Marketing + Web

What’s a Digital Footprint and Why Does It Matter to My Business?

Never underestimate the power of your business’s digital footprint. 

When you hear the words “digital footprint” you may think of online breadcrumbs or traces of your personal activities online—whether that be your social media profiles and posts or comments you’ve made on web-based review sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp. But when we talk about your business’s digital footprint we are talking about something a little different than a personal digital footprint. 

What is a Business Digital Footprint? 

A business’s digital footprint is the complete expression of it’s brand online. This includes everything that you’ve said—or that others have said—about your business/brand anywhere on the internet. You could think of managing your digital footprint as online reputation management. Everything from content you’ve created and strategically disseminated to comments and reviews posted by people you’ve never met, your digital footprint is your brand’s online reputation and something that needs to be prioritized in a successful digital marketing strategy. 

How Can I Discover My Business’s Digital Footprint? 

To get a sense of what we mean, open a new tab and do a quick search on your company’s name and review the results. Are you surprised by what you see? Ideally, a direct search on your company name should return your own branded content on at least the first full page of results. Hopefully you’re seeing results like your company’s neatly indexed website, social media profiles, presence in online directories and review sites, as well as, in an online magazine. 

Some results may pleasantly surprise you, such as a loyal customer praising your company on their own social media channels, but what should you do if the results look different than the ideal? Perhaps you’re seeing a few inaccurate directory listings or stray bits of outdated info such as an old address or telephone number. Or maybe you’re seeing your company named on a review website you’ve never even heard of! While we hope the latter is not the case, we do see this more often than you may think. 

Online Brand Management Can Improve Your Digital Footprint

At the end of the day, this is really about online brand management. Every business needs to be proactive in shaping and doing everything possible to control their online identity. In traditional brand management, a business owner wouldn’t dream of ignoring their brand’s reputation in the physical marketplace so why do some businesses ignore their brand identity online? 

One of the major service areas we focus on at Cross & Crown is assessing, maintaining, and maximizing our clients’ digital footprints.

We work with our clients to ensure that all the information about them online is an accurate representation of their product or services. This includes keeping the back-end of your website neatly indexed and error-free, ensuring that online listings and directories are up-to-date, addressing comments your customers are making about your company on social media (e.g. Twitter mentions), and any other online comments or reviews posted about your company in unexpected places. 

If you’re unsatisfied with the results you see from that quick google search on your business, stay turned to our weekly blog posts, or even better, go ahead and contact us now. Depending on the size and quality of your digital footprint, there may be some things you can do right away to improve and expand your digital presence. But there are other things you could (or should) be doing to improve your digital footprint that require subject matter expertise—such as SEO—that you may need our help with right away. 

We have the expertise you need to conduct a thorough assessment of your company’s digital footprint and help you successfully manage your brand reputation online. Let us know how we can help!