Your digital presence is crucial to your company’s success. We hear this advice everywhere as brick and mortar stores decline in significance, while online commerce continues to soar. But what is digital presence and how is it established and maintained? Your website’s effectiveness is essential to your ROI. It’s your digital showroom.

As we mentioned in our last blog post, businesses are usually fastidious about their physical locations. Often, time and money is spent ensuring showrooms and offices look modern and sleek, customers feel the “wow factor” when they step in the space, and the ambiance is on-brand.

We have to do the same with our digital showrooms.

Critical to a website is content. We tend to think of content as what’s on a website and how it’s presented. This is typically understood to mean directed SEO, quality of content writing and keyword effectiveness. This is, however, but one aspect of content. Content in a larger context should be seen as engagement through interactive communication, or as Atlantic Digital’s Tom Corcoran says, “At the heart of the internet is interactivity. It's critical to acknowledge that we operate in an environment of engagement.” Defining what you say before deciding how to say it is important, he notes. Only you can determine what this is, guided by your business plan and long-term vision.

All aspects of your company’s marketing presence are important, whether on the internet or not. Your marketing should be designed to foster interest and trust in your brand, and ultimately bring customers into your digital showroom.  The marketing strategies to do this, however, require careful consideration, coordination and implementation, guided by a clear understanding of customers’ interests.  

Your digital showroom isn’t just a place to sell a product or a service — it’s a space to delight and make a lasting impression on your customers. Happy customers are repeat customers (and customers who tell their friends). Don’t just look for the functional in your website, look for the “wow factor.”

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing has risen to take advantage of the growing sophistication of social media. It embraces all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and topical blogs, eBooks and effective SEO. These are the tools that help you interactively engage with your customers as they come to know and trust your products or services. If curiosity or the need to solve a problem has brought customers to your web site’s digital showroom, it’s inbound marketing—the ability to delight and educate your customers—that helps keep them there, enabling you to build a personalized, interactive relationship with them.

Email - Personalized Outward Bound Marketing

Emails can be designed to enhance your relationship with your customers and prospects. A robust digital showroom uses email as a carefully honed marketing tool. Drawn from the interests your customers have shown via your website or displayed on social media, this venerable marketing tool can be recrafted to enlighten and entertain your subscribers with focused quality content they’ll enjoy and respond to.  

Your emails must be interesting, have a compelling subject line and spark engagement with you and your brand. The great virtue (and curse) of emails is that they can be forwarded. You’ll want yours to be so well-written and so packed with new content that your subscribers will forward them to their friends and family as a great read.

Your digital showroom has many components. They derive from your own ingenuity, as well as from your observation of competitors’ techniques. It’s your job to determine how effectively they’re working. Examining your site traffic and client metrics, such as visit frequency, retention and conversion and their relationship to site features and marketing techniques, will tell you if your digital showroom is doing its job. Only a continuous process of analysis and reinvention will keep your digital showroom a top producer.