Plan Your Digital Presence

Your social reputation precedes you

A brand these days must have a digital media presence. However, each brand and business approach digital media in a different way. Digital footprints are easy to track and are accessible to curious customers, vendors, and target audiences, who may be looking out for you on the web. Therefore, it is very important to build a good reputation around your digital presence. So, how a brand can achieve that? Well, planning is the first step in the right direction. In this post we will look into a few basic things to help build a better digital presence around a brand.

Before digging deep into the topic, let’s discuss a few basic ideas which can be considered as a rule of thumb:

• Start with the customer: It always pays to focus on the customer. Your main focus should be to get insights and needs of the customer through your digital presence.
• A flexible plan is better than a rigid plan: Social Media is proving Andy Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ theory to be true. A social media trend or a viral sensation can live longer than you expect. Be flexible in your plans and be ready to adapt to situations.
• Realistic Goals: Just like every other aspect of your business, it is very important to set achievable and realistic goals. The feeling of completing a goal is the best source of motivation.
• Keep it simple and updated: It is usually wise not to complicate things, and this translates to activities on social media as well.

Now that we have set some basic guidelines for our plan, let’s build something out of it.

Building your brand

Building a brand is never an easy task, yet it is very fruitful. To set yourself apart from your competitors and be a rock star brand, first you need answers to a few questions on behalf of your customers:

• When my customer thinks of my brand, what comes to mind?
• Does what you portray directly respond to their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations?
• How are you addressing these things (mentioned above) in your social media presence?
• What gaps do you have?

The answers to this exercise will help you better understand your customers and help to shape a better strategy towards giving them what they seek through your brand’s digital presence.

Focussing on benefits

The sole purpose of every brand is to sell something. Your digital presence engages people, which ultimately adds some value to the sales figures. Potential customers who don’t know your brand as yet, don’t fall in love with you as yet, and don’t trust your brand as yet, are only interested in one thing; getting the experience they are seeking. Your digital presence must be able to significantly describe the benefits of your brand, so that they can arrive at a conclusive result. It’s advisable to foresee what benefits your customer is looking out of your brand and arrange your digital presence around it.

Be Real and Be Found

Wrap Up

If you ask me to sum up a brand’s digital reputation, I would say it is a sum of your social presence and your social media activities. Social media reputation is built around social presence, continuous activities, and positive feedbacks by fans.