Digital Branding Strategy
What is digital branding? Interestingly there is no set definition for the term. So what does it mean? Branding is defined as “the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design” (dictonary.com). Adding digital to that definition applies anything related to the online sphere. Digital branding helps a company develop its brand while expanding its image to new audiences. Branding, especially rebranding, helps a company answer questions about its target audience, goals, perception, and values. Digital branding can be broken into three segments:
- Image
- Logo and color
- Website
- Mission
- Engagement
- Social media
- Influencers
- Content
- Email campaigns
- Market specialization
- SEO
Brand Image
Brand image is what customers see when they discover you, it’s your look and feel that can make or break your reputation. With that being said, it is integral to examine what your customers wantare wanting and expecting from a business in your market.
Let’s look into some of the most important aspects of this process.
Mission and Specialization
Your company’s mission will drive every change you make. When a customer looks at you, they want to know what you stand for. Is your business aiming for social change, sustainability, quality of life improvement, developing technology for the future? Does your target audience care about what you are focussing on? How do you stand out from your competitors?
You need to know who you are and why you are doing what you are doing. Why should people care? If you have a mission statement, great! The next step is making sure your branding reflects it. Once you’ve acknowledged your goal and who you are, you have guidelines for establishing the rest of your branding.
Logo and Colors
With your mission, specialization, and statement in mind, it’s time to develop your logo and color scheme. Ask yourself, how do you want your customers to feel when they look at your company? Do you want your colors to elicit a professional, upbeat, or creative image?
If you take a look at every iconic brand you’ll notice each has its own style that represents their mission. Apple has a simple two-toned apple to match its sleek brand, Google has a multi-colored letter, Chanel uses black and white to show the high-class element of their brand. Even album covers are a visual representation of their content. Your image and colors need to be synonymous with each other. Having an eye-catching color scheme with a consistent image will build brand recognition.
Website
Once your mission and logo are all sorted out, the next step is to decide how to better your website. Your website is one of the most important places where a customer actually interacts with your business. A cluttered website with an unclear user interface ends in frustration and might cost you a sale. Your website is your first impression, you only get one shot and need to make it count. Developing a clean user interface, and intuitive design that is easy to follow and manage is one of the fastest ways of converting site visits to sales. Having a clear design is a great way to keep customers engaged. So, let’s get into the rest of your digital presence.
Engagement
How do you know what your customers want? Being able and willing to engage can set your brand leagues apart from your competitors. A brand that listens and acknowledges itstheir customer’scustomers voices lays the groundwork for a loyal community. Now, let’s examine some of the ways you can start to build that understanding.
Social Media
Like I said above, you can use your website to funnel customers into your social media. Not using social platforms to expand your brand is a massive missed opportunity. The versatility that these social platforms provide, represents a unique opportunity to build relationships and communicate your values with your audience! Taking full advantage of social media by creating content specifically tailored for those mediums, i.e. short videos, infographics, etc, can snowball your brand recognition! Scheduling out your posts so followers receive constant updates about changes or products ensures continued interest. It can also help you develop strong relationships through positive and clever customer engagement.
Influencers
Similar to social media, Influencers can be an effective way to create interest in your brand. You can think of them as almost like a Yelp page with a face. You sponsor them to make a few posts about your brand/product, send items for them to review, and they can translate that investment into site visits, sales, and interest in your brand. Building a positive relationship with these figures also presents the opportunity for more collaboration in the future. Networking is never a bad idea!
Content
Content is anything that your brand is developing to create interest and outreach. Oftentimes you can think of content as your newsletters, advertisements, and SEO. The big question for content is what are you creating to drive interest?
Below, we will take a look at effective ways to drive interest.
Similar to using social media to grow interest in your brand, using email marketing will help you reach your audience who are not on social media. The first step to a successful email marketing campaign is to build a strong list of potential leads. With that being said, email marketing can be a very slippery slope. Everyone has that spam folder filled with ads from brands that just bombard you every hour about the next big thing. The key is to send just enough material to keep interest without being oppressive. With proper balance, the amount of ROI you develop from a cleverly worded email with the right images and color scheme can be incredible! Not too fast though, before you start blasting emails to your customers you need to figure out what you’ll be sending them. Is it a new product announcement, website change, sale, survey, or new branding info? Make sure to target your emails to your audience and write them in an upbeat and engaging tone to have the greatest chance of not being just another email in the spam folder.
SEO
SEO should never be overlooked or disregarded. What’s the point of changing the face of your brand if no one is able to find it? Using the proper keywords and phrases to make sure search engines will show you over your competition is key to growing your brand. Establishing strong CTRs (Click Through Rate) and maintaining SEO is necessary to expand your digital foundation.
But how do you do that? You will need to find someone like Colibri Digital Marketing to take a look at your SEO practices. SEO can be a time-consuming process because there is a lot that goes into it, but the returns are well worth the time spent.
Advertisement
Last but not least is digital advertising. Most of the sections above covered what needs to be done to create a welcoming and memorable experience for your customers, but what if you just can’t get people to stop by and see all the hard work you’ve put in? That’s when you turn to advertising.
You can advertise on search engines, social media, entertainment platforms like youtube, etc. You can work with influencers or sponsor videos and post on social media. However, that can get expensive depending on which content creator you work with, and how many videos you would like to sponsor. Digital advertising is a great medium for expansion with many possible avenues to go down. At the same time, it can be overwhelming, so choosing your platform and strategies based on your KPIs will make it a lot more manageable.
Takeaways
In the end, digital branding can be implemented in tons of places. It takes a lot of work to perfect your digital branding, it’s time consuming, exhausting, and you will need help. Lucky for you Colibri Digital Marketing has experts whose job is to do the thinking and implementation for you. Everybody needs help, look through some of our other work and you will see that we are to make you the best you can be!
