With the growing popularity of social networks and digital marketing, every company has to think more and more actively about maintaining its website and presence in social networks. The belief that "if I can't find it online, it doesn't exist" also affects businesses and attracting potential customers. Although most businesses have a website or social media accounts such as Facebook, it may turn out that just having a working website or an active social media account is not enough. Therefore, even if your company does not sell goods or services on the Internet, it is recommended to allocate part of the marketing budget directly to increasing and improving the company's online presence. Below, the Capitalia team has collected various tips on how to make your company's online presence more effective and attractive to customers.

1. Unified content across different social networking platforms
Using different logos, multiple fonts, different font sizes, or conflicting information such as a business phone number makes a business look disorganized and untrustworthy. The type and style of communication should also be unchanged - if your company's client is, for example, a start-up, the choice of words and the client's address can be relatively unforced. However, in order not to confuse the client, it is preferable to maintain communication in a similar style on all social networks and platforms - thus, wherever a potential client sees your company, he will immediately recognize it.

2. Domain registration
Not registering a business domain allows anyone to register and use the business name. Identical domains can easily confuse anyone who searches for your company on the Internet and finds another company with the same name. Ambiguity can cause a potential customer to decide in favor of a competing company whose name is the same on all Internet sites. In addition, the first company that registers the specific domain also becomes its owner - if your company misses this opportunity, you should look for new domain and even name options. The domain should be as simple as possible and as close to the real business name as possible. This information also applies to social network accounts. Creating social network accounts does not require a lot of time and money for business , but it can save unpleasant misunderstandings in the future. And it will continue to be as important to control digital assets online as it is to register a company.

3. Correct language without grammatical and spelling errors
Language errors in any text published by the company lowers its value in the eyes of the customer. Even if your clients are not teachers of the Latvian language, rewriting or obvious grammatical errors give the impression that an insufficient amount of work has been invested in the creation of the text and indicate carelessness. Before publishing any text, it is helpful to have a couple of people proofread the text, who might spot errors that the author may not have noticed. If the main language of the website or social network is another language, for example English, it is also worth checking the created article with Grammarly - an application that marks and corrects spelling, punctuation and even style mistakes in the text.

4. Creating a professional email address
By creating an e-mail address intended specifically for business needs, you intuitively indicate to the client that the company's employees know how to separate personal from business relations and are serious about their company. This shows professionalism and a high quality bar for everything the company offers.

5. Regular online communication with customers
Failure to respond to questions or comments on the website and social media can give customers the impression of poor customer service. Customers may suspect that, in case of an unsuccessful order, returning or exchanging the product could also be a complicated and time-consuming process. Feedback and regular communication with customers can also help improve business performance and customer satisfaction. Although it is not directly related to product sales or quality, it is possible to learn something useful for the company from each comment received. If customers see that you are responding to their messages, they will be encouraged to write back, and this is a good way to gain customer insight into your business and how it works without a large investment .

6. Regular use of social network accounts
Humans tend to bond with things and people they can rely on. If a company-owned social network account exists, but new posts are rarely and irregularly posted on it, it will not bring any benefit to the company. In addition, with today's abundance of information in the digital environment, if a company publishes new information infrequently, it can easily disappear into the depths of the Internet. Regularly posting and communicating with people on social media will not only make your business seem more human and attract new potential customers, but will also satisfy an algorithm that will show your posts more often to random viewers.

7. Regularly updated and improved information
Most often, the first information about a company appears on the web the moment a customer uses the Google search engine. If the information that appears there is inaccurate or outdated (for example, an article about the company's achievements in 2018), the customer's interest in the company and trust in it may disappear. The easiest way to solve this problem is to take control of the information that is distributed about the company. This can be done by registering your business with Google and editing the information that appears when your business name is entered into the search engine. The same applies to the information on the home page. It is very important to follow up so that the information there corresponds to reality and is regularly updated. This will show that you are paying close attention to your company's online image and that no detail has been overlooked. In addition, potential customers will know that you are still active and offer the services mentioned on the website.

8. Website optimization also for mobile use
The use of smartphones has undeniably become an important part of everyday life and business. More and more people are using various search engines on mobile phones to find what they need in their daily run. If a potential customer finds your company's website and tries to view it on a mobile device, but the website is not adapted for such an activity, the texts there will be inconvenient or impossible to read, and the overall appearance of the website will likely be visually unattractive and impractical. By the way, adapting the website for mobile phones also improves the company's SEO rating - how high the website appears in Google's search engine listings. Thus, the optimization of the homepage will also improve the chances of finding the company on the Internet.

9. High-quality visual materials
The human brain processes an image 60 thousand times faster than text, which means that if images are posted on a website or in social networks, they will always create the first impression of a company even before reading any sentence. If the posted image will be of low quality, or out of context, it will accordingly create a bad first impression of the company. As is well known, the first impression is often decisive for the client to understand whether he wants to start cooperation with the company.