‘Professional Visibility’ is my term for the kind of online visibility that gets more leads and customers from your website and across the web.
It’s not enough to have a ‘brochure’ website.
It’s not enough to post every once in a while on Facebook.
Your company depends on you becoming a business that seems like it’s everywhere online. Professional Visibility means being able to be more selective with the kinds of customers and clients you choose to work with.
Referrals are great – but should you depend entirely on the good will of your friends, community, and current customers?
I venture to say that if you are over 50% dependent on referrals, you need to buy in completely to the idea of renovating your online presence – to be more professional, and visible.
Principle one: Professional Visibility means your website is as professional as you are and reflects the quality of work you do.
If you are the type of person that stands behind their work 100% – don’t you want your website to tell that story? The perception of your company’s quality is affected by your website’s quality – for good or bad. If your website is speaking volumes and it’s not saying what you want it to – it might be time to change the story with a website redesign.
Principle two: Professional Visibility means people easily find your company when people search for companies that do what you do on search engines.
If your company isn’t doing regular and consistent Search Engine Optimization, you may be dropping the ball. SEO just means creating content regularly and structuring your website so it’s easily crawlable by search engines. Also, it means getting links back to your website from other websites in your niche with high metrics themselves. It’s easy enough to get started, but hard to follow-through. Consider hiring a professional if you don’t have 5+ hours a week to spend on this.
Principle three: Professional Visibility means when people Google the name of your company that the first page of search results reflects the type of business you are.
Do you have solid 5-star reviews from all of your favorite customers? If not – you should be reaching out, or implementing some kind of reputation management software to reach out and follow up with your customers on your behalf and screen the bad feedback – having it sent back to you instead. Most reputation management software has this ability, and I use GetFiveStars for my clients and their customers.
Principle four: Professional Visibility means people that follow your company on social media see regular updates consistently with useful content that’s appropriate for each social network. This reminds people that you exist.
This is as close as it gets to advertising. Post a tweet, a Facebook post, or an Instagram story of your process regularly, or you’re saying ‘yeah, I want my business to succeed, but I don’t want to look silly on social.’ Don’t neglect the 100s of eyeballs that may check out what you have to say on social. Not to mention, if people click through to your social media pages from your website and you haven’t posted in five months, they might assume your company isn’t that serious, isn’t that big – or worse, went out of business!
Principle five: Professional Visibility means that when people visit your website, they are ‘remarketed’ to throughout the web so that they have reminders of when they considered your company.
Google AdWords remarketing, and Facebook remarketing allows you to put your ads in front of people that had gone on your site before but left without making a decision. The ‘click through rate’ on these ads is much higher than other ads that are served up to a particular audience that hasn’t interacted with your site.
Principle six: Professional Visibility means that your company is telling a memorable and visually compelling story, that illustrates the problem you solve.
This might require making a video and telling the story of a customer of yours and how your work has changed their lives for the better. It might mean showcasing photos that make the value you provide obvious and emotionally compelling – no matter what, it needs to focus on the customer and not just you. This lack of focus on the customer is a key problem I see with various companies’ marketing; it often falls flat because it doesn’t focus enough on the benefits to the customer. Instead,  it talks about all of the features and is ‘self-focused,’ which is not professional in a modern sense – it’s ego-centric and uncompelling.
Principle seven: Professional Visibility means knowing what niche or niches your company is aggressively persuing and providing resources and content for those people to solve their problems, and nurture the relationship.
This means writing or having content written that helps people when they come up against problems related to what you do. It can mean tutorial videos, deep guides, and blog posts that answer questions. The ideal situation is that your company thinks of itself as a media company that needs to churn out relevant content that is useful, educational, and (ideally) entertaining as well.
Principle eight: Professional Visibility means having clear calls to action throughout your website, at the end of each page, and in social posts to drive more business and help more people.
If you’re not implementing Professional Visibility – you’re doing yourself, your company, and your customers a disservice. You’re shirking your responsibility to help as many people as possible that are a great fit for your products or services.
Success is your duty.
I believe people that keep their company unnaturally small are potentially not fulfilling their destiny – and I like helping people fulfill that destiny – that mission – that purpose.
If I can help you connect with more people that need what you have – send me a message at tim@hookagency.com or call me at 763-221-5525 and we can chat about what you need to do to take it to the next level.
