How to make your company's presence felt online

Online is where it’s happening. It’s become one of those tiresome catchphrases to punchily describe the strategic importance of the internet to all manner of professional activity. But as trite and obvious as it may sound, it also continues to be true. Whether you’re a small business owner, a freelancer with a dozen clients or a salaried worker with a side hustle, you need a website – period. And today, there can be no excuses to disengage from the online realm, since the advent of cheap and quick website-building tools and social media means you no longer need advanced coding skills or lavish marketing budgets to conquer your little piece of the worldwide web.

So how does one get started on building a professional web presence? Web developer Joris Hens from Mechelen says the toughest and most crucial question is the one you’ll have to figure out at the very outset. “What do you want to get out of it? What’s the message you want to convey?” he asks. “What kind of web presence do you want and what do you hope to accomplish with it?”

Like a roll of the dice, your answer to this question will determine everything that follows. Let’s say you have a foodtruck, for instance. In such a scenario, you could easily do with a simple website that details where you can typically be found, how your ingredients are sourced and maybe what your culinary philosophy is. You might use social media to complement that static web presence with daily updates, photos of dishes and real-time information.

But if you’re a business-to-business company selling industrial cleaning products, you probably won’t have much use for social media since you’re not targeting the general public. Instead, your website will very likely have to do all the grunt work. You’ll probably want a solid and comprehensive webshop, in which case it might be more interesting to contact an experienced web designer.

The good news is that whatever your situation, solutions exist at every price point. Freelancers or salaried workers with a professional side-activity looking for the simplest kind of web presence ought to consider free platforms like about.me or flavors.me. Describing the bare bones of your activity or business, these function like digital business cards and can also be synched to your social media accounts. They take 10 minutes at most to set up – upload a photo, select a theme, enter a couple of personal details and you’re good to go.

For small businesses that want a simple but professional-looking website, Hens recommends Squarespace. With simple drag-and-drop tools and bargain prices (fees start at €8 a month), Squarespace is the website-building platform that has made the most waves recently. “For a small business, it’s a great way to get started, just to get something up and running and get the word out and go from there,” says Hens.

If you have a bigger budget or want a more advanced website, you should consider hiring a web developer or a web development company. It’s worth pointing out here that full-service web development companies typically offer a broader range of services in addition to the simple web design process, such as online content strategies, web engine optimisation and analytics. Both their fees and those of web developers widely vary – expect to pay anything from €300 to €2,000.

No matter what route you take, says Razvan Dimitriu, a Brussels-based web and graphic designer from Romania, it’s important to keep one key aspect in mind – the design of the website. “A good website should draw you in in 10 seconds and should be really easy to use,” he says. “If you want to find information, you should be able to find it in two or three clicks, and not have to search on 10 pages to find your information.”

When it comes to domain names, flexibility is key. If you’d like the web address for your Brussels bar to be bxlbeercafe.com, for instance, you can check if it’s still available and register it at the domain registration platform register.com for around €40 a year. If you want to use a domain name that’s already in use – beercafe.com for instance – then good luck. In this case, you’d have to contact the domain name owner directly or a domain name reseller, and you’re much more likely to have to spend a considerable sum of money to acquire the domain name of your choice.

Still, for Hens, a website is only part of the online marketing puzzle and he always encourages customers to think broader. “You have think about content strategies, about what makes you unique, and whether you have something to share that people want to know or want to read about,” he says. “Because building a website and putting it online isn’t going to attract a couple of thousand visitors, so they need to think about how they will generate traffic.”

And this of course is where social media comes in. For online media consultant Jamie Biesemans, social media channels are first and foremost a fantastic marketing tool. “Using social media is a very cheap way to try and reach as many people as possible,” he says. “It’s very important to use that because you don’t really have any other tools at this moment that work as well.”

Biesemans too warns that any social media strategy begins and ends with figuring out what image you want to present of yourself or your business to the world. “Social media has to be part of your greater marketing plan,” he says. “You have to think about how you want to be perceived by the world, and social media is a very important part of that because you can work on that image.”

In this context, it’s also worth underlining that the internet never forgets. “You have to remember that what you post on social media is very persistent, even though it seems fleeting,” Biesemans says. “So you have to think about how professional you’re going to be on these channels.” The owner of a skateboard store, for instance, can get away with a more irreverent Twitter voice and racier Facebook posts than, say, the social media manager of a bank.

Biesemans says the benchmark for what you should post is simple. “What you post on it has to be interesting – not just self-glorification that’s of no interest to anyone,” he says. “You have to use content.” That’s why he recommends posting “very actionable things”, such as promotions and exclusive deals, because those work the strongest on social media in his view. “If you use it for pushing promotions out, you’ll get users and readers who’ll keep following that Facebook page, and that’s often an important challenge – you have to keep people engaged.”

When it comes to social media, too, there are many platforms that can help you track how well you’re doing. Free online tools such as TweetDeck, Hootsuite and Buffer are just a few of the many resources that can help you manage and track your social media accounts and assess the impact of your social media strategies. For Biesemans, such tools are indispensable to any good online marketing strategy. “If you’re planning to use social media and get people to go your website, you have to use statistics from time to time to have a look at how well you’re doing,” he says. 

This article was first published in The Bulletin Business Guide 2015