How To Build Your Digital Brand From Scratch
As a Branding Agency with strong digital advertising roots, we are often tasked by clients to help them to build their brand online. In this article, I will be sharing some of the processes that we have found to be effective in building effective brands using online advertising.
Be True To Your Brand.
Step 1 is to have a solid brand identity for your firm. If you do not, please create one before you apply anything in this article. Be sure to understand who you are, who you wish to talk to, and have a clear understanding of the true value and strong features of your product and services. A strong defined brand is an essential element of reaching an audience and converting them to customers.
Define Your Tools.
Everyone has a website these days, and your website is the foundation of any effective online branding campaign. Take a hard look at your website, perhaps you might seek the opinions of some of your best customers to define whether or not your site is a true reflection of who you are and the value your company provides to its customers. Once the foundation is secure, you are free to build brand recognition by using the power of online promotion.Email is a powerful tool that many companies overlook because it has become “noise” in customer email inboxes. If done well, email marketing to a list that is squarely within your target market is still a strong tool. Current customers may still need to be reminded of your firm, and we have had recent success in purchasing email lists for clients that are very focused.Paid advertising offers many options to reach a targeted audience. Programmatic advertising and Google Remarketing and Affinity Display Campaigns have become cost-effective options in reaching a defined target. These are definitely not the banner ads of internet marketing days past that were just a nuisance for website visitors. The ads are delivered to an audience that has shown an interest in the goods and services that you provide through search history or even a visit to your website. Google and Bing text ads continue to be a big part of any online branding campaign, and new dashboards allow ease of analysis and review despite the options numerous bid strategies and platforms offered, especially by Google.Social Media and SEO offer strong results for most clients but are time-consuming and subject to constant changes in algorithms that can radically change results. In both cases, a solid brand promoted using solid organic techniques and with an eye to providing the best user experience possible will always bring gains. Both platforms require patience and hard work to master and bring into the fold, but in most cases, an audience that is gained by promoting your brand on these platforms will be loyal, focused, and will be some of your best prospective customers.
How Do You Tell If It Is Working?
We measure online gains using analytics, and where possible, sales figures. You do not have to be an ecommerce business to measure sales from online brand promotion. Most platforms allow tracking of conversions and if they do not, they can be tracked effectively by using Google Tag Manager, which is a part of Google Analytics. To go beyond just conversion tracking, you may find interesting trends in online performance by checking the following metrics in Google Analytics:-New Users-Defined as site visitors who have not had a cookie dropped into their browser by Google Analytics, a growth in New Users is a strong indication that you are reaching an audience not previously reached by your online brand.-Direct Website Traffic-Direct visitors have put the URL of your website into a browser or may have your website saved as a bookmark. If they are coming to you directly, it is safe to say that your branding has made an impression on this potential customer, or on another website visitor who is referring them to your website directly.-Landing Pages and User Behavior on Google Analytics. Landing pages will tell you what features of your brand have the best online placement, and the User Behavior statistics will help you to evaluate how many visitors are coming back and how frequently they view your information, and how long they spend on individual pages. These metrics are very useful in defining how effectively you are communicating the essence of your brand to your online audience.Conclusion. The best online branding campaigns are created in simple fashion. Take the brand guidelines, be consistent and choose the online strategies and platforms that reach those audiences. Easy to say, sometimes a bit complicated to accomplish. But the general guidelines are simple: be consistent, be true to who you are, and make sure that your brand shines through with everything from your logo, to your messaging, to the consistency of brand voice in your online content. You can measure success by analytics and metrics, but the real reward will be the growth in your business fueled by the buzz that will be created by a successful online branding campaign.