Building a website or creating social media accounts for your business is easy. The question is how to use these channels to stand out in a highly competitive digital marketing ecosystem. To put your business in front of the right people and boost brand loyalty, you need to ensure your digital assets represent your business’ values accurately.
Here is how to build a memorable online brand presence that will reflect your business’ personality.
Keep Your Brand Consistent
To raise brand awareness and memorability, you need to keep your brand consistent across all digital channels.
Design
Choose design elements, such as colors, shapes, logos, and typography that will represent your brand values. Keep in mind that each design asset has its own set of traits and evokes distinct emotions in a customer, so be careful when selecting them. You also need to choose how your brand will sound online by setting the right tone of voice.
Brand name
Keep your brand name short, simple, and catchy. When choosing a brand name, consider your online presence, too. You will want to use your brand name both as a domain name and social media handles. By keeping your brand name consistent across all online and offline channels, you will make it trustworthy and memorable.
Create a brand style guide
No matter if you are hiring a creative agency or an in-house team of digital marketing professionals, your goal is to ensure they will use your brand assets consistently. That is where you need to create a brand style guide that dictates how your brand will be presented in the digital landscape. Make sure it strictly defines all variations of your brand assets (photography, logo, fonts, colors, voice) across different digital channels. Above all, make it available to all members of your marketing, PR, and sales teams.
Communicate with Customers
In today’s hyperconnected digital era, customers expect brands to be more responsive and tech-savvy. With the rise of artificial intelligence and sophisticated customer management software, your target audience wants you to use live chat, bots, and social networks to communicate naturally and faster.
For starters, invest in chatbots. Powered by artificial intelligence, chatbots will constantly “learn” about your customers’ specific needs and expectations to provide them with relevant and accurate answers. With a chatbot, customers can receive immediate feedback, as well as get product recommendations and place orders. A chatbot can also reflect your brand’s values. Hire a skilled content writer that will inject your brand’s tone of voice and personality into chatbot scripts to maximize brand awareness.
Social media monitoring tools will let you track your brand’s hashtags and mentions in real-time. This way, you will stay on top of customers’ conversations and provide faster feedback.
Strengthen Content Marketing to Boost Brand Authority
When promoting your brand, you want people to perceive it as credible and authoritative. That is where your content marketing strategy can help.
Start by creating informative, fresh, and data-backed articles on your blog. Optimize them for the right keywords and promote them online to maximize their reach. Next, once you start generating traffic, start experimenting with other forms of content. These could be infographics, ebooks, comprehensive guides, lists, templates – whatever works for your audiences. Social media content, such as gorgeous photos, animations, gifs, quizzes, etc. can also engage your followers and boost your brand awareness.
The key is to inject your brand’s traits into each piece of content you create. Any element, from the design of illustrations, photo filters, and colors to your writing style and paragraph spacing needs to be in harmony and consistent. You want people to recognize your content immediately. For example, Synthesis Quatro, an architectural bureau, wanted to create a brochure that would be as sleek and innovative as their design solutions. They chose to work with Infostarters creative agency that incorporated the brand’s values and uniqueness into their brochure design.
Always Tell your Story
Who are you and why do you exist? What are your brand’s major goals, values, and missions? These are just some of the numerous questions your customers want you to answer. This is exactly where storytelling shines.
First, make your brand’s story visible on your website. Build the “About” section, where you would provide all details about your business, its history, and development. You should also add the “Our Missions” page, where you would tell customers what causes you stand for. For example, Fortress of Inca has the “What We Believe” section, where they emphasize that their products are sustainable, good for health, and handmade. They also emphasize their fair wages policies and use their website to show how they appreciate their workers. Customers want to have a good reason to choose you over your competitors and giving back to the community is certainly one of them.
Your social channels can also emphasize your brand values. Use them strategically to share the photos from charity events and provide information about the sponsorships you provided. If you donate a percentage of your income to charities, emphasize when promoting your products on Instagram or Facebook.
Humanize your Brand
Showing the human side of your brand lets you gain your audiences’ trust and build stronger relationships. For starters, you need to introduce customers to the people behind your brand. Add the “Our Employees” page, where you would post your employees’ photos and their stories. You could even ask them to write brief testimonials.
This is also where you could leverage social networks. For example, you could post your employees’ photos and stories on Instagram weekly. You could also take behind-the-scenes photos and videos from your offices, parties, production processes, etc.
You should also invest in user-generated content. Isla Ida, for example, publishes beautiful photos of their products, created by their customers, both on their website and Instagram. UGC builds trust with your prospective customers. It tells them that people with similar preferences and needs are already buying from you and that they are satisfied. Knowing that, they will be motivated to purchase from you, too. Apart from UGC, you could also publish customers’ testimonials and product reviews.
Conclusions
Before buying from you, customers will search for your brand online. While some of them will google you, others will perform social media searches. To engage them and encourage them to buy, you should create a consistent brand presence across all digital channels. Your goal should be to present your brand accurately and transparently and I hope these tips will help you.