Top 10 tips for building an online brand

There are several factors that your business needs to focus on to thrive in today’s multifaceted world. Each business that adopts a corporate identity finds a need to establish a network of well-structured branding methods. The promptest method to do so in the digital era that we live in is through online branding. As advocates of moving your idea to the online world, we put together this list of top 10 tips to guide you through the process of reshaping/building a brand.

Let’s explore the top 10 tips to build your brand online

In hopes of getting the most out of your online presence, you need to be aware of what your brand does to your enterprise.

Don’t be fooled: branding is not simply creating a logo for your business — it is much more than that.

Think about branding as the way your customer experiences your designs, your communication, behavior, culture, even its language and vision. If you think of all these aspects at once, it is the way your customer perceives you. Larry Ackerman explains:

Identity is cause, brand is effect, and the strength of the former influences the strength of the latter.

As today’s businesses revolve around the digital world — particularly during the difficult times we are going through today — online branding has become an important and not very distinct branch of branding. Thus, we compiled a list that should enlighten you while building your brand.

Here is our list of the top 10 online tips to build or reshape your brand:

Social Media presence
Audience targeting
Keywords
Express your brand
Observe your competitors
Community management
Transparency
Retargeting using Ads
Reflect your brand identity through digital channels
Transform your brand

Whether your company promotes an online brand or a physical brand, utilizing social media channels is always a good idea. However, your image must be consistent across all social media channels. If you promote an image on Facebook and Instagram, try to ensure that a tweet on Twitter is consistent with the flow of your social messaging and with the creatives used.

Your profile pictures and cover photos should also be consistent, as well as how you use your logo across all platforms. A tip to build your brand can be a simple Hashtag that your audience can automatically relate to you. For example, Nike’s decade-long hashtag: #JustDoIt.

When choosing your social media platforms, keep in mind your objective and identity your customer’s persona and accordingly choose the platforms where your customers spend most of their time. Finally, check your social insights and data so that you can enhance your performance and learn from your previous mistakes.

Want to create professional ads, branded content and stunning stories in minutes? Use Over App available on desktop and mobile.

2. Audience targeting

Your target audience is not only your social media followers and viewers, but they are your potential, existing and shifted customers. Be keen on identifying your targeted audience. How would you like to choose your audience? Based on their location? Language? Interests? Demographics?

Once you have a clearer vision of your customer’s persona, you can build your business plan and marketing strategy accordingly. A well-structured strategy can promote or demote a brand and its services and if you are advertising for the wrong audience, you could neglect a huge profitable statue for you and your business.

Online audience targeting can be done through various platforms based on your business’s demands and your audience’s presence. This excellent report composed by Business Insider presents the different top social media platforms and top brands on different platforms to give you an understanding of how these brands target their audience and build their brands based on shown demographics.
Quoting Jerry Allocca:

If your target audience speaks digital, shouldn’t your organization speak digital too?

3. Keywords

Using targeted keywords allow your brand to expand its scope. It gives clues and hints to potential customers that haven’t heard about you and are on the lookout for a product or a service that you provide. Keyword research is an excellent method to reach your target audience, as well as essential for building your brand digitally.
Keywords increase your presence in search engine optimization and social media appearances. If you are struggling to generate a keyword that establishes your brand, here are some tips by Pixelmattic that can help guide you through your first ever keyword:

Heady Mix of Keywords:

Use headwords and long-tail keywords in your content. Headwords are more competitive and more likely to be searched by customers, as compared to long-tail keywords. An example of headwords is ‘silver jewelry’. The long-tail keyword version of this would be ‘buy silver jewelry online’.

Content First. Always:

Your content must have superior quality, communicating its objective in a clear manner. Remember to not force SEO words into your article, as the need for including the words must come naturally.

Keyword Tools:

Use keyword research tools such as Google Trends and Google AdWords Keyword Planner to understand which keywords are trending nationally and globally.

4. Express your brand

Be authentic, and not unique.

Authenticity comes first when building a brand. One important tip to maintain that makes you different from your competitors is your ability to earn people’s trust. You can easily reflect your uniqueness from your competitors by false branding, but that’s not what you want to do. You want to ensure and build a brand with a strong persona, a vital front and trustworthy authority which cannot be done unless you express these traits through your authenticity.

Don’t be a faceless brand; have a strong brand identity and make sure that you reflect this through your communication. Since your brand will be determined by your traits, make your traits that of knowledge, capability and reflective of your own values. You can be loud and sound without posting or constantly marketing yourself as long as you express what the business stands for through your brand. This is important as it affects your reputation and your customer’s views of your brand.

5. Observe your competitors

If you continuously compete with others, you become bitter. But, if you compete with yourself, you become better.

Observing your competitors does not mean despising one another. Think of it this way: you and your competitors can help improve one another. Equivalently, paying attention to your competitor’s online branding helps you understand what the market demands are and how they react to their branding. In general, companies must conduct competitor analysis to understand the competitor’s online branding strategies.

Analysis can be conducted through many activities such as observing their social media platforms, subscribing to their newsletters and emails, reading their blogs, etc. By doing so, you can make sure you don’t copy them, and your brand can be safeguarded from supporting another brand or being mistaken for a competitor.

6. Community Management

The channels and platforms you use to reach out to your customers need to have a similar return passage for them to reach out to you. Community management or customer support is an extremely important aspect of building a brand. It contributes to your long-term brand success as it increases your exposure, and helps you stay in touch with your customers and build connections with them.
So, be prepared to answer queries, questions and suggestions from your customers through the digital channels that are used to promote your brand.

7. Transparency

Transparency is essential to build a brand that remains strong and visible. If you want to stay transparent with your audience, do not post or promote a product or a service without making sure that you have the correct information sent out. If you send out a message, you should not turn back from it. It is part of your authenticity since without it, building your brand will continue to trouble your enterprise. As the late Steve Jobs advised us,

Master the topic, the message, and the delivery

8. Retarget using Ads

One of today’s most successful means of building a brand and advertising it is through online ads. With these ads, you don’t just promote your products or your identity to those with similar interests, but you can also use them to retarget your existing audience with new products, services, or even messages. Writing creative content in your ads can be done by observing your audience on social media platforms or by using marketing tools such as GoDaddy’s Digital Marketing Suite.

A brilliant study by Wishpond study unveils 3 different pieces of information regarding ads retargeting.

A website visitor who has been retargeted with a display ad is 70% more likely to convert with you.
72% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart and only 8% of those lost consumers return to complete the purchase
Ad retargeting brings 26% of lost consumers back to finalize a sale

Retargeting is a huge part of online branding strategies and it is crucial for businesses wishing to build a brand. Ads are simply a conversion tool that helps you retarget your web traffic and undoubtedly helps in creating customers’ loyalty.

9. Reflect your brand identity through digital channels

Make a change in the world through your brand. The latter tips allowed you to understand different methods and values that will help in the process of building a brand. Projecting your business is another value and norm that allows you to provide your audience with utter respect for your business. Remember, being a successful brand requires time and can be a long process, so be patient.
Reflect your business and online brand through every tool you utilize digitally including your domain, website and emails, which GoDaddy can help you secure.

10. Transform your brand

Don’t be afraid to make changes to your brand. As the world evolves, so should you. Adapt to the market demands, develop your brand online and offline. If you have an excellent base for your brand such as the color, logo, motto, tone, font, etc., you can easily reshape and transform your business to meet the business demands of the era we live in. If your brand has a well-established reputation — even amongst the smallest of crowds — the transformation will represent a positive overturn to your efforts for providing the best quality possible.

Build a brand online

Success doesn’t come overnight. It takes hard work, dedication and determination. To build a brand is not a limit within itself. Take into account the above tips which will help you position your brand in a respectable reputation. Whether you are a small startup or an already existing company, build a brand that lasts and don’t limit yourself to one door. Look at Nestle, for example: it is a brand that owns over 2,000 brands within a variety of sectors, ranging from nutrition products to luxury brands. Each brand it owns has its own identity, online strategy and market vision. It is part of Nestle’s vision to expand in many sectors and it does this through each and every one of its brands.

An online presence will help you expand and give you the ability to reshape when needed since the online customer base is susceptible to change. Be prepared for reshaping, be patient in your pursuit, and build your business a strong, independent brand.

For more helpful articles, feel free to visit our blog.