When it comes to building and maintaining your online presence, you need to be in control of the elements your audience sees. What happens if you’re not in control? Well, there’s a pretty long list of problems that could occur that will negatively impact your small business. For instance, your customers could experience a slow response time while your salespeople receive poor leads. Without control, you have no visibility into the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Of course, you could go the other route and employ a ton of different tools that are intended to give you transparency and control, but really that’s just going to lead to stress, resulting from the overwhelming amount of tools you have to learn and pay for. When all is said and done, a lack of control often leads to poor reputation management and review monitoring while simultaneously delivering minimal (if any) revenue and growth.
Yikes, right?
That’s a whole lot of negatives that can snowball pretty quickly if you’re not in control of your online presence. On the other hand, if you do have your hands firmly on the reins, you can reap a lot of benefits from your efforts.
What Does Being in Control of Your Online Presence Look Like?
We already talked about some of the negative effects that can happen if you lose control of your online presence (or never had it in the first place). The good news, though, is that when you gain control, you can also gain some great ground with your branding and lead generation efforts. When you’re in control of your online presence:
- You control the narrative. In a time when customers have so much control over their own journeys, it’s nice to get some of that power back. When your entire online presence is plugged into one single dashboard, you won’t have to worry about missing out on a bad review that got posted or deal with incorrect business information spreading around the internet.
- You allow marketing automation to do the legwork. Rather than being “open” 24/7, as customers demand these days, you’re able to deploy the help of chatbots, live chat, and automated scheduling services that help you close leads, even when you’re not working.
- You have one dashboard to look at. It can quickly become overwhelming when you have to sign in to a dozen different tools to figure out what’s going on. When you utilize marketing tools that are specifically designed to give you authority over your online presence, you can say goodbye to a dozen screens and say hello to a consolidated information center.
Not in Control of Your Online Presence? Let’s Change That with These Local Marketing Software Features!
Software can do amazing things, but how can it help you manage your online presence in a better, more efficient, and more commanding way? Here are eight features you can find when you utilize the right local marketing software platform:
1. Reputation Management
Get notified of new reviews as soon as they get posted so you can be in command of your reputation. You can quickly respond to bad reviews and praise positive reviews while the comments are still fresh and relevant. Remember, other people are watching the way you respond to your customers, so it’s important to respond to all comments—both good and bad—in a timely fashion.
2. Lead Management
With the right marketing software, you’ll be notified of all new leads in real-time and have the ability to respond directly, route them to the appropriate salesperson, or enter them into an automated email drip series for nurture. You’ll also have the added bonus of being able to access your leads wherever you are and at any time.
3. Business Listings Management
Gain control over your information online. You can easily make updates and edit your information across all online listings (over 70 in fact) and add new content such as offers, photos, and testimonials as they become available. When you have everything in a single interface, you can make one update that’ll reach all of the proper channels, rather than updating each listing individually.
4. Website Management
Managing your website is a lot simpler when everything is in one place. Create new pages, publish new blog posts, and view performance metrics like overall traffic and channel sources on one single dashboard.
5. Paid Advertising
View all of your paid ad campaigns that are currently running all in one place. Advertise on places like Google, Bing, Yelp, and Facebook with pre-optimized publicity efforts that are easy to set up and target to your ideal customers.
6. Content Marketing
Create, schedule, and share content to Google, your website, business listings, and social media profiles—all from one place. Google considers freshness as one of the determining factors where your site will fall in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The fresher your content (as long as it’s genuinely fresh, new, relevant, and up to date), the better positioned you’ll be to rank well.
These days, “content” means a lot of different things, and a great platform can help you publish all types of content to the world, including:
- Photos
- Blogs
- Articles
- Customer success stories
7. Social Media Marketing
Engage and connect with new customers on social media. Easily monitor any mentions of your business in one place across all social media platforms. With more than 3 billion people around the world using social media each month, you certainly don’t want to skimp on the social aspect of your marketing efforts. Of course, you also don’t want to be plugged into 15 different social channels on 15 different tabs on your browser. The right local marketing software will pull everything you need to know into one easy-to-examine place.
8. Analytics and Insights
Get the insights and data you need so you’re not in the dark about the effectiveness (or opportunities available) regarding your marketing campaigns. Without marketing analytics, you’ll never truly be able to measure metrics, set goals, or realize quantifiable success. However, once you get analytics up and running, you’ll be able to measure your website’s performance, see how customers are finding you, know which words are grabbing their attention, and so much more.
5 Key Benefits that Come from Gaining Control of Your Online Presence
Being in control of your online presence sounds great, doesn’t it? Now that you’ve learned about the eight local marketing software features that can put the power of your online presence right in your hands, let’s dive into five key benefits you’ll realize when you’re the authority of your online atmosphere:
1. Efficiency
This word is always music to business leaders’ ears. What kind of leader isn’t always on the lookout for ways to save time and become more efficient? Once you’ve gained control of your online presence through a well-built software platform, you’ll be able to use automation to streamline core business processes. This, in turn, frees up employees’ time while simultaneously catering to customers more quickly. It’s a win-win for everybody.
2. Increased Traffic
Consolidating tools and applications into a single place will enable you to increase your online presence and get more traffic because all of your tasks are being handled on one easy-to-access platform.
3. Qualified Leads
Research shows that only 25% of leads are actually qualified and should be sent to the sales team. The other 75% is just a source of frustration for salespeople. Additionally, it’s estimated that between 35 and 50% of sales go to the vendor that responds to sales inquiries first. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you could eliminate frustrating unqualified leads from your salespeople’s task list while simultaneously beating your competitors to the punch line?
The right local marketing software platform can help you make this happen. You’ll be able to get more quality leads because you’ll have the data and insights needed to make tweaks to improve marketing campaigns.
4. More Customers
Improving the quality of the leads coming in inherently boosts the number of customers you should expect to be purchasing your product or service. When you’re attracting the right audience from the very start, you don’t have to put as much work into attracting leads because your processes are already more efficient and targeted.
5. More Positive Reviews
Making customers happy should be an ultimate goal of any successful company. That’s not always easy to do, but when you have the right tools in place, it’s much easier to put a smile on people’s faces. With technology working for you by way of a marketing platform, you’ll be able to get more five-star reviews and improve your brand’s reputation because you’re delivering a great customer experience from start to finish. Why? Because you are in charge of your online presence.
Next Steps
Now that you know what local marketing software features can do for your online presence, how can you get started? It’s easy! If you’re ready to maintain your web presence through a robust interface that speaks the language of website traffic, advertising analytics, call tracking, social media monitoring, voice search, competitor analysis, and more, we’re ready to help you. Request a demo of our Surefire Local Marketing Platform today to get a complimentary analysis of your online presence!
