What is Digital Branding?
Digital branding is more or less the same concept as conventional branding; however, the advertising campaigns are replaced with digital media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. When you bring the social media aspect into the mix, you’re branding the business “digitally” so that its presence can be felt all over the internet.
Why is it so Important?
It pays to understand why building your brand digitally in this day and age is so critical. Although branding always has played a vital role in any business’s success, we must consider how the online landscape continues to change and evolve with varying user behaviours, for one. Therefore, its importance and benefits are pretty convincing:
- Branding gives you a competitive edge. The digital media world can get very “noisy” and staying competitive is now more of a day-to-day digital challenge than anything else.
- Online users today are more independent than ever before; they have everything they need right at their fingertips, and there’s a rich variety to be found online in terms of products and services. A well defined digital brand building strategy is important in order to distinguish yourself from every other competitor.
- As a brand, you cannot exercise much control over what people say about you online. Users can quickly check out opinions of others familiar with your service, which can marginally influence their decision to purchase. Have a strong digital brand following and you can seal their trust.
- The business/consumer relationship simply does not end when a sale is made. Brand building in the digital arena leverages this to convert first-time consumers into lifelong brand loyalists.
Digital branding isn’t only about what you’re offering. It’s about the effectiveness of your social engagement, your employees, the sales process, customer services and everything that falls in between. Think for a second about how online branding has influenced all that.
How is Branding Different from Marketing?
Marketing is what you’d call actively promoting your business’s offerings. It’s a “push” strategy because you’re consciously pushing out your message in order to get people buying. For example, “buy ‘x’ product because it is better than ‘y’”, which is assumed to be the competition. Or “buy this because a certain celebrity uses it and they absolutely love it”. Perhaps, this is oversimplifying it a little, but at a glance, that’s pretty much it.
Branding on the other hand, precedes and underlies your marketing efforts. Branding is a “pull” strategy because it expresses the underlying value of your product and/or service. It is a collection of characteristics, attributes and values which clarify what the brand is and isn’t, so that people have clear expectations.
A strong brand definitely encourages people to buy more and supports the sales and marketing activities you have in place, though it does not say “buy me now”, like marketing does. Instead, it’s more along the lines of “This is what I do, why I exist, and if you agree with what I’m offering, you can buy me and tell your friends about me”. Marketing is done to gain a tactical advantage, while branding gives you a strategic one.
4 Common Aspects of Digital Branding
Commanding Content
Quality content forms the cornerstone of a prominent online presence as well as a commanding digital brand. It’s content like social media updates, eBooks and blogs, to name a few, that helps people find your brand online and identify with it. It can position you as an industry leader and without the right content your brand is more or less static.
Buyer Personas
Having great, authoritative content is essential though it won’t have much “oomph” if it isn’t specifically written to accommodate your buyer personas and addresses their pain points. A buyer persona defines who the ideal buyer is of your products/services – namely the psychological, behavioural and demographic elements of a user. You need to know who’s buying from you so that you only create content that resonates well with them.
Multiple Engagement Platforms
Naturally, you’re not going to be on every single social media channel or have more than one websites. However, on your website, there ought to be one social media profile at the very least, depending on your mission objectives and buyer personas. Essentially, you need to be on the social media platforms your buyers are.
Being on multiple platforms pays because search engines count each platform as a unique source of high-value rankings; it improves your brand’s keyword search results when people want to find you. Better visibility for your brand comes with high search engine rankings.
Cross-promotion
A successful digital brand knows how to promote great content across multiple platforms, and fine-tuning it to be best-presented on each one. Your buyer personas might engage you on multiple channels throughout the day, which is why you should be on our toes. For instance, they might miss out on the latest blog you posted on Facebook, but they won’t miss it when it lands in their weekly newsletter. Decide how to post your content on multiple social channels.
Sometimes, it’s a good idea to promote older content across different channels, particularly if it was a raving hit in the not too distant past.
Real-world Example: Digital Branding Done Right
Here’s how famed fashion designer Giorgio Armani incorporated a great digital branding strategy in the second quarter of 2015 to celebrate the brand’s 40th anniversary:
Armani was celebrating four decades of fashion success and created a digital branding campaign called #ATribute which shed light on certain aspects of the brand and its history by way of a serialized approach. By singling out a specific offering, Armani put itself in a better position to let everyone know what made its beauty line so memorable while also celebrating achievements across other categories including fragrance, apparel/accessories, and hospitality and personal care.
Armani’s dedicated microsite comprised weekly updates which were based on different themes spanning out over a 40-week time frame. Content included great runway cameos and ad campaigns, including notable moments where the designer made significant contributions to the fashion industry.
By trending on Twitter, the brand was able to attract more attention making it visible to more eyes, and resulting in more buyers. Plus, it also solidified its name by being hyper active on social media and promoting itself in a unique manner.
4 Ways to Getting More Successful with Digital Branding
While connecting with customers on Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is something we recommend wholeheartedly, not harnessing the power of other digital branding platforms may prevent you from enjoying the highest search engine rankings. Free and highly effective channels such as:
YouTube
It’s understandable that content may be more difficult to create on YouTube, but once you have the hang of it, all you need to do transform your digital content and branding strategy using the same concepts, while asking someone to film it. It doesn’t have to be a high-budget mini-movie but rather something audiences can relate to.
You can ask one of your employees so sit against a plain background (or the company’s main hall) and talk about upcoming events and promotions, or the latest happenings in the industry. You could even share a prank or two someone recently pulled at the office. The whole idea is to improve visibility and people will appreciate the fact that you’re reaching out to them through video.
Some of the top businesses today have a commanding YouTube presence:
- GoPro has 4,078,547 subscribers with 1,221,366,501 views
- Playstation boasts 4,738,311 subscribers along with a total 1,46,043,146 page views
- Angry Birds’ subscribers stand at 1,732,404 and total views amounting to 2,691,201,735
Udemy
An online learning marketplace like Udemy is a great place to promote your digital brand presence.
Consumers are always on the lookout to educate themselves on a particular subject or discipline. Why not tap into your users’ intellect by offering free classes to teach them more about your industry? Establishing yourself as a Udemy instructor effectively puts the authority figure seal on your company brand and happens to be a great opportunity to make people love your product even more.
Udemy is redefining the way online learning is perceived and gets more than 500,000 unique visitors each month. In fact, 10 instructors on Udemy earned $1.6 million in a year. With profits like that, you surely have more than a couple of reasons to command your presence there.
PlayBuzz
Ever answer one of those silly but fun personality quizzes? They certainly add a few minutes of amusement to your day, don’t they? Your brand can be a part of this fun too.
Create a Playbuzz channel and present a “silly” but interesting quiz to your followers. Including these quizzes in your digital branding strategy is a good way to provide not just amusement but keep your users informed through multiple social media channels.
PlayBuzz has over 1 billion users across its network, boasts a 94% item completion rate and has more than 10,000 leading publishing partners. 50% of their audience are 18-34 year olds.
Quora
The top brands out there are discussed on Quora, with some of the most intellectual minds and industry leaders often contributing to the conversation. You’d be hard pressed to find a brand today with no Quora mentions. To make the most of Quora, ensure you’re account is complete and looks professional. Check out the discussions to get a gist of what popular topics are being discussed in your nice. Communicate openly with others and don’t hesitate to share answer on social media sites.
Over 500,000 topics are being discussed on Quora with millions of views each month. So yeah, there’s little reason not to promote your brand there.
4 Top-notch Tips to Creating a Potent Digital Branding Campaign
Effective brand building is all about skilfully applying the time, resources and effort to creating the desired perception in your user’s mind. Here are some common characteristics that go into successful digital brand building:
Influential Abilities
Consumers are a part of the digital brand building process, and therefore should be given immersive opportunities to contribute. It starts right from the beginning by way of co-creation platforms such as collaborative exchanges, online feedback forms, and blogging or crowd sourcing. Customization is the main link between your ability to influence and customer immersion. Nike’s non-stop evolution of Nike+ is a good example of a brand running on a co-creation platform.
Inter-connective Abilities
In order to have customers experience consistency across all points of contact, it is important that your digital branding strategies sync with the brand’s conventional branding strategies. This typically involves being capable of building an organizational structure which welcomes digital as a crucial platform but isn’t meant as a replacement for conventional branding platforms.
Experiment to Fail, Then Succeed
Brand building in the digital space is more or less an iterative process. You need to be constantly testing and experimenting to validate and look for fresh brand-building ways. Therefore, failure is an inevitable part of the process, but it leads to improvement. As a brand owner, you must invest in monitoring systems like A/B testing, user experience design and web analytics, just to give you an idea.
Actionable Outcomes:
To steer your digital brand strategy in the right direction, you need to be making actionable decisions based on your digital brand building objectives. This is often an overlooked aspect and one which is paramount to overall digital brand success. Establish processes that link your digital brand performance metrics with the core success criteria such as revenues and profitability, marketing and communication ROI or customer acquisition and loyalty.
Future Outlook on Digital Branding
Social media has practically transformed the way consumers see and interact with brands. Social platforms deepen the relationship your brand shares with customers and understanding this is fundamental to finding success in digital branding.
Embrace it so that the brand itself is integrated in the picture, but more importantly, execute it in a way that tells your brand’s story, while staying consistent with the business’s vision.
The AOK Marketing Advantage
Building a great brand in the digital space requires close scrutiny of every social media channel available on the internet today. You need to be on the platforms your customers visit the most. In fact, beat them to it so that they are greeted with a breath of fresh air when they see your name.
Consult our digital marketing experts today completely FREE or call us directly on 1.888.566.2577.
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