Branding in the age of digital transformation
“Digital branding is the core of everything your business is doing online. It’s the DNA of your online strategy.”
Digital transformation aims to create or strengthen capabilities and provide new ways of meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Ultimately, these changes will shape customer perceptions. It follows that the brand strategy needs to embody these desired new perceptions to capitalize on the opportunity for stronger differentiation and customer relationships. It aims straight to the brand and its branding. It demands some upgrades, some changes, some revolution. Since today is the best time for brand expansion, for brands that stand out, and brands that speak the right messages in front of the right audience.
Achieving brand-building success in digital realms is a necessity, not an alternative.
Here are six factors that will impact your brand rising in the foreseeable future.
A good Logo has no language barrier
A logo is your first stop on your way to a great digital brand.
A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner’s intended message. A concept or “meaning” is usually behind an effective logo, and it communicates the intended message.
The logo should look good in all sizes on all your brand materials: letterheads, business cards, billboards. But remember: digital platforms require specific sizes and imaging. You should design a logo that works well on profile pictures, cover photos, email headers, app buttons and more.
When combined, a well-designed logo and an effective branding strategy help organizations reach their audiences in an effective way, but also create a resilient, industry-leading brand. Don’t ever underestimate the importance of a well-designed logo, aligned to your overall branding strategy. It will be a rewarding investment for your brand and organization in the long term.
A bad website is like a grumpy salesperson
If your logo is the sign for your business, your website is your digital storefront location. When a customer wants to know your brick-and-mortar locations, your hours of operation, your product listings, or your contact information, they won’t be digging through the phone book anymore. They’ll Google your website, where they’ll expect to find information quickly and easily.
Effective websites are simple and easy to navigate. Streamline design and maintain brand consistency with a limited color scheme that matches or complements your logo. Make your brand name and essential details stand out with bold, legible fonts. Keep pages concise and to-the-point, and don’t bore down users with too much information. The fastest way to make a potential customer stop clicking is to bury essential info.
Your website should also have a “crawlable” link structure, meaning humans and search engines can navigate to all the information presented on the website with ease.
Lastly, make sure your website works well and on every screen. Test, test end test, every link, every button, every image… Errors look amateur. And there is no space for amateurs on top. The competition is watching your every step, and the customers they never forget.
Social Media in the era of distractions and noise
Long gone are the days when campaigns lasted longer than two months. Brands have to listen to customers and adapt almost in real-time.
Social media offers an effective way of doing so. Through social listening and authentic brand experience that is carried through social channels, brands are able to adjust their messages quicker than ever and shape communication that resonates best with their customers.
Social media strategy and adoption of new content types and ways of publishing to stay relevant and engage all audiences. Brands need to be prepared to generate “ephemeral” content which means content with a very short shelf life. Essentially, it means brands need to offer constantly bite-size information to keep the audiences engaged.
There’s also the tech side to communication on social media. The use of customizable chatbots on social media to respond to customer queries and provide general customer support or introduce new products has proven beneficial to brands. Especially where the volume of user engagement is high, especially for B2C brands.
“Video Killed the Radio Star”
Another challenge for brands is to offer consumers and followers valuable, high-quality content. Not just any type of content, but the right kind of content. As we talked about social media platforms, they are all unique and can bring the best value for a brand, if used the right way. Most of us are already too familiar with content marketing but content should not only stop at words and some pretty pics, nowadays video is the king.
With the glorious advance of video and its demand, brands must think about how to package communication in the most effective way. Not only creative aspects but even more so the format and distribution channels impact marketing success. More and more social media platforms put a strong emphasis on video format for storytelling purposes.
To stop advertising to save money is like stopping the clock to save time
If Hanry Ford knew this in the 1900’s you should also know this now.
Advertising has been present since always. The “old modern” advertising began to take shape with the advent of newspapers and magazines in the 16th and 17th centuries. Today's advertising is about digital platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch, TikTok and countless more. You should not call yourself today's brand if you haven't implemented them in your brand strategy.
Today, businesses worldwide spend more than $250 billion on digital advertising each year. That number continues to increase due to the impressive return on investment (ROI) generated by digital ads. For companies that want to stay competitive, it’s essential to take your ad strategy online.
Digital advertising is a targeted, data-driven advertising strategy for reaching consumers in every stage of the buying funnel and moving them from one stage of the buying funnel to the next. From awareness to purchase, you can use digital media advertising to drive revenue.
Marketing Never Stops. If you stop your marketing, you are wasting the brand equity you have built so far. This is not a start and then stop the process.
And never ever stop fishing for new customers.
This is the era of less is more with SEO
Less is more is both correct and good. Your brand shouldn't deliver SPAM; it should deliver good value.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around in some form or another since at least the mid-90s, which can make it seem overwhelming to jump into for people just beginning to build their brand.
But as the old adage goes, the best time to start may have been yesterday, but the second-best time to start is today. If you have already started, you have to constantly adapt to all the upgrades and new rules modern SEO is bringing.
“SEO Isn’t About Gaming the System Anymore; It’s About Learning How to Play by the Rules.” — Jordan Teicher
SEO changes so much that anyone who is out of the game has time to start fresh. SEO is no longer about search optimization tricks, but by learning the rules Google and other crawlers have laid out and put out the best content optimized for that ruleset.
The game’s rules are set, in other words. Now’s the time to learn to be a great competitor. If you start with an SEO-based mindset, you can do both and reap huge dividends as a result.
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Your mission as a digital brand is knowing what you want to share with your community and determine how you want to present it, and stay consistent.
Digital branding performs within the intangible area of your brand’s expression. It’s a tool, a set of requirements that, when used properly, make the intangible, tangible.
It strives in translating your brand’s story and values to all digital channels, in order to interact with your consumers. Creating a fertile ground to build relationships on.
