When It Comes to Branding, You Need a Whole Lot More Than Just Digital Marketing
One-on-one interactions and other traditional methods of establishing a brand identity, such as participation in a trade association, public speaking, sponsorships, community involvement, and a variety of other strategies and tactics are not being replaced by digital marketing; rather, digital marketing is serving as a supplement to these other methods.
When building a strategy and plan for branding, each of these needs to be taken into consideration. When developing this plan, it is also of the utmost importance to locate, as well as fund, the necessary infrastructure and resources that are to be assigned to both the development of a brand and the creation of leads. To that purpose, our illustrative checklist can be of assistance to you.
You could also consider enlisting the assistance of an expert digital branding consultant to assist you with the planning and implementation of your brand-building strategy.
What Characteristics Set A Powerful Brand Apart From A Less Successful One?
The internet has become the most useful resource for choosing and selecting the goods and services that the vast majority of customers require.
According to wearesocial.com, 86 percent of people who use the internet in the United Kingdom have conducted an online search for goods and services to purchase, and 81 percent of those people have made a purchase over the internet.
This figure demonstrates how essential it is to establish a name for oneself in the world of digital media.
Before I go into the more expressive advantages of constructing a brand in the digital arena, we need to have a solid understanding of how brands, and more specifically, powerful brands, are characterized.
Let’s begin with the most basic explanation, and then move on to more in-depth topics from there. A powerful brand is one that is memorable to its customers, both those who have purchased from it in the past and those who might buy from it in the future. Have you ever been curious about what this means?
A strong brand is one that has a firm grasp on its unique selling proposition (USP). They also have a very good understanding of their rivals. They have a solid understanding of how their presence alters the dynamic of the environment in which their industry operates.
The fact that a company’s vision, mission, and values are widely disseminated and comprehended within the organization is a significant factor that contributes to the robustness of a brand.
Developing powerful brands requires having a strong brand identity, which can be accomplished by developing a visual synergy that is appealing to the target market. Visual synergy is achieved when elements such as logos, taglines, colour palettes, and iconography are brought together in a manner that is not only pleasing to the eye but also pertinent to the sector in which the company operates.
A powerful brand will use this principle consistently across a wide variety of connections, both in the virtual and physical worlds of operation. By doing so, it will get ingrained in the minds of customers (via identification and repetition), which will ultimately result in the brand being instantly recognizable.
Therefore, successful brands treat brand strategy and growth like any other aspect of their organization, not just Marketing.
The following are some advantages of developing a brand through the use of web marketing:
Visibility, Recognizability, and Accessibility
Since the internet is accessible all over the world, more people will be exposed to your brand than your local sales staff or store could ever hope to reach. With more individuals exposed to your brand, more people will be aware of your products or services than if you relied on more conventional means of promoting them.
A brand’s level of recognition is proportional to the frequency with which it is seen by consumers. Having a presence across a variety of digital media increases the likelihood that a brand will be recognized.
When there is a higher level of familiarity with a brand, there is a larger likelihood that consumers will select that brand when given a choice. In the end, the goal of any brand strategist is to develop brands that are at the forefront of consumers’ minds.
Foster relationships with your contacts across the entirety of the customer journey, from the stage of awareness all the way through the phase of becoming brand advocates.
Customers are more likely to purchase brands that they are already familiar with. The presence of your brands in the digital arena enables you to foster your prospective customers from the phase of brand awareness into the consideration phase when they become informed about your products and services. This phase occurs after they have moved on from the phase of brand awareness.
Customers are considered consumers if they have made the decision to purchase a product or service from a company rather than one of its rivals. Your customers are more likely to become advocates for your brand if you are successful in all three phases of the customer journey (the awareness, consideration, and decision phases) and blow them away in each one.
Many aspects of digital marketing are taken into consideration by marketing teams whenever they think about the consumer journey. Digital marketing planning will contain components like email marketing, social networks, mobile advertising, Outbound Marketing, lead generation and search engine optimization (SEO).
Trustworthiness and Credibility
A trustworthy brand is one that is immediately recognizable, has been in business for a significant amount of time, possesses a devoted fan base or client population, and keeps the promises it makes.
The credibility of a company is bolstered both within the sector in which it operates and among the consumers who patronize it when that company’s products or services are associated with a recognizable and respected brand name.
Credibility and trust are the foundations upon which loyalty and community are built. The simplicity of purchasing also improves as word-of-mouth marketing becomes more widespread, which is a positive consequence. This will result in a rise in the amount of online traffic, conversion rates, interaction with websites and social media, and possibly even higher rates of media interest as well.
This, in turn, has an immediate and direct impact on the business’s edge over its competitors.
Create A Sense Of Community
Building communities have frequently been considered the responsibility of social media marketers; nevertheless, one may make the case that it is everyone’s responsibility to develop communities.
The first justification is straightforward. Because of the nature of the assignment, it involves the participation and involvement of a number of different people, and who better to act as advocates for your brand than your staff? The second reason is that the advantages gained by concentrating on the development of the community are significant.
The launch of new goods and services is made simpler and more cost-effective when a company possesses both brand ambassadors and brand champions, in addition to a devoted customer community for the brand. You’ll also put in less effort to raise people’s knowledge of your brand.
You are most likely curious about the reason why it would be cheaper, aren’t you? Because the size and activity level of your online community will determine the extent to which you will need to rely on paid advertising and public relations to promote your new goods and services, and the less you do so, the more money you will save.
Community building is now significantly less labour demanding and more straightforward than it was in the past, thanks to the development of digital media platforms and marketing automation technologies. In the past, community building required a significant amount of manual labour.
Word-of-mouth marketing is another advantage associated with this. As buyers, we put more stock in the thoughts and judgments of those closest to us than we would in the words of a paid advertiser.
Reach increases when your brand community begins to anticipate and speak about upcoming items, and this increased reach, which is achieved through organic means, is considered as making a significant contribution to the credibility of the brand.
Creating a brand community has additional advantages, one of which is the access it grants to business stakeholders for the purpose of better understanding its target audience. Building a community for your company is the first step on an incredible path toward better knowing your customers, their problems, and the things they adore about your goods and services.
Boost the Value of the Brand
When we talk about a company’s “brand equity,” we’re referring to the financial worth that comes from the way in which consumers perceive and feel about the company’s products, as well as how effectively the company commands market share and profits within its industry.
When your company has a larger level of brand equity, the expenses of paid advertising that are related to increasing traffic or awareness will go down, which is good news for your bottom line.
Consumers are more likely to choose a stronger brand over one offered by a competitor, which is one reason why increased brand equity is associated with increased market share. In light of this fact, there is a chance to move toward a pricing structure that is more premium.
People are more likely to be interested in working for companies that have a good reputation, therefore strong brands have less of a need to aggressively attract new employees. Naturally, this implies that companies with better brands have a lower requirement to spend money on operations linked to human resources and recruitment.
