As time moves forward and every adult in London and the world spends most of the day with a device in their hand, developing an online brand identity and maintaining your place in the market can be a challenge. Your brand identity is a representation of your company, its reputation and its mission, and defining and marketing your brand is vital to making consumers aware of what you’re offering and why they should be interested.
So how can you define, brand and market your company in today’s online world?
What do you do and why do you do it?
Summarising what your company does and why you’re in business is the first step to establishing your brand. Whether you offer a unique service or product, or you’re one of 10 similar businesses in a single city, it’s necessary to determine what sets you above other companies and how you intend to maintain that fact. What words would you use to define your business? What words would customers and employers use? The answers to these questions will let you know whether your brand is confident, whether you’re achieving your goals and whether the public’s view of your company is accurate.
Where is your Brand in the Marketplace?
Determining where your brand sits in the market is an important step of the process. A traditional SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) will provide valuable insight and give you a clearer picture of what your company is aiming to achieve, whether you’re on the right road and what roadblocks you may come up against in the marketplace. Often a productive way to go about this is to involve a brand design agency specializing in branding and advertising. The benefit of this is to have outside eyes taking a good look at your company with no bias and complete honesty.
What do you Want to Accomplish with your Branding?
The next question to consider is, what are you hoping to achieve with your branding? Are you hoping for increased traffic to your website? Are you trying to make the phone ring? Do you simply want to get your brand out there to a particular demographic to create a buzz? By establishing your end goal before you begin branding or rebranding, you’re less likely to be dealing with rewrites and miscommunication with your brand design agency which will only end up using more time and money on both your parts.
What Role does Social Media and Online presence Play in Branding and Marketing?
Social media is becoming a vital marketing tool and a useful avenue for providing a clear call to action using your branding and advertising. An important aspect of your online presence is making it easy and fast for customers to connect with you. Combining a user-friendly, attractive website with a regular and interesting social presence is priceless in getting your brand out there and increasing word-of-mouth contact. In 2014 it was established that companies with a blog containing regular posts are 13 times more likely to generate a positive marketing ROI. Your target market needs to feel you are moving forward with the market, fulfilling your brand promises and that you are different from the competition.
It’s true enough to say that these days you can get everything online. Not only can you get everything online, but you can get multiple versions and options of any product or service you require with a few keystrokes and a search engine. With this in mind, SEO (search engine optimization) is increasingly becoming the most urgent step of branding and marketing. Putting effort into both SEO and content marketing using a well-established brand design agency is well worth the investment. By paying close attention to your online presence, they will help you stay at the top of search engine listings and increase traffic to your website, resulting in a higher return on investment.
At the end of the day, a well-managed brand with a consistent and clear branding identity is the key to success in the online world. Projecting your brand across as many channels as possible with an attractive and accessible branding identity will immediately increase sales and customers.