By Shawn Theesfeld for our 99 Ways to Make a Positive Difference in Your Pharmacy blog series
Your pharmacy has a great website. You have an active social media presence. But how is your online presence doing?
An online presence is a cohesive integration of your website and social media, and essentially is your store’s online personality. To make your online presence benefit your business, you need to keep a few things in mind:
Set goals
What do you want your online presence to DO for your business? Are you trying to drive e-commerce sales? Do you want to increase visits to your website? Are you trying to establish your pharmacy as a community health resource? Who is your target audience? Make sure you have a clear vision for what you want your online efforts to achieve, and set quantifiable metrics to gauge your progress.
Be consistent
Make sure you’re using the same logos, tone, style, fonts (where applicable), and messaging in your social media you’re using on your website. Keeping your online presence consistent will help people recognize you and make it easy for them to connect with you across a variety of digital channels.
Cross-link
Add links to your social media platforms onyour website, and vice versa. Make sure it’s easy for visitors to your social media sites to find your website and share your content, and for visitors to your website to connect with your social sites.
Use analytics
Social media networks and Google analytics provide valuable information about how your social efforts and website efforts are working together. You’ll be able to tell if visitors to your social sites are clicking over to your website, and what content followers of your social platforms engage with the most. Use this data to adjust your tactics for maximum reach and engagement.
Be responsive – take your great customer service online
Visitors to your website and social media may like or follow you, or leave comments or questions. Reply to these as quickly as possible. If these people try to interact with you online and get no response, it sends them a negative message about your customer service in general, which can impact your in-store operations.
Approach the many components of a successful online presence with strategy and care to get the most benefit for your business.
As part of the PC development team, Shawn helps to develop, maintain and support all in-house, PC-based applications. This development includes Microsoft SQL development, .NET development, and Web development.