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The rise in social media and the increasing number of people accessing the internet has made digital brand building an essential step for any business.
Today, digital brand development has come to the fore, and every business seeks to establish itself before potential customers. Companies are adopting different digital brand building strategies to stay a step ahead of their competitors.
Because branding plays a critical role in helping any business establish a reputation and realize its ROI, business owners must equip themselves with the best digital brand techniques.
In this article, I will explain the seven best digital branding strategies every business should have.
Engage with Your Customers
Your customers should be your greatest asset and source of information if you look forward to adopting the best branding strategy. Therefore, you should engage your customers by asking them questions that can help you transform your brand.
Most of the top companies are already applying this in their brand metrics. For example, Airbnb went further to ask their customers on Twitter about any features they could add to their services.
After engaging with its customers, the company came up with a feature that could enable customers to pay for the same room separately if they apply for a room.
This helped Airbnb to solve the problem where customers had difficulties sharing the cost of a room. By including this feature, the company was able to increase its customer base significantly.
Make It Easy for Customers to Buy
If you are running an online store, you know that customers will only buy if they find the products they are looking for at the right time. Meaning, you should understand how your customers think whenever they visit your shop.
Apply customer journey mapping to understand how your customers behave when they visit your shop and then take an extra step to customize their experience.
Strive to simplify the time and steps that customers take to complete their purchase. For an online store, it should take less than a minute for a customer to identify a product and place their order. The buying process should be a piece of cake for your customers.
You can learn about this from Dominos. The company reduced the number of steps that customers go through before buying their products from 25 to 5 steps.
By doing this, they realized a significant increase in the number of complete sales per day. They also introduced another zero-click feature on the website, making it simple for customers to order pizzas in the comfort of their homes.
As a way of making your customers enjoy your services, you should focus on eliminating anything on the customer journey that you think they should not do. Simplify your customers’ experience with your brand to make it easier for them to buy.
Improve Your Digital Marketing Skills
If you want to double your success rate in digital brand building, never stop learning.
If you’re self-taught, consider going back to school to earn a degree in the marketing/advertising fields. This will help you land roles as a brand expert, marketing manager, or book clients if you ventured out on your own. If you already have a college degree, then consider taking digital marketing courses to stay up to date on what’s new as digital marketing and brand building is constantly changing.
If you’re a business owner and not a marketing professional, a marketing education still has value (and some would argue it has more value than a business degree). It will give you a leg up when it comes to marketing, branding, and advertising efforts. It can even save you money as marketing professionals (and experts) are not cheap. If you can oversee, manage, or even do some of the marketing for your own business, you’ll be ahead of the game.
At the end of the day, the only way to truly succeed in digital brand building is to learn, then practice what you learned by building brands whether you do it for clients or your own businesses.
Focus on Customers’ Unique Interests
As a startup marketing professional, the only way you can ensure your advertising message reaches customers is by focusing on their interests. First, you have to segment your audience (customers) based on their age, gender, geographic, loyalty, availability, etc. After segmenting, come up with different adverts for each segment.
Campbell Soup gives a perfect example of how you can go about this process. In one of their recent marketing campaigns, the company came up with over one thousand adverts on YouTube channel custom to focus on different customers.
Here is a screenshot from one of their adverts posted on YouTube.
Each advert would be shown to customers with different interests. Since the company was using YouTube, they were able to reach customers directly on their screens, which improved sales.
Gamify Your Adverts
Another effective way of making customers relate with your brand on digital platforms is by introducing gamification into your adverts.
One of the best gamification examples ever is the famous McDonald’s advert dubbed ‘Monopoly Game.’ The company used some gamification concepts derived from the world-famous game of Monopoly, to create a unique advert that would later help them increase their sales.
Although this promotion was offline based, most marketers are still borrowing from it.
Today, most companies are applying gamification in marketing their products and improving customer experience. Ultimately, gamification is a trend that you should look forward to incorporating in your digital brand development.
Adopt A Social Good Marketing Strategy
There is nothing that helps a business establish itself in the community and win customers’ hearts like showing it cares for humanity. If you want to build your brand online, you should come up with marketing campaigns that show you are willing to give back to society.
You can learn how a good social campaign can help your business to grow faster from Warby Parker, a leading prescription eyeglass seller.
The company applies the ‘buy one give one’ BOGO marketing campaign to make their customers feel good when buying their eyeglasses.
For every eyeglass sold, the company donates a pair of glasses to another person. The company also donates some funds to developing countries to fund eye care training programs.
BOGO is a marketing strategy that focuses on selfish altruism. When customers feel like their efforts to buy will help make the world a better place for the vulnerable group, they are more likely to buy.
Additionally, you can also use social media platforms to show how your business helps the community. Come up with hashtags for humanity on Twitter to inspire people to buy your products and improve your organic reach.
Disney Park applied this strategy in one of their successful social media campaigns. The company was donating $5 for any photo that customers were posting with their hashtag.
Below is a photo from one of their customer’s posts in the campaign.
For only two months, the company was able to collect over $2 million through this campaign and donate to the Make a Wish Foundation.
Creating social good for your customers is one of the best marketing strategies you should practice. Apart from helping your brand grow, it also lets you touch people’s hearts and convert them into loyal customers.
Invite Customers To Participate In Your Marketing Campaigns
The best way to build your brand on digital platforms is by earning trust from your new and existing customers.
If your customers believe that what you are offering them solves their problems, they are more likely to help you build your brand through referrals and word-of-mouth.
Provide Solutions To Real Problems
Most customers are attracted to a business that can offer the right solutions to their problems. If your business can help customers meet their challenges, it will take you little effort and resources to market your brand.
Therefore, you should focus more on selling solutions to your customers and not services. Adopt a problem-solving approach in your services delivery so that customers can relate more with your brand.
Give Your Business A Professional Look
Another trick is to show that your business or company has a professional look. With many companies struggling to remain at the top, most customers want to buy from the best in the market.
When you show your level of expertise to customers, you entice them to remain loyal to your brand.
Showcase Your Expertise
Demonstrate your level of expertise by sharing some of your success stories with customers. Share a heartfelt story of how your business helped clients find a solution to their problems through your guidance.
Ask Customer To Share Their Experience
Additionally, you can ask your customers to clarify their desires, and then adjust your products and services to meet their unique specs.
When you launch a marketing campaign, you should encourage customer participation. When customers participate directly in your brand building, you improve your chances of success.
Opel, a German automobile manufacturer, managed to increase its sales by engaging customers in its brand-building campaign. The company came up with a customer-centered marketing strategy.
They asked their existing customers to take a video while driving and post them on different social media platforms in exchange for some credit in their next purchase.
This tactic that Opel employed sounds like the conventional word-of-mouth strategy. By sharing real videos on social media platforms, existing customers were simply marketing the company’s brand to other people within their networks.
Final Thoughts
Digital brand building involves a lot. Sometimes you have to make your hands dirty if you want your business to grow and stay ahead.
There are different brand-building strategies that you can employ to build your brand to a broader audience. Tactics such as creating social proof and improving customer experience with your brand can help grow your online reputation faster.
If you look forward to building your business brand, you should not hesitate to try at least one of these tactics in your campaigns. When you apply these tactics the right way, you can improve your sales and establish an excellent brand reputation.
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