In today's fast-paced digital landscape, a robust digital presence is essential for any brand but a challenge for marketers to manage at scale. The following explores what a digital presence is, why it matters, and how brands can optimize their digital identity.
What is a digital presence?
A digital presence refers to how your brand appears across every touchpoint a customer might interact with, including your website, social media profiles, listings, reviews, and more. It includes all the content that represents your brand, influencing how customers discover, perceive, and engage with you.
Why is a digital presence important?
A great digital presence means that customers have a consistent experience every time they interact with your brand, no matter which channel they're using. The way people search for answers and their expectations for interacting with brands change with every innovation, algorithm change, or generational trend.
Finding information about a brand is not a linear process. It's omnichannel and complex. A survey* of over 2,000 customers found 94% of customers look for brand information on websites other than Google, Bing, Facebook, or Apple. They search for information on many different channels, including search engines (84%), maps (59%), social media platforms (51%), brand websites (49%), review websites (35%), voice assistants (28%), and AI tools (19%).
With more information and options available than ever before, search happens everywhere. Imagine a customer looking for summer clothes: they might discover a brand via a YouTube video, Instagram content, or a viral TikTok. Non-traditional and emerging search experiences influence results as much as SEO efforts.
With so many options, your brand needs to break through the noise and stand out as the best option for the customer. Customers are seeking reviews, social, and easily searchable web pages. Your brand needs to be ready for any of the ways a customer chooses to interact.
What are the elements of a digital presence?
There are three critical elements of a digital presence: discoverability, authority and authenticity, and engagement. These elements help your brand stand out, earn trust, and build loyalty.
Discoverability is about showing up, no matter the channel. Extend your presence beyond major publishers like Google, Facebook, Apple, or Bing. Brands with a broader publisher network see up to 186% better overall web performance from Google, with over 17% of all their digital engagement coming from non-Google publishers.
Authority and authenticity are about consistently showing up with quality content. Customers expect consistent, accurate information everywhere they look. According to the survey*, 91% of customers say it is important for brand information to be accurate, and 64% are likely to switch brands if they find negative or inaccurate information.
Engagement is about interacting with customers wherever they're having conversations. That may be on your own website or sites like Reddit, Open Table, Zoc Doc, or others. Customers expect a two-way dialogue with brands. According to the survey*, 69% of customers expect a response to reviews or comments within a week.
What steps can you take to achieve a strong digital presence?
1. Maintain accurate, robust local listings: Ensure your brand information is complete and accurate across all third-party sites to improve search discoverability and customer trust.
Search engines like Google pull information from multiple sources. They surface the brands with the most complete, accurate, and detailed information. Managing your listings across third-party sites helps surface the right answers to customers, including for searches with local intent. If your listings are optimized, your brand has a better chance of surfacing in both branded and unbranded searches.
2. Engage in reviews: Actively manage and respond to reviews to influence search rankings and build brand trust.
A local ranking factors study by Moz identifies multiple aspects of reviews that may impact search rankings. These include review recency, the velocity of new reviews, the diversity of review platforms, the authority of the reviewer, and the format of the review as text or star rating. Beyond influencing search, reviews are crucial for brand trust. Customers* rank average star rating and quantity of reviews as the top two pieces of brand information they look for when making a purchase decision, and 71% say reviews influence their decision to trust a brand.
3. Participate in social media: Use social media platforms to create location-specific content and boost local search visibility.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X allow brands to create location-specific pages and content. These pages can help boost local search visibility as local ranking factors include signals from social media profiles. Furthermore, 51% of customers* search for information about brands directly on social media platforms. Social media also influences trust. 59% of customers are more likely to trust a brand with an active social media presence.
4. Build local pages: Create landing pages with detailed information for each location to improve search rankings and provide customers with rich content.
Local pages, or specific landing pages with information about a place, can impact search results. For example, a breadth of local pages can help your brand rank for a broader spectrum of unbranded search terms. Local pages can also provide customers with more rich content to include in their decision-making process. When looking for a specific product or service, 31% of customers* start their search on a brand's website.
Choosing a Digital Presence Management Platform
Every digital touchpoint represents a chance to win or lose a customer. Your digital presence impacts how people find your brand, feel about it, and whether they want to engage with you and make a purchase. However, managing your digital presence at scale can be challenging. A digital presence management platform can help by consolidating tools and providing access to data across digital marketing channels. Features to look for in a digital presence management platform include:
Consolidation: Integrate seamlessly with existing marketing solutions to provide a unified view of your digital presence.
Data analytics: Offer real-time insights to understand customer behavior and identify trends.
Direct integrations with publishers: Ensure your information appears everywhere customers search through direct integrations with publishers.
Workflow automation: Save time and money by automating workflows with AI and machine learning.
How Yext can improve your digital presence management
With Yext, our brand's differentiator is a best-in-class approach to knowledge management. Information about your brand lives in many different areas of your company. Yext's knowledge graph aggregates and structures your data within one platform and one source of truth. The Yext Digital Presence Platform enables you to manage your entire digital presence at scale while telling a consistent, compliant, and compelling brand story that resonates with your customers.
Explore the Yext Digital Presence Platform
*Survey details: The results are from an online survey of 2,312 adults who purchased something online within the past year. The survey was conducted from June 14 to 25, 2024, by Researchscape International on behalf of Yext. Results were weighted by country population, age, and gender. Respondents were from five different countries (Germany, Italy, France, United Kingdom, United States).