Growing a business is tough and uses up every penny you put in. Companies for decades have been dropping huge dollars into mainstream media like TV, Outdoor and Print to earn recognition and consumers, all the while just hoping it would get them results. Fast forward to present day and we have a very diverse and much-more personalized medium called ‘digital’. Now, you can optimize and create brand presence more cost-efficiently and track your consumers in real-time to give them what exactly they are looking for. While there are no effortless means of achieving digital success, there are simple ways to boost online presence and bring about a difference in growing your brand, creatively! I’m writing this article to dole out my knowledge of what we have done right for increasing our business presence and how we attempted to energize our moves, at the right time.
1. Need for Speed
Improve your site’s speed
This is so basic, that I often think it’s almost forgotten. But in all honesty, nothing turns off customers more than a slow site. A few gaping seconds can make your prospect lose interest and move on. A fast website is also a well-visited website. Which means more traffic and more traffic means more business. Ideally, a website should load under 2 seconds – it’s the most viable load time and possible to achieve at a reasonable cost. Plus, don’t forget to make it mobile-friendly, something a lot of sites still aren’t! As per Amazon’s reporting, they increased revenue of 1% for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed. So did Walmart, who found a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of improvement. If you enjoy DIY, Google Developers have useful information that can help you improve site performance all by yourself. Or else, just get a professional and walk the speed path.
2. Search-ically enhanced
Work on the SEO of your site
Optimizing your website for search engines and making it pop-up right ahead, will be key in achieving visibility. And the most fundamental activities needed to accomplish this would be

• Do a keyword research for your business or company
• Include your important keyword/s in the site title, description, tagline, blog categories, page titles, and page content.
• Link your most important pages directly from your website homepage and cross-link them with each other.
• Use a URL structure that includes text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

For example: Instead of
https://ashnik.com/xyp?=12e! 
your link should rather read
https://ashnik.com/solutions/big-data-platform-solutions/

• Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why active websites do well on search engines.So update your site regularly through blogs, relevant pictures (of events, team members or others) and overall content.

Basically, be search-material!
3. Anti-social, not
Leverage your social media channels effectively
Keep a track of all social platforms that your target customers are active on, next, be active right there. And then, direct your marketing and promotional offerings to these platforms to attract relevant customers. It’s a lot more than just likes and follows on your pages. There are so many features sprinting up every day to fit your product specifically. FB live videos or live instagramming your events, Google Hangouts, Twitter event targeting and polling, Snapchatting are just a few amongst many more, that you can use to give a real-time peek into your business events and promotions. As a business, it’s also essential to recurrently build internal, relevant content such as vlogs, blogs and news updates – which in turn can be simply circulated through social media to increase footfall on your website. How about showing your social side to the world!
 4.Who isn’t down with a viral?
Create format or content that can go viral
Going viral is every marketer’s dream – one that brings you newer consumers. An efficient viral on an average means each customer gets one more customer, which means you have doubled the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Companies like eBay, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter or Groupon have built virility into their products – once you use them, you suggest it to your family or friends and thus enable its further adoption. Say for example Skype, has an incredible viral loop, you encourage other people to join it and stay in touch. It has over 405 million users as of today, worldwide. The other form of viral is through content. People share content that is helpful, powerful, humorous or informative. So in simpler words, if your site content fits relevant categories, it’s more likely to be shared by your target audience on their social platforms, thus escalating the brand visibility. For instance, all of Ashnik’s google tech hangouts get converted to Youtube videos and brings us views and subscribers https://www.youtube.com/user/ashnikbiz – in fact, some of our existing customers cited that they had previously used these technical videos to query-solve and subsequently approached us for business. Such a win-win, isn’t it?
 5. Show and tell
Put up the testimonies and the success stories
Your website is a reflection of your business, so it’s obvious that it needs to carry all the legit information your customers may be looking for. Likewise, your success stories and clients’ vouch-worthy words are a big faith factor for prospects too. The credibility of a fruitful case-study or testimony sets you apart from competitors, builds confidence in potential customers and is a great mode of reassurance. To make it noticeable, you can even link it to your home page. A good example of how both can be clubbed together on one page – https://ashnik.com/resources/success-stories/. So get it up, and let your website do the selling!
Hope these simple tips help you build or improve your digital approach for branding and marketing. Do let me know in comments if you have any more basic ideas to enhance digital presence. Would love to hear!