. Is your product/service popular among young people? If so, you’ll want to place your focus on Instagram and TikTok. If your audience is mainly professionals, LinkedIn is where you’ll flourish. Dig deep into your audience to discover where they’re spending the most time.
We recommend choosing one or two social channels to concentrate on (especially if you’re just starting out), instead of spreading yourself too thinly.
After you get settled in the right platforms, the next step is to create engaging content. This can help identify your community and get them talking – they need to get to know you, but also for you to get to know them.
Don’t use social media to make sales. That’s not what it’s for.
Put the “social” in social media and use it to start conversations, answer questions, and show off your brand’s personality. Having an active account that posts regularly (3 to 5 times per week) and replies to comments and messages shows your customers that you care about what you do and about their experience with you. That paints you in a positive light online and in the minds of your audience.
Be sure to follow the (sometimes strict) rules and guidelines that Meta, LinkedIn, and other platforms have for cannabis businesses’ social media pages.
Write And Publish Blogs
A business blog is the perfect way to position yourself as the voice of authority in your industry. If your customers have questions, you can answer them there. You might even provide answers to questions they hadn’t even thought to ask.
Posting consistent blog articles shows that you’re there to support your customers and address their concerns with solutions.
Blogs are especially great for customers new to the cannabis sphere. They might not even know where to begin in asking questions, and they’ll head to your blog for the answers they need. Getting expert advice that covers their bases will make them more likely to shop with you.
Google rewards sites that post quality blogs consistently (once or twice a month is our recommended frequency) by placing them higher in search rankings. An updated blog shows Google and your audience that you are regularly adding value to your brand and your business by keeping information up-to-date.
Make The Most Of Video
Video marketing is a critical part of advertising for a majority of marketers — 93% say that video marketing has given them a good ROI, according to Wyzowl.
Humans are naturally drawn to video content. It captures our attention better than both the written word and images; a whopping 91% of Instagram users watch videos on the platform weekly, according to Forbes.
Using videos for your marketing purposes is highly favored by Google. Just be sure that you don’t show anyone actively using cannabis in your videos you post.
Clean Up Your Online Listings
Having consistent messaging and information across online directories helps your business in a few ways:
- Google loves consistent information and will rank you higher when your business details are the same across the internet
- Consistent information builds customers’ trust in you
- It helps new customers find you easily
Consistent information across directories is absolutely crucial for your positive online presence!
The thought of parsing through all the directories that exist across the web to ensure your information adds up can be daunting. That’s where we come in. With Cannabis Digital Solutions’ online listing platform, Location Concierge, we take care of everything on the back end, from making sure the addresses for each of your locations are correct to updating holiday hours and everything in between.
Leverage Reputation Management
The last time you made a purchase, checked out a new restaurant, or booked a hotel, we bet you checked out the online reviews for that product/service. The number of reviews, their authenticity, and how the business responded probably all played a role in your decision. That’s the case for 71% of consumers! Featuring positive reviews on your website is a great way to boost your reputation and build trust within your audience (and encourage more customers to leave reviews!).
While positive reviews are what we want to shine a light on, negative reviews can help your online presence, too. It’s all in how you remedy the reviewer’s situation. If potential customers see you publicly replying to a negative review in an attempt to make things right, they’ll understand that you want the best for your patrons and will be more likely to purchase from you.
We understand that it can be difficult to generate reviews and reply to them all. Location Concierge comes to the rescue again! Leave it to us at Cannabis Digital Solutions; we’ll send out emails encouraging your recent customers to leave reviews and, when they do, we’ll take the reins in responding. It’s that simple.
Your Cannabis Business, Online
We want your online presence to mirror your business, making it as strong and positive as possible, and there’s plenty we can do to work together to make that happen. To improve your business’s presence online, maintain it, or start it from scratch, reach out to Cannabis Digital Solutions today. We’d love to partner with you!
