Words: Angela Parajo
Maintaining a strong digital presence is a challenge for any business. Stretching yourself too thin across every social platform, for instance, can drain your time and marketing resources. And that’s even before you’ve considered your email marketing, site content, and resourcing for ongoing SEO and GEO.
To get noticed, your message needs to land quickly and clearly. But your digital presence shouldn’t be about pushing out hundreds of content pieces and trying to appear everywhere. It’s about showing up strategically; working smarter rather than harder.
Try these marketing strategies to increase your online visibility and build long-term brand trust.
Focus your channel efforts
You want to show up in the spaces where your audience already spends time and where you feel you can provide high value and connect with them best. Already built a strong audience on Meta and keen to branch out to TikTok? It’s certainly worth doing, but only if it makes sense for your business and your audience’s online behaviour.
So, how should a business decide which marketing channels they should invest in?
- Map out your customer’s journey. Where are the existing touchpoints? Where is there potential? At what stages are customers likely to take action? For instance, writing content for high-intent keywords can help your business appear in search results when people are actively looking for your solution, while using social media creates conversations to keep your brand top of mind.
- Play to your strengths to stay consistent. A strong online presence comes from consistency, and that matters more than trying to be everywhere. By focusing on the type of content you can deliver well and regularly, this will improve your brand’s visibility and trust.
- Look at what’s already working (and why). Dive into your metrics to see what’s already building engagement, traffic or conversions – and what has the potential. Then put your energy into the channels that give you the best chance to get seen and amplify your reach online.
Develop a content strategy
Without the right strategy, your content will just be white noise in an already crowded digital space. Tie your objectives to your business goals and be SMART about it: Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Relevant and Time-bound.
When your content speaks to the right people on the right channels, it carries purpose, whether that’s through a social post, blog or campaign. With a clear plan, including strong messaging and clear goals, you can work on what to do more of consistently, and that’s what builds visibility and long-term momentum.
Deliver value-led content
Once you have a strategy in place, you want to be impactful and own your niche. Clarity and quality are key to standing out in someone’s feed or building authority to appear in search results.
Blogging, for instance, helps drive organic and long-tail visibility, positions your brand as a credible voice, and helps create trust. In fact, 70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than an advert.
Additionally, businesses that publish blog content consistently can generate over 68% more leads per month than those that don’t, according to Hubspot insights.
Being intentional and strategic with original and value-driven content will help improve your online presence.
Engage with your community
Engagement keeps your brand top of mind and builds trust, which extends further than simple brand awareness.
Social media, in particular, should be used as a platform to respond, connect, and share your brand’s value in a way that feels genuine and relatable. With an increase in AI use and presence, users are seeking more human and genuine connections.
When a brand feels more approachable, people are more likely to respond, share or tag others. Most platforms will reward these types of meaningful interactions, which encourages the algorithm to show your content to wider audiences.
So, give people a reason to engage, to return, and to trust your brand over time. When it aligns with their needs (to find a solution, to learn a tip or to be entertained), it earns attention and can turn passive viewers into active participants.
Optimise your content for SEO and LLMs
Value-driven content, when integrated in a wider SEO and LLMs content strategy, can significantly boost your online visibility and attract more qualified traffic.
You want to do this by:
- Using the right, high-intent keywords
- Structuring content around user questions and needs
- Improving on-page elements like metadata, headings and internal links.
To further future-proof your strategy, you want to optimise your content for inclusion in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Helpful tips include:
- Using clear, factual, well-structured content
- Adding in relevant schema tags
- Making use of semantic tags and properly include heading tags
- Writing with clarity and helpfulness
Read this detailed guide on how to how to get your content included in AI training datasets.
Time and resources are a big factor in what channels you should focus on in your marketing strategy, so prioritise the ones that resonate with your audience and own them. Invest in continuous listening and data analysis to truly know your target audience, their content preferences, pain points and goals, and build from there.
When you find the channels that works, partnering with marketing experts (*cough, cough* hello!) is advised help you scale properly, without the resource burnout.
