Generating prestige and respect for your business can help to build a sustainable platform for future growth and profits. If you’re among the first names that your customers think of when they think about your particular niche, then they’re more likely to turn to you when they have a need within that niche. Being seen as an expert can also confer more direct digital marketing benefits; when certain sorts of customers find the information that they’re after on your site, other, similar kinds of customer will also be reliably funnelled there.
But how do you generate that all-important aura of authority and expertise? It doesn’t happen overnight; to build up your reputation, you’ll need to develop the right habits for demonstrating expertise.
Blogging
The most obvious way to demonstrate your expertise is through specialised blogging. Work out the questions that your customers need answered, and then write an exhaustive, insightful blog on the subject. You might then promote this blog via your business’s social media channels, and thereby attract traffic to the site. Blogging naturally requires that you can write clearly and cogently, but more important is the information that you’re actually communicating.
Hosting Conferences and Talks
If you’re bringing together the finest minds in your industry, who can discuss the biggest issues in a conference setting, then you’ll automatically be thought of as a force driving the big questions (and often providing the answers to them). The great thing about conferences is that you don’t need to provide the expertise yourself – and you might learn just as much as you teach. Conferences of this sort, moreover, don’t have to be in-person affairs. You might host a digital conference via a virtual event platform.
SEO
A related area of interest to blogs is Search Engine Optimisation. When a particular question is Googled, you’ll appear among the results. If your blog is doing its job, you’ll get more clicks, and eventually Google will begin to promote your site above the alternatively. This effect will snowball until you’re seen as an authority – but this requires some consistency, and some engagement with your audience. Other search engines work the same way, but they don’t enjoy quite the same enormous userbase. You can read detailed, practical guidance on how to optimise your site for search engines, and which practices to avoid, on Google’s own SEO starter guide.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click adverts are a reliable way to draw in traffic – and, as the name suggests, you’ll only pay for the people who actually click on the ad and visit the site. PPC campaigns are a great way to get the ball rolling on your campaign, and they allow you to be very specific about which demographics you’re targeting.
