You may be wondering why Rome is being compared to your digital presence, but as we all know; Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither can your digital presence. From switching your mindset from quick wins to long-term growth, to laying the ground work for your digital empire – read more to find out how to build your digital presence in a way that will work for your business.

Expectation Vs Reality

It’s easy to expect a big following straight away, whether you’re promoting your business or building a personal brand, everyone has heart-eyes for those big numbers, but focussing on the big numbers will be your downfall.

Quick wins make you stressed, look at it this way. You’ve decided to elevate your content; you’ve spent hours strategically editing a reel to promote your businesses best selling product. The quality is immaculate, each shot has been perfectly thought out and you are positive this post will do well. You click post and it’s performed poorly, so you stop posting.

“I’ve put so much effort into that post and it’s performed poorly, so what actually is the point?” This is what not to do. Staying consistent and building solid foundations will be the best thing you can do for your digital presence, and here’s why…

Building Foundations

The key elements within your foundations for a digital presence that helps your business or personal brand grow will always involve strong branding and an engaging content strategy. So, before you think about posting, ensure you have in mind exactly what you want your audience to know about you or your brand, this way you can deliver these messages and ideologies through your content.

Creating a solid digital foundation is like laying the groundwork for a great empire, keep consistent, and stay on brand.

The Process

The process is exactly where consistency will become your best friend.

As they built Rome, they worked on it every single day, bit by bit, piece by piece. Eventually they had a whole city. Apply this to your digital presence, consistent actions – whether that’s audience engagement or posting content – will help build a lasting digital presence over time, just as Rome is a place that thousands of tourists visit every single day.

Within the process, it’s also important to remember that social media evolves over time. Building patience, persistence and adaptability into your digital strategy will work hand in hand with elevating your overall presence.

Set Backs

Set backs will always come with a digital presence, when one video goes viral, you then expect the rest to do the same. If you’re not new to the world of social media, you will know that the algorithm changes daily. What was relevant or resonated with an audience one day, may not the next.

It’s important to stay motivated and on brand. It’s easy to break brand guidelines or escape from your niche when you feel you are no longer relevant, but what may not be relevant today might be the thing everyone is talking about tomorrow. Stay consistent, stay motivated and stay on brand.

Mindset Shift

Switching your mindset from quick wins to long term growth will be the best thing you can do for your digital presence. It’s better to build a slow following of loyal customers over time, rather than have every single video go viral and build an unloyal following that becomes disinterested after a few days or weeks.

The benefits of thinking long term in the digital world gives you a brand that is recognisable, trust worthy and aligns with its own core values. Long term engagement builds more trust, loyalty and better SEO discoverability. Every small step eventually adds up and leads to a snowball effect.

This type of mindset helps you stay focussed, grounded and adaptable, rather than panicking and stressing if your content doesn’t go viral right away.

Rome Vs Your Digital Presence

I suppose you might understand where we are coming from now with the Rome reference, things take time & being impatient will hold you back even further. Here’s a few things to remember when working on your digital presence:

• Set small goals and celebrate milestones along the way
• When you think long term, you’re less stressed about the immediate outcomes
• You’ve worked hard for this, you deserve to celebrate

So, remember, be patient, be persistent, be adaptable and most importantly – stay consistent!