Digital marketing makes branding your business much easier.
Branding is crucial for business success. A brand is the collection of identifiers (name, logo, packaging, etc.) that help people recognise a company, product, or individual. If your customers do not recognise your brand, then they are more likely to purchase from an alternative they can identify. Additionally, branding helps improve the success of all of your product or service offerings. Customers having a good experience with one product increases the likelihood of them purchasing a separate product of yours in the future.
Digital marketing utilises online technologies and channels to promote products or services. But, how does digital marketing help branding? Digital marketing allows companies to increase visibility, create associations between their products and symbols, and target customers at each stage of the brand recognition process (brand rejection, non-recognition, recognition, preference, and loyalty). These abilities provide companies more flexibility in advertising to customers and help them make their brand identifiers more widely recognised.
Importance of Branding
Branding has many important roles in a business. It drives customer brand awareness and recognition, builds customer trust, improves advertising results, and generates customer loyalty. Brand awareness and recognition helps customers recognise your product, service, and logo, which increases the likelihood of them choosing your offerings over a competitor’s. Likewise, customer trust in your brand makes consumers more likely to purchase from you in the future.
Customer loyalty is arguably the most important metric because it greatly increases the chance that past customers will purchase future products. Customer loyalty is often measured with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric, which gauges how likely a customer is to recommend a product. Research America is a great resource for explaining more about the NPS and how beneficial it is for nearly every industry and organisation. Understanding how many customers have already achieved brand loyalty helps businesses revise their marketing plan to either target new customers, focus on converting existing customers, or focus on keeping current loyal customers happy.
Choosing Your Digital Marketing Strategies
There are many ways to market your brand online; prioritising the strategies that will provide the most value for your business is crucial for success.
Some of the most popular digital marketing strategies include:
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Content marketing
- Blogging
- Video marketing (typically on YouTube)
Choosing the right mix of strategies for your business will depend on a number of factors, including your marketing budget, company goals, industry, target audience, and more. For small and mid-sized businesses, starting with social media and email marketing is likely the best strategy. These options are both low-cost and highly effective at building an online brand. Social media allows you to engage with a large audience and help more people achieve brand recognition, while email marketing is useful for connecting with past customers to encourage them to buy again or to build customer brand preference or loyalty.
Larger businesses can choose to specialise in a few strategies or diversify their efforts across multiple channels and techniques to see which performs best for their industry and target audience. Preliminary research can be used instead to eliminate this guesswork and find which channels generate the best results before investing a large amount of time and money in nonoptimal strategies.
Optimising Your Website
Your website is one of the most important places to create your online brand. On your company website, you have nearly unlimited freedom to showcase your brand colors, logo, name, products, services, packaging, and all other elements of your brand. Your website is likely the first place many customers discover your brand or research your products, so your web pages should be helpful, engaging, and branded. Adding a blog to your website is a great way to provide more value to consumers.
Your website should represent your brand identity and highlight how your products or services meet the needs of your target audience. Including demonstration videos, positive customer reviews, and suggested next steps (a call to action) can help market your brand to consumers. Providing your contact information or offering forms to request more information can help turn your website into a lead generation powerhouse.
Overview
Overall, digital marketing can be a powerful tool to build your brand and increase advertising success. Maintaining consistency in messaging and branding across digital channels is essential for creating a holistic and unified brand image. However, switching tones can be acceptable, especially when creating content for your website versus social media. Generally, social media has a more casual tone, but it is important to keep the core messaging aligned with your website or emails.
By choosing the right digital marketing strategies for your business, you can effectively build your brand, increase customer brand recognition, and improve your sales over time.
