As a business in today’s world, having a strong and engaging online presence is absolutely critical to your success. Whether you are just now creating your online identity, or whether you are taking time to reevaluate it, organizing your online assets is vital to cultivating a web-based character that your customers will respect and rely on.

What are we referring to as far as “online assets?” These can include your websites, email addresses, social media accounts, mailing lists, analytics and even CRM databases. Essentially, online assets are anywhere and any way your business uses the internet and represents itself on the web.

At McNutt & Partners, when we start working with new digital marketing clients, the first thing we do is an audit of our client’s online assets. We determine how many domains they own and who owns them, which social media accounts they have already established and their levels of activity, what email addresses are associated with their business and so on. This helps give us an idea of what has been done and what needs to be done to improve a client’s web presence moving forward.

We work with clients all the time where online assets we inherit are completely unorganized, sometimes to the point of hindering the purpose of having those online assets in the first place. If you don’t know what you have or how to access it, you are bound to wind up not using a domain, social account or email that could potentially be a benefit to your business.

If you want to take action to organize your business’ online assets, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• How many domains do I own and what are they?
• Who is my domain registrar?
• Do I have credentials to access my domains?
• Which email addresses are associated with my business?
• Where is my email hosted?
• Which social media accounts have I established?
• Which social media accounts is my business lacking?
• When was the last time I posted on my business’ social media accounts?
• What are my access credentials for my social media accounts?
• Do I have access to my analytics?
• What (if any) mailing lists do I have and when were they last updated?
• Where are my mailing lists stored and do I have access to that?

When you become a McNutt & Partners client, these are questions we will ask and help you find answers to in an effort to identify your weak spots as far as your digital offering and devise a plan to strengthen them. As a business, keeping inventory of your online assets is just as important as keeping your books in an orderly fashion. And because your digital presence is constantly in the public view, a well-maintained online identity will ultimately reflect positively in the eyes of the consumers you are trying to attract.

For more insight into our ideas about successful digital marketing and traditional advertising, continue to follow the McNutt & Partners blog! Call us at 334-521-1010.