Secrets of Creating Professional Online Presence

The Importance of a Professional Online Presence For Brand

With most start-up brands being purely online based, it is imperative, your online presence is professional, high quality, branded, and instantly recognizable. Consistency is key in online world. For your audience to recognize your brand, you must be consistent, thus allowing you to grow in the audience engagement and reach.

Online presence could be broken down into 3 sections:

  • Website
  • Emails
  • Social Media

Why is Creating a Professional Website so Important?

A website is one of most integral components of your online success. If your website does not exude professionalism, credibility, a great design and a brilliant user experience, customers may turn away. 75% of your web visitors will judge your credibility based on design of your website.

Luckily, there are some easy ways to ensure, your brand’s website is professional, current, and looks like something which your customers can relate to and more importantly, trust.

“75% of your web visitors will judge your credibility based on design of your website”.

Why do Speed/Load Time important?

Load time is important metric for your website. This is not just for the user experience but also for search engine optimization(SEO). If your website loads quickly, you have instantly made a strong first impression. However, if any potential customer decides to click off of your site rather than letting it load, there is a chance that you will lose sales based on that alone.

If large numbers of visitors “bounce” from your website, then this will have an negative impact on your organic search engine rank. With brand websites being image heavy, the fastest way to improve loading speed is to compress your images, there are various image compressors online which could help with this.

How Photography effects e-commerce?

The importance of the product pages of your e commerce website should not be underestimated. After all, what is the point in putting all that effort into directing the someone towards your website, having them get to your product, and then not be able to see everything they need to push them through to the making a sale?

With photography being largest influence on a customer when shopping online, you should allocate an amount of your budget professional images.

What’s User Experience (UX)?

User Experience in web design is process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability. Your site’s design and structure should allow viewers to find what they’re looking for without any confusion or unnecessary clicks. Putting an emphasis on your viewer’s journey will not only benefit your customers but will consequently deliver the results for your brand.

Your product category pages should be tidy and logical, with important information about the products, like composition, being readily available. This allows the customers to make a fast purchase and then checkout using a system which is uncluttered, hassle-free, and trustworthy.

Should the website Mobile-friendly?

Mobile browsing is estimated to account for 52% of all the web traffic. Studies show if a site isn’t rendered for the mobile display, people will simply stop visiting it in favour of a competitor that provides a smoother mobile experience.

Most modern website templates automatically render the mobile version; Google has a handy tool which you could use to check if your site passes the mobile-friendly test. Things like text size, mobile navigation, and touch-friendly buttons are assessed, with a “pass” or “fail” score being given. You’re then given advice on changes you can make which will render your site on mobile devices more efficiently.

Importance of Personalized Domain Email for New Business

One of the most effective ways to present yourself as an established brand in industry is to have a custom domain for your website and for your emails.

Although to some this might seem like an obvious first step, some brands continue to use Hotmail or Gmail email addresses, which instantly gives the impression that you are an amateur in the industry. If you are a small brand that is not a problem for most, but a non branded email address is something that instantly gives your business an amateur undertone.

When you are trying to convince the potential customer to spend money with your brand, you want to make sure everything you do is as professional and trustworthy as possible, right down to small and often overlooked details, such as your email address.

An email address like yourname@yourcompanyname.com tells a potential customer that you are a professional business with an online domain (yourcompanyname.com) where they can find you.

Branding advantages:

Having your own domain email means whoever you contact using it will instantly know the company you are emailing from.

1. Trust

With a branded email address you are helping to build a trust with your customer, assuring them that you are an established business.

2. Consistency

Having the branded email is another point for your branding consistency. Everything you do, should be branded in some way, and your email is no exception.

3. Simplicity

If you have an easy to remember branded email (info@yourcompany.com), it means that a customer could easily remember how to contact you.

Edited: Sourced By @Howthorninc