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Digital Branding Channels
In the past, branding was accomplished mainly via print media such as newspapers and magazines; television advertisements; radio commercials; or direct mailing.
While these methods remain useful today, digital channels continue to advance rapidly - here are eight digital avenues companies can use to enhance their branding initiatives; some may use more than one channel at once!
Website Branding
Social media marketing relies on websites. They serve as powerful standalone tools and the hub for many different online advertising initiatives and campaigns.
An ideal website should easily recall a product or service while remaining mobile-friendly and intuitive for visitors.
Pay Per Click Advertising
PPC, or paid advertising, allows marketers to reach Internet users across various digital platforms. Marketers can create PPC campaigns on Google, Bing and LinkedIn and show ads across Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Campaigns designed for pay-per-click (PPC) platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads allow businesses to target users based on their interests, locations or demographic characteristics.
Google and Facebook Ads are two widely utilized PPC platforms.
Content Branding
Content branding, or inbound branding, is an approach used to engage potential customers via content they care about.
Content is published online before being promoted via social media channels like social media pages and emails; search engine optimization or pay-per-click campaigns may occur; blogs, eBooks, Online Courses, Infographics, and podcast Webinars are some common examples.
Email Branding
Email marketing team remains one of the most powerful digital branding channels. Email isn't spam: instead, it allows businesses to connect with potential customers and anyone interested in their products and brands.
Digital marketers use multiple digital channels to cultivate email lists of leads for acquisition funnels using email branding to convert leads to actual customers.
Social Media Branding
Social media branding campaigns focus on building brand recognition and trust between your brand and target market or increasing leads or direct sales through promoted posts or tweets.
Affiliate Branding
Affiliate branding has existed for centuries, yet it has taken on new meaning with the internet. Influencers can promote other people's products to earn a commission for every sale or lead generated - Amazon even offers affiliate programs that pay millions every month to websites selling its products!
Video Advertising
YouTube is one of the world's premier search engines, and millions of internet users turn to it daily for purchase decisions, information about products or services and reviews - or just relaxation purposes.
Marketers can leverage various video branding platforms for successful video campaigns, including Facebook Videos, Instagram and TikTok. Video can also be integrated with SEO strategy efforts and content strategies for maximum effectiveness.
SMS Messaging
Text messages (commonly referred to as short message service or SMS for short) can be an excellent tool for businesses and nonprofit organizations to inform customers about promotions or opportunities available through them or share important updates with them.
SMS campaigns have even become popular tools political candidates use for campaign promotion - customers can even donate or pay via text! Since technology advances have allowed customers to pay or donate via text messaging services like Text-To-Give services directly via their phones!
Digital branding plans offer businesses an online strategy for building a presence via various web-based channels like social media, organic search engines, paid ads, and their website.
Digital strategies aim to raise brand recognition while attracting new customers for your business. Digital branding strategies help your business to achieve digital goals by strategically selecting mediums. While "digital campaign" and "digital strategy" can often be used interchangeably, just like branding strategies and tactics do, what exactly differentiates these financial terms and marketing terms?
What Exactly Is A Digital Campaign?
Digital branding campaigns form the backbone of your digital strategy and should help achieve specific end goals.
If your goal is to generate leads through social media accounts, such as Twitter, you could launch a digital branding campaign geared toward doing just that. By sharing gated content from your business on the platform, Twitter provides the perfect place for potential leads to find you!
How To Create A Digital Branding Strategy
1. Develop Buyer Personas
To create an effective digital branding strategy, you must know to whom your branding efforts will target and create detailed buyer personas as the foundation of any digital strategy.
Buyer personas represent your ideal customers for the business. These personas can be developed using research, surveys and interviews with target audiences.
Assumptions should never be used when providing information about your target audience; otherwise, they could lead to unintended results in branding strategies and efforts.
To accurately represent yourself and your persona, include people outside your database who fit within your target audience.
What information must you gather to build buyer personas and use it as the foundation for your digital branding strategy? What type of business you own depends entirely upon its nature; for instance, whether or not it offers B2B services versus consumer ones and sells costly or less costly products.You can start with these ideas and then fine-tune them to suit your business.
Demographic and Quantitative Information
- Location: Provides web analytics tools that enable businesses to determine where website traffic originates and gathers accurately.
- Age: Depending on the nature and purpose of your business, gathering age data might or might not be applicable. If that's the case, identify patterns in your existing prospects/contact database to gather this info quickly and effectively.
- Income: Persona Research Interviews It may be more secure for people to divulge sensitive data like their personal income through personal research interviews than online forms, as they may not want to provide such personal details voluntarily.
- Job title: Your B2B company's customer base should help determine its job title.
Qualitative Information
- Goals of Your Buyer Persona: Once your product or service has addressed a challenge, its goals should become apparent to you. Speak with actual customers and sales reps within your company to understand exactly where to focus.
- Challenges: Communicate with your target audience to understand any difficulties they are currently encountering.
- Hobbies/Interests: When surveying customers who fit within your target market, find out their hobbies and interests. For instance, finding out whether multiple segments share similar fitness/health-oriented interests may help shape future content creation decisions if you sell fashion apparel.
- Priorities: Consult customers and members of your target audience to understand what's most important for them. For a B2B company selling software, knowing that its target audience values customer service over price could prove immensely helpful.
2. Determine Your Branding Goals And What Tools You Need
Digital branding goals should always align with your company's core goals.
If one of your company's main focuses is increasing online revenue by 20 per cent, for example, then setting goals like increasing website leads 50 per cent more compared to last year may help achieve this objective.
With the right digital tools, you must be able to track progress towards your overall goal. Original Reporting Dashboard, for instance, brings all your branding and sales team information together in one central hub allowing you to assess what works quickly and what doesn't work to optimize future strategies.
3. Evaluate Digital Assets and Channels
It is crucial that when reviewing all digital branding channels and assets that comprise your digital strategy, you consider their overall picture to avoid being overwhelmed or confused when selecting those you will include in your strategy plan.
Doing this will enable you to avoid feeling overloaded and disoriented by too many options. Make an inventory list to provide a better view of what assets or vehicles you own and possess. You could do this easily using Excel Spreadsheet.
4. Use an Owned, Earned and Paid Media Framework
Employ the owned-earned-and paid media frameworks to identify digital "vehicles" assets or channels you already employ as part of your strategy and select the best suitable ones.
Owned Media
Owned channels refer to digital assets your business or brand owns - such as blogs, social media profiles or websites - over which it maintains complete control.
Content that exists separately from your site - for instance, a blog published via Medium is one example) can also be utilized effectively in branding activities.
Earned Media
Earned media refers to any exposure your brand gains via word-of-mouth marketing goals or content distributed via other sites (e.g.
guest posts, PR work or customer service work are examples of earned media). Receiving recognition for all the hard work done towards earning it. Your content could generate positive experiences, press reviews and become shared via various social media posts channels (e.g.
social media presence).
Paid Media
Paid media refers to any channel or vehicle for which you pay money to reach and appeal to buyer personas. Use native advertising, Google AdWords or sponsored posts on other websites to increase exposure.
You might consider investing in native ads, Google AdWords ads or sponsored posts from third-party websites as strategies.
Now that we understand what this framework entails, let's look at an example. Imagine creating an owned content piece on one page of your website designed to generate leads and wanting to use different components of this framework instead of just working with paid or earned media channels.
Make your content shareable to increase leads generated through it and drive more traffic towards your landing page, earning "earned media". Your content's success can be enhanced by sharing it on Facebook and paying more people to see it.
Notably, paid media does not need to be part of your success strategy; earned and owned media may do their work without additional spending.
Once your goal has been established, evaluate what channels work for your company before including those channels in your digital strategy plan. Start thinking now about which items you want to keep and which you wish to remove or reduce.
5. Develop and Audit Own Media Campaigns
Owned media lies at the core of digital branding, typically taking form in content forms such as About Us pages, product descriptions, blogs, eBooks or infographics.
Every message that goes out is vitally important to be classified under content, including About Us pages, product descriptions, blogs, ebooks or infographics.
Content can help convert website visitors into customers or leads while strengthening brand recognition online. When optimized with SEO in mind, content can also increase organic and search traffic.Content ownership is integral to digital branding strategies.
Determine what content will help you achieve your goals.
Suppose you aim to generate 50% more leads through your website than during the prior year. In that case, your Not page probably won't figure in your plan unless this page was effective at lead generation in its previous iterations.This quick process lets you identify which owned content will help achieve your digital marketing plans.
Audit Existing Content
Review the existing content owned by your business and rank each item according to what has performed best concerning meeting goals in the past.If you aim to generate leads, rank content according to its success at doing just that in the last year (blog posts, ebooks, or web pages are examples of such).
Know what's working right now so you can develop content strategies with success in the future.
Identification Of Content Gaps
Take time to examine buyer personas to pinpoint any content holes carefully.Make these personas available if, as part of a math tutoring business, research has revealed that one of their biggest struggles is understanding how best to study effectively.Your eBooks on specific types of landing pages could prove very effective at generating sales (perhaps more effectively than webinars!).
If you run a math tutoring business, part of your plan may include publishing an ebook on "how to study more effectively".
Create A Content Creation Plan
Create a plan for creating content based on your findings and the gaps you identified. This will help you achieve your goals.
Included in this list is:
- Title
- You can also download the format of your choice
- Goal
- Promoting channels
- Why are you creating content?
- Priority of content
It can be as simple as a spreadsheet. You should include information such as budget if you plan to outsource content creation or time estimates if it's something you are producing yourself.
Read More: 5 Ways A Digital Marketing Strategy Can Help Your Business
6. Plan And Audit Your Earned Media Campaigns
Attuning earned media to your current goals can give you a clearer idea of where best to spend your time and energy.
For instance, if you aim to drive increased traffic or leads, identify all sources of that traffic and rank your earned media from most effective to least. Cyber Infrastructure Traffic Analytics' Sources reports can provide this data.
Write an industry press article that draws qualified traffic to your website, leading to higher conversions. LinkedIn may be where most people share this type of content - this drives additional visitors.
Utilize historical data to understand which earned media types will help achieve your goals and which won't. Don't be intimidated to experiment, even if something new has never been tried!
7. Audit Your Paid Media Campaigns
A similar process should apply here - evaluate what paid media you currently possess across different platforms such as AdWords (Google Adsense, Facebook ads etc.) and Twitter etc.
and determine which will help you achieve your goals more quickly.
Suppose your AdWords campaign isn't yielding the promised results or is no longer working out as intended. In that case, reassessing might be in order, or it may be best to move onto other platforms altogether.
By the time this process is over, you should know which paid media platforms should remain part of your strategy and which should be removed from consideration.
8. Your Digital Branding Campaign Can Only Succeed With Collective Effort
Once your research and planning have been done, you have an idea of the components included in the digital branding strategy plan.
Here's an outline of what should have been completed so far:
- Your buyer personas should be clearly defined.
- Digital branding goals
- A list of all your owned, earned and paid media
- Audit your current owned, earned and paid media
- A plan for creating owned content or a wish list
Understanding digital branding strategies is integral to success, and earning a degree related to marketing trends or a related discipline could give your career a significant edge.
Here is a list of popular strategies used by teams from multiple industries.
Digital Branding Strategies
1. Create A Blog
Blogging can be an invaluable way to promote your business online. While some may consider blogging an "excessive waste of time", blogging allows your products and services to reach customer experience interested in them more directly.
Why blog? Because well-researched and well-written blog posts can often meet the urgent needs of potential clients.
Cyber infrastructure sells branding software used by branding professionals who create plans, campaigns and editorial calendars on behalf of their employers - we tailor all our blog topics towards this need!
A blog to provide valuable customer assistance. Understanding their pain points and creating content that targets these specific audiences are key elements to successfully producing articles that provide targeted help for readers while remaining highly targeted and useful for your target market.
2. Advertise on Specific Platforms
An organic blogging strategy only tells part of the story; paid ads also play an integral part in spreading brand recognition and reaching those who may have missed your business otherwise.
This type of promotion helps build brand awareness while reaching those who might otherwise go unnoticed by search engines or organic traffic alone.
Implement this strategy when your blog is still expanding but doesn't generate the traffic you require for success.
Include these forms of advertising as part of your digital branding plan:
- Social Media Advertising.
- pay-Per-Click (PPC).
- Google Ads.
- Online Advertising.
There is an advertising solution on nearly every platform: from display networks like Google to its built-in ad system - such as those found on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Advertising can be an excellent way of promoting your business without worrying about SEO or content creation. All it requires is writing some lines, selecting images, and starting the campaign! However, before embarking on advertising efforts, you must develop an advertising plan outlining who they will target, the channels they will utilize, and any investments necessary for these campaigns to thrive and ensure their success.
3. Free Educational Materials Are Available
Digital branding doesn't end once someone visits your site or clicks an ad; in exchange for their email, offer something of value; the gated visual content could even be free, yet users pay with their contact info; lead generation is essential if you hope to convert visitors into customer satisfaction.
Create a landing page featuring just a single educational resource - such as an ebook, guide, template or kit - and offer it free of charge to clients.
Think carefully about their needs to help ensure success in daily life; craft tools to support that.
Use best landing page practices to encourage visitors to download your resource. Remove unnecessary information and buttons, limit navigation menus, eliminate links that lead away from your landing page, and ensure their only option for downloading educational material is by doing so.
4. Search Engines Optimize Your Digital Marketing Content
SEO is an integral part of digital strategy; it helps increase product sales rankings while increasing blog views and educational materials viewed online.SEO or social channels will bring customers searching for your products or services to your pages, while on-page SEO helps ensure your high-quality content marketing effort converts users and engages them effectively.
Need some guidance when starting? Download our Starter Kit below.
5. Hold An Online Contest Or Give
Contests and giveaways can be an excellent way to enhance your digital strategy and build brand recognition, garnering hundreds or even thousands of new leads and followers who could later be turned into customer journeys.
This approach works best if your business sells consumer-facing products or offers services with tangible deliverables - for instance, a beauty brand might choose to give away free cosmetic products.
At the same time, portrait photographers might provide free sessions. Although not suited to B2B companies or manufacturers, you could tailor it according to your specific requirements, such as offering free goods as incentives when people sign up to your mailing list (an example is giving one product free with each subscription to one mailing list!).
6. Conduct an Online Seminar
If a contest doesn't seem suitable for your company, webinars could provide an effective alternative. These interactive events allow customer loyalty to become educated on your products and service offerings while speaking directly with representatives from your firm; customers can then ask any pertinent questions in real-time while receiving timely responses.
Are You Selling Complex Products Online? Consider Establishing a Webinar Page on Your Website so loyal Customers and Prospects May Benefit
7. Create A Podcast
One look at Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces competing to capture market share will demonstrate audio branding is growing quickly.
While platforms like Clubhouse differ significantly from podcasting in many respects, their core concept remains similar: you can educate and engage your target audience wherever they may be using any audio device to listen in on you! Podcasts offer an excellent means of reaching people outside social media platforms or social platforms and search engines. Their natural, unplanned Medium makes the listeners more comfortable. Yet, you should still plan each episode carefully to provide unbiased content relevant to the target audience.
8. Launch an Email Campaign
Email branding is an extremely powerful digital branding strategy you should employ today to nurture customers who show great enthusiasm for your product or service.
Just as customers wouldn't subscribe to a brand newsletter if it did not suit them, businesses shouldn't send emails out that haven't joined their mailing lists without first opting in; otherwise, they risk decreasing email deliverability rates and are sent unknowingly into spam filters.
Subscribers can be acquired through blogs, contests and webinars, with email campaigns delivered when people give you their contact info and opt-in for communication from you.
Now is the time to combine all this information into an official branding strategy document, using your research as the foundation. Your strategy document should outline the steps necessary for reaching your goals.
Final Thoughts
Digital branding is vitally important to digital marketers. Digital advertising presents them with great business opportunities; therefore, they must understand its advantages and disadvantages to remain competitive within this realm of branding.
Digital branding is an emerging business arena, and digital and traditional branding departments should not be treated differently.
