Digital Brand Management Guide

In a highly digitalized era, it might feel that we’ve always been in sync and connecting online at the base level. But in reality, our digital landscape is moving swiftly and is constantly advancing in the form of unique platforms, devices and device-based applications being launched for the public. A product (with respect to technology) that has been newly launched in the market has a competitor within months (with additional features, etc.). This brings us to believe that there is a never-ending brand management digital transformation.

The ways and mediums we connect and communicate is ever-evolving. From Landlines to Pagers, from mobile phones to emails and now the newest and most convenient medium of communication is instant messaging apps (e.g. WhatsApp). This is why companies need to alter their advertising mediums that communicate their brand message and boost customer experiences.

Let’s take a look at what is Digital Brand Management and a step by step procedure on how to go about it for your business.

What is Digital Brand Management?

Digital brand management absorbs traditional brand management rules and applies them to customer experiences across various digital mediums. Simply put, it’s monitoring and guiding the way your brand is viewed online. The aim here is to foster direct customer engagement. This means social media, apps and company websites allow your brand to interact directly with your customers as though real time. This is one of the main reasons why digital brand management is really a progression to direct marketing. It covers everything to do with how your customer interacts directly with your brand via various up to date digital medias, encompassing landing pages and apps and also the entire spectrum of online content strategy. To attain a sustainable digital brand management strategy, successful organizations are leveraging social media, website content and mobile applications in order to boost brand awareness, interact with customers directly and power market reach.

How to get started with digital branding?

Step 1: Identify and Create Your Ideal Customer List:
We shall learn how to identify and create your ideal customer list by brainstorming on these questions. Once these are answered, you can proceed to step 2.
1. Who are your customers? Here you need to define who exactly from a family will purchase your products and services. E.g. If you own a baby care products business, the parent or the grandparents will be the ones purchasing your product.
2. What are their specific needs? Here you will note down all the requirements they have. Building on the same example of baby care products, they would need moisturizers, hair oil, body oil, shampoos, clothes, caps, etc.
3. Where are they situated? This can vary from business to business. If your business is situated in a city area, you can probably find your potential customers near nursing homes or hospitals.
4. How can you engage them? Here you can think of what kind of campaigns will help you get attention from your customers. Leverage festivals, international days, etc. to design campaigns accordingly.
5. What is their preferred mode of purchase? Many parents wouldn’t have the time to venture out to shop for products for their kids. Hence the latest trend is online marketing. You must consider moving to an E-commerce platform as this would make purchasing from you convenient.
6. When do they purchase? Here you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoe. Ask a few parents around you, when do they buy baby products? When they are in their 6th or 7th month of pregnancy or after the kid is born? A google form research survey will help you gather the buying patterns of to be parents.
7. What are their purchasing habits? Here again, you need to ask questions like, do they buy your products monthly or quarterly or half-yearly.?

The 7 questions above shall help you, map a complete journey of the stages of purchase so that you are aware of your prospects’ needs and what they are going to do in the next stage.

Step 2: Design a Logo and Website
Let’s break this into 2. First Logo and then we can talk about your website.

Logo Design:
Let’s first understand what does a logo symbolize? It is created to represent your business, so your customers should be able to easily identify your company by your logo. A good logo should incorporate elements of your brand’s mission and values.
These are some basic rules to designing your logo for your business:
1. Choose appropriate colors that match your business personality, your industry and your target audience.
2. Make the logo design memorable so that it leaves an impact on the minds of the customers.
3. Your logo must look good in all sizes because it will be used for multiple advertising mediums e.g. in websites, pamphlets, letterheads, business cards, social media thumbnails, etc.
4. Choose an ideal font that matches the tone of your business. Use formal fonts for formal businesses (Lawyers, manufacturers) and use informal font if you have a lively as well as informal business (music company, cocktail gowns)
5. Do not make the design complicated. On an average your audience will remember your logo if it is simple. They should be able to recognize your brand just from your logo.

Once you are done with the logo design, it’s time to see how it will look on your website. Follow these design essentials to create a user-friendly website:
1. For consistency, your website should have the same color theme as your brand’s logo.
2. The design should be simple yet elegant.
3. Keep the text font legible keeping in mind design esthetics.
4. Navigation should be easy so that the users don’t find it difficult to browse through other pages on the website. Use the traditional menu button on the top or a hamburger menu in the corner.
5. Make sure your website follows an easily crawlable link structure. This will ensure each update on your website is crawled upon the various search engines for better SEO results.
6. Use a contrasting color for your CTA(Call-to-action) button. This will distinguish the content on the website from the various CTA buttons (e.g. order now, subscribe now or enquire now) in order to be easily visible and to drive maximum actions.
7. Make your website responsive. Responsive means, the content on the website will scale according to the screen size. (e.g. Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Mobile) and get rid of all errors, if any.
8. Have your website content crafted originally, design compelling content to provide value to your website visitors which will in turn drive user action.

Step 3: Enhance Your Brand Message
Every business be it small or large requires a powerful brand message to maintain an edge over its competitors. Sending out a crisp and clear message consistently is critical to make an impact on your potential customers. This ultimately helps to position your brand strongly in any niche.
Here are some tips to follow while enhancing your brand message:
1. Conduct competitor analysis and recognize the messages that your competitors are trying to deliver.
2. Always try to give solutions to the pain points of your customers and try to focus on that solution in your brand message. Say it loud and clear.
3. Don’t be afraid to seek ideas from your audience. Surveys, webinars, etc. will help you gather information on their pain points.
4. While designing the brand message you must consider looking at the products or services that you’re offering and to whom they are offering to. Your brand message should be clear so that people understand immediately what you are selling and why is it helpful for them.
5. Feel free to take inspiration from successful brands but mind you, we do not recommend you copy them.

Step 4: Boost Your Online Presence via SEO
You can’t neglect the power of SEO when it comes to digital branding, especially if you fall under the MSME category of business. Follow the below tips to optimize your website and be seen on various search engines:
1. Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines while designing your website to help Google find, index and rank your website.
2. Use proper schema markup to describe the content on your website.
3. Have unique, relevant and enthralling content that people love to read and share.
4. Be in a habit of posting Blogs on your website. Backlinking them to your relevant service pages will help boost your conversion rate.
5. As already mentioned above in the tips to design effective websites, have a clean navigation structure and make sure your site is responsive.
6. Add proper meta tags on all your pages to permit the search engines to better understand the content of your web pages.
7. Take utmost advantage of keywords in the Alt text of all your images on your website.
8. Try to include keyword synonyms in the heading tags.
9. Design CTA’s to optimize conversions. They must be short and catchy.
10. Improve your page loading speed so that your website can work well on lousy Internet connections.

Step 5: Use Social Media Channels to Reach Your Target Audience
You simply cannot ignore the power and reach of social media. As a business, it is crucial for you to be present on all top social channels because this is the place your audiences will be looking out for you. Ensuring you have good profile visibility is the basic requirement for every business when it comes to digital branding on social media websites.

Here are some strategies to follow in order to have a powerful social media presence:
1. Set your social media goals and objectives in such a way to meet your KPIs (key performance indicators).
2. Use platforms like Shopify to list your products locally on the top social media websites. This will help you sell your products directly on Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Instagram and other popular channels where your potential customer is browsing for similar products.
3. Do a competitive analysis so that you are able to determine on which platforms your competition is present.
4. Consistency works in successful social media management. Create a social media calendar to organize your posts which will have information on brand, products and offers.

Step 6: Strive to Provide Value to Your Customers
Let’s answer this question before getting to the point. What is the most important asset for an organization? Money, employees, or maybe innovation. You are right, but what tops this list is Loyal customers. In order to build and nurture current loyal customers, you must strive to deliver value. The next question you would have in mind is, how do you know what type of content is valuable to your target audience?

Below are some ways you can create value for customers:
1. Use predictive analytics: here you have to predict what your customers need and how would they solutionize or react to these needs.
2. Identify and segment your customers to provide them with a specific value. Send an offer email to a customer yet to buy your product and not to the customer who bought your product at full MRP.
3. Nurture and build relationships with your customers by engaging in two-way conversations with them. This can be done by merely talking to them.
4. You initiate the relationship-building procedure by simply, clarifying your value proposition, which is a promise of value to be delivered – i.e. the main reason someone should buy from you.
5. Provide relevant product recommendations based on a customer’s browsing history and requirements.
6. Reward loyal customers by giving them jaw-dropping discounts and offers to make them feel special.

Step 7: Content Marketing Will Work Wonders
Content marketing is rightly labeled to be the king of the web. No brand can be successful in digital branding if it doesn’t create and run enthralling content marketing campaigns. Content marketing has been showing benefits at every stage of the marketing funnel, from the initial awareness of your brand or products, to specific product details, from complex data like comparison shopping, to eventual conversions. It helps businesses improve brand presence so that they get seen and it also helps to build credibility.

Did you know, 70% of customers prefer to learn about a business by reading an article or blog post? Hence, every business small or big needs to leverage this fact and enhance their digital branding with consistent, unique and quality content. Moreover, it’s noticed that small businesses are able to beat the giants by indulging in intelligent content marketing. This is something that even major brands fear from smaller players. Hence, content marketing is a strategy that should be learned and used well, especially for today’s millennial audiences.

Below are some key points to keep in mind while crafting your content:
1. Your content must be designed in such a way to seem relevant and provide value to your audience with information that is unique, authoritative and trustworthy.
2. Every piece of content you craft should target the problems of the segmented audience with solutions to the same.
3. Prepare a list of keywords/topics that you wish to target. Include 1 keyword in each post for maximum benefits.
4. Add proper schema markup to allow search engines to better understand your content.
5. Analyze each social media campaign and identify the type of content that your audience wants to see from you.
6. Showcases your brand personality while designing content.
7. Utilize your storytelling skills and include that in your content so that audiences will remember your brand message.
8. Identify the goals and KPIs for every piece of content and then distribute it across channels where you are most likely to achieve your KPIs.

 You can run through the blog Content Marketing Trends 2020 for additional guidance.

Step 8: Unleash the Power of Online AdvertisingOnline advertising is not just for big brands. Smaller businesses should not ignore the power of online ads and local directories.

Here are some of the top directories where every business must list themselves:

1. Google My Business
2. Bing Local
3. Yahoo Local
4. LinkedIn
5. Yelp
6. Manta
7. Yellowpages
8. Whitepages
9. Four Square
10. Think Local

Step 9: Leverage Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the best way to expand your brand reputation. The concept is fairly simple, all you need to get is some bloggers and social media stars on board who have an impressive number of followers on your targeted channel. The only way to get them to talk about your brand is to reach out to them with an offer that they can’t deny.

Here are some of the top influencer marketing platforms where you can find micro-influencers who can improve your brand reputation and provide genuine leads according to your budgets.

1. Upfluence
2. Tribe Group
3. Mavrck
4. Traackr
5. Famebit

Every business is striving to be visible online and, more importantly, wasn’t to communicate trustworthy in the eyes of consumers. The only way to do this is by exceeding the expectations of your audience. Keep in mind that each and every marketing channel has its own role to play in the success of your brand. Make use of the strategies discussed in this blog and don’t leave any stone unturned to provide value to people!

Get started by getting a pulse of how your audience perceives your brand, products and services. By managing your online brand, you can leave a positive lasting impression and boost brand growth and leverage customer reach.

Ref:
https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/branding/10-step-checklist-to-digital-branding-for-smbs/