Online presence and the website’s role in it are taken for granted today without considering some significant facts. For a start, let’s list a couple of examples of online presence:

  • Website
  • Application
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Google business place
  • Comments that mention you or your company
  • Advertising
  • YouTube channel
  • Business directories
  • Google search
  • Bing search
  • …

We could easily list a lot more examples of online presence… I’ll take the liberty of saying that online presence is all that can be found about yourself or your company on the Internet. Hopefully, now that we highlighted the notion of online presence, we can continue with the challenges this topic imposes. 

Take, for instance, that in all the examples listed above, you or your company are mentioned in a positive context. That’s an ideal scenario, we are doing a good job, and we are showing it, people praise us… a situation one can only wish for 🙂

In practice, It’s not always quite the case. Whether objective or malicious persons are in question, there’s always a possibility that something will occur that doesn’t quite go in our favor. Why?

Out of simple reason that there are sources of online presence which we can influence, that is, control the content that is shown (our website, our Facebook page, our YouTube channel…), and sources we cannot influence (comments, posts, reviews, texts on websites that we don’t own…), and there are significant challenges present. It takes great expertise, expert skills, and dedication to create an online portrait of a brand, a company, or an individual in a way that we want it to be. It’s a separate topic worked on by the crisis online communication.

If we focus solely on the sources we can directly influence (our website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, LinkedIn profile…), a question occurs: What’s ours in the first place? What do we own? What is it we know that indeed cannot be taken from us (of course, while we’re within the legal framework)?

Out of everything listed, only the website and application (if we have one) are owned by us. They’re the only ones where we didn’t have to accept the terms of use and the only ones that cannot be taken away from us easily.

We don’t own anything else. We are present on those servers under certain conditions, and their owners have the right to deny their services without giving particular explanations. Of course, this isn’t something that happens often, but it does happen. Besides that, the owners of these platforms can very easily and without any announcement, change the terms of use, cut down certain functions they deem unnecessary, etc…

In summary, your website or your application is essentially your sole online property. Therefore, we should aspire to make them the primary destination and the ultimate goal of your online presence. Why?

Because we have exclusive control over the content published on them, we define the environment; we manage the information flow; we have pretty detailed insights into website visitors’ behavior. And, based on these data, we can do an analysis based on which we make decisions on our further steps. A website doesn’t exclude other forms of online presence, and this article aims to exclusively emphasize its significance in the online ecosystem you are building.

The question is, what kind of website and application we need? That is directly influenced by your line of work and to what extent you wish to do it online.

When discussing websites and applications, we need to have one thing in mind: the goal. Your website or application needs to have a clearly defined goal that is measurable and realistically achievable.

What can we expect from a website or an application, what are the opportunities, and in what way can you improve your business?

Let’s go through a couple of examples we achieved in practice.

Presentational website

In line with our new “homey” rebranding, the idea was to represent the Homepage agency in a new light. You can check the outcome on homepage.rs.

Web-shop

The solution we did for our foreign client was somewhat a challenge taking into account the specificity of the service he provides. The client sells weekend arrangements (themed tours) for people over 50 who don’t have a life partner.

The result was that we transferred the information gathering process, availability check, and, in the end, the very sales to the enlarged website. Rezultat je bio da smo proces informisanja, provere termina i na kraju same prodaje u potpunosti prebacili na webiste uz njeno povećanje.

Consulting

This example has to do with qualified lead generation.

A client gave us the task to reduce the number of phone calls while maintaining the number of leads and, based on the subject of an email received, to enable him to recognize whether the lead qualifies for further processing.

Besides projecting the website in line with the industry requirements (filtering based on availability, chronology, active contents, contents to come…), we had the challenge of drafting a survey whose task was to define the quality of the lead itself.

We succeeded in reducing the number of phone calls and saved the client time needed to process the leads. 

Intranet

A client’s request was to simplify the communication with the employees and make it faster for all the necessary information to be communicated quickly and clearly. We came up with a solution that significantly helped the HR sector. Using the internal platform, the employees can now see all the latest news from the company, order a daily menu, send a vacation request…the list of all their colleagues is always available, as well as the information about which sector they’re in, who is their team lead…etc.

An interesting part is the very onboarding process which is an entirely online one. New colleagues are presented on the homepage, where all the employees can learn more about any of them through their employee profiles. There is also a section with internal procedures, rule books, library, company structure, naturally, with the possibility for the employees to give suggestions and propositions directly on the platform.

Activation

As we stated before, when you’re thinking about a website or an application, it’s of utmost importance that you have a clear goal. A client’s goal was to raise awareness about the people who became prominent for their humane efforts during the isolation caused by the pandemic, such as doctors and other professionals whose job propelled them to do so.  This project was achieved through a web application where people nominated their “heroes” – all those who displayed their greatness and humanity during this challenging period. The activation achieved awe-inspiring results, which resulted in a reward given by DSOJ (The Public Relations Society of Serbia). 

Using these couple of examples, I tried to familiarize you with the overall idea and present just a tiny portion of the websites’ and applications’ capabilities.