The first impression is not always the right one; however, when it comes to the business world, you may not have a second chance to convince your audience. The market is a busy and crowded place. You can’t afford to waste time when creating a positive and trustworthy impression because your competitors might get there first.
Ultimately, the audience is looking for a solution to their needs or problems. While the typical buyer will compare their options before committing to purchase, they cut corners by relying on their first perception of your brand to decide whether you make it into their top list or whether they should discard you from their final choices.
Indeed, prospective customers base their decisions on a mixture of feelings – based on their digital experience of your brand. Facts, as it happens, are the least important part of the equation. What your brand needs to focus on, when it comes to first impressions, is the creation of a positive experience online.
This experience is a result of a variety of interactions, whether they occur on your website, on social media, or even on review sites. You are what the audience sees and experiences. Therefore, when you want to encourage a new user to trust your business, you will need to partner with professionals who can help you to create a positive experience for your audience for a winning first impression.
The expert who keeps your brand image coherent
Small businesses and side hustles can sometimes be found cutting corners with their branding design. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to meet solo entrepreneurs who have used an online app or a freelancing platform to create a business logo. In reality, hiring a logo designer on Fiverr is only going to get you a quick and cheap logo design.
However, what you’re missing is the brand board that puts your identity together across multiple channels and materials. Indeed, when you are only a few seconds to make an impression when you’re handing your business cards or posting on social media; the last thing you want is to use a blurry logo or to have a marginally different colo
A professional designer can set your brand board to ensure that you’ve got a meaningful and recognisable logo across all platforms. While it might seem like a trivial matter, it can dramatically affect the way people perceive your brand. It makes you look unprofessional.
The expert who keeps your digital UX friendly and intuitive
Your audience expects your website to be both informative and usable. Single-page applications, such as card layout on page for instance, are a popular minimalist design style used to display portfolios, projects, blog article synopsis, services, products, etc. as an interactive gallery. From a web user’s perspective, card layouts are engaging, cross-device friendly and provide a quick overview of a business offering.
Remember that web users have an attention span online of on average 8 seconds. That’s precisely why a card layout is the best thing modern websites can do to bring the relevant content to the screen. When your card layout works, visitors can access all your information with minimal navigation. However, many small businesses rely on pre-made web templates, which are built using previous javascript framework technologies.
The result can be dramatic, from failure to load the content within the card frame to
The expert who keeps your content consistent across all elements
Content is king when it comes to establishing your online presence. However, consistency is just as important. When considering consistency, a lot of brands tend to focus their strategy on promoting the same information on all platforms, including social media and emails. But digital consistency is a concept that expands through time. Indeed, search engines have a memory. They index your web content throughout the years, which means that depending on the keywords and popularity, Google can pull out an old article instead of your latest one.
However, on your blog, old articles may not be relevant to your activities or expertise anymore. Users expect brands to provide a forward-looking experience. Maintaining a consistent profile, therefore, refers to content management strategies not only across channels but also time. A professional content specialist can help you to develop not only your consistency through time but also to figure out what happens to old articles. Indeed, while there are removal strategies, these can affect your SEO.
The expert who keeps your customers in the loop
Your audience pays close attention to the way you interact with customers on social media. Indeed, as social media communications are typically public, you can’t afford to ignore users or miss a query. Over two-thirds of customers use social media platforms for customer service needs. As customers expect your brand to be always active on social media, they resent delays of over 60 minutes. Working with a social media manager can help you to maintain your brand reputation online, without missing any query from your audience.
The expert who protects your reputation after a bad review
Last but not least, negative reviews are difficult to handle for inexperienced business owners. Nobody wants to read a public review that casts a negative light on their business. But you can’t avoid them. Everybody makes mistakes; hence, there is no company with only positive feedback. Sometimes, reviewers are unfair; sometimes they’re in the right.
A crisis expert or a PR specialist can provide guidance on the best way to respond. Regardless of how you feel, you can’t leave negative feedback unanswered. An apology is appropriate, but it can be tricky to find the right words and defend yourself without sounding like you’re attacking the reviewer. If you’re going through a bad patch of negative feedback, a crisis expert can help you to rebuild trust.
Your brand is what people see online. Form the way you engage with your customers on social media to the way your website creates a user-friendly experience, creating a positive impression is a never-ending process that requires the expertise of many professionals.