Today, a brand without a presence on digital platforms is like a car without tires. Back in the olden days, managers only needed to produce TVC pieces, place ads in print newspapers to reach millions of potential customers.
That is no longer true in the age of industry 4.0.
That’s why your business needs to quickly access digital platforms so as not to be left behind. In this article, we will explore all there is to know about digital branding – a branding strategy in the digital age.
Hopefully, the information below will help you a lot in marketing activities of your business.
What is branding?
Branding (roughly translated in Vietnamese as “Branding”) is a creative process where marketing managers convey messages about the business to their potential customers.
Such messages could be:
- What is your business?
- What are your goals when doing business activities?
- What benefits can you bring to your customers?
- What can customers expect from you?
Branding is the process of you trying to take actions to help customers know you, remember you, and trust and love your brand.
You have to make your brand like Coca-Cola, thinking of soft drinks; like Apple, a maker of technology, not an “apple”; or McDonald’s, the fast food company, is not a person’s name.
When building a brand, you need to pay attention to the following three B’s :
- Brand: Is an abstract concept, used to show how customers, the public speak, think about your business, products.
- Branding: Is the process of designing and building a brand into something familiar to customers.
- Brand identity: Is a group of visual elements that help users identify your brand (and distinguish them from other brands) such as logo, website, fanpage on social networks, etc.
These three Bs always go together. There will be no brand without the visual elements that come from brand identity . Without brand identity, customers will have a hard time remembering your brand…
Here are a few helpful questions for your business as it grows and your brand:
- What makes your business different from others in the market?
- What are your business goals and strategic vision?
- Who are your business’s target customers?
- What words can you use to describe your business?
What is digital branding?
Digital branding is how you build and develop your brand on digital platforms such as websites, social networks, videos, mobile apps, etc.
Digital branding is a combination of concepts: digital marketing (digital marketing) and internet branding (branding on the internet).
In a society where almost every one of us owns a mobile phone, a laptop with an internet connection, bringing brands into the digital environment is a must for businesses. businesses, in order to reach the target customer group and build long-term relationships with them.
The difference between digital marketing and digital branding
There is a difference between digital branding and digital marketing. In fact, digital branding can be considered an activity within the concept of digital marketing in general.
If the goal of digital branding is to build a good relationship between businesses and customers (from brand recognition, brand trust to brand loyalty) on the Internet, then the biggest goal of Digital marketing is finding new customers and helping businesses sell products and services in the digital environment.
Digital marketing reaches customers through many online channels, digital branding builds and develops relationships between customers and businesses in a positive direction. Buyers gradually become more engaged and “interactive” with the business.
Benefits of digital branding
Whether you are a blogger or a freelancer, a self-employed person or a small business owner, a really good and effective digital branding strategy will improve your business. Improve the “face” of your online presence on many levels.
Here are a few key benefits of Digital Branding:
Draw attention to the right audience
Building a solid brand identity based on digital channels is a great way to expose yourself to the right audience. This is especially useful for brands that start from zero .
Certainly, first you need to create the persona (persona is a list of detailed information about a certain group of customers) of the customer in detail. You need to understand who your customers are and from there build a suitable brand that can meet their needs.
Its idea is to create large targeted campaigns, from which the brand will get the attention of the right customers and interact with them.
Let’s take a look at an example on social media below.
You will notice that a lot of brands use hashtags of their brand names on social media, as well as create separate and dedicated hashtags for each campaign for posts (e.g. Coca-Cola’s #ThatsGold , created specifically for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games or L’oreal’s #WorthSaying used as a way of empowering women, for women to stand up and speak out on issues that matter to them)
L’Oreal Group
✔@Loreal
This way, you will get customers to use hashtags more and more actively, thereby helping you to expand your audience and reach other customers who are still in the right area for the campaign or brand.
In addition, hashtags also help strengthen your brand credibility.
Build relationships with customers
Any digital brand campaign is aimed at real and quality customers, which means big goals.
That means your customers will feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
It doesn’t matter whether you create a website, a social media channel, or an email containing marketing content, you always need to personalize your brand while delivering real value to your customers. your.
This is how you turn your visitors and one-time buyers into loyal customers and your primary source of customers.
Fast
Digital branding helps your messages be communicated to customers quickly.
9 elements that make up digital branding
1. Logo
Logo is the first element that customers approach to a brand. When you think of Disney, you think of Mickey’s two round mouse ears. Referring to Apple, you can’t help but imagine the image of an apple with a missing side.
All of the above examples are logos of famous brands in the world.
Logos of brands must match the image and core values of the business, but also leave a deep impression on the target customers.
To design a beautiful, professional logo, you first need to “shape” the image of the brand: Is your business nostalgic or modern? Minimalist or colorful? Serious or funny?
You can completely refer to the impressive logos of competitors in the industry, maybe you will find yourself some unique ideas. However, do not forget the principles to remember in choosing colors for the logo: Stand out but also match the values of the brand.
The logo also needs to be appropriate to integrate into other design products related to the business such as: visiting cards, billboards, email, etc. Even the logo must have the appropriate size to use. make cover photo, avatar on Facebook, Instagram, in mail, mobile app and many other platforms.
If you find it difficult to design a logo for your business , do not hesitate to seek external support from design agencies.
2. Website
If customers recognize the brand through the logo, the website is the place for you to sell your products and services in the digital environment. One thing you should know: Today is the era where the customer is the one who “takes the lead” in a buying and selling relationship.
Customers no longer sit at home and wait for advertisements to make a purchase. They actively Google your business website, find useful information and make their decisions.
Quality websites should be simple and provide a smooth experience. The elements on the website from colors, fonts, shapes, effects must be consistent with the logo of your business. On the website should contain outstanding, attractive and call for customers to act.
In addition, your website also needs to adhere to certain principles to optimize display performance on Google search results (also known as SEO), including:
- Website friendly with Google’s crawling algorithm,
- Build internal link network according to appropriate models (Silo, Pyramid, …),
- Develop website content that provides useful information for readers,
- Avoid performing acts of manipulating Google’s search engine,…
3. Message from the brand
Brand messaging is what businesses want to say to the public and how they communicate them.
This message must express the values that the business wants to send to the public and they should meet the wants and needs of customers.
An effective message from a brand will answer the following questions:
- Who is your business? Doing?
- What does your business image represent?
- What makes your business so important to your customers?
In addition, you need to ensure: The message of the business must always be consistent in any marketing campaign and that message must adhere to the core values that your company is pursuing; The content must be attractive and attract the reader’s attention at the “first sight”.
Corporate messages can be expressed in many forms.
Even senior leaders can represent their businesses to deliver the right messages to the public.
4. THIS
As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, SEO (activities to optimize the position to appear on Google’s search engine) has really become an extremely important marketing tool in the technology era. 4.0 for any business.
Please pay attention to the following issues so that your business has a favorable position on Google Search:
- Always have in mind how to build a website to meet the needs of readers, not for search engines.
- Take advantage of the things that make your website stand out and attract visitors.
- Use tools to determine: Which links are pointing to your website, which links of your website are active?
- Implement SEO campaign in sequence: Keyword Research -> Content Creation -> Building Link System -> Monitor SEO effectiveness.
5. Social network
Today, you will not be surprised to see that your grandparents and parents also practice “playing” Facebook, Zalo.
This shows: The digital environment is a goldmine in which any business can exploit and find their interests.
However, you also need to define what content you plan to deliver on each social media platform:
With Facebook, the content is informative and oriented; Instagram is content that favors images and videos; content on Zalo may be suitable for older customers; LinkedIn is the sharing of your business expressed in a professional environment;…
In addition, other social networking issues you need to pay attention to include: Time to post the right article; tools to measure the effectiveness of content building on social networks;
> [Social Branding] – Branding on Facebook
6. Email marketing
There is still a certain place in using email to connect businesses with customers. Usually, the target customers of email marketing are high-income people who spend a lot of time checking and working through mail.
Before implementing a marketing strategy, you need to answer questions like:
- What is your purpose for implementing this strategy? (Collect leads, nurture relationships with old customers, announce new products, etc.);
- Who are the customers you want to reach;
- What is the content you want to convey;
- Are there any tools to measure campaign effectiveness?
Note: You need to be cautious when sending emails with a large number of recipients. If you are not careful, it is possible that your business’s mail will be classified as “Spam” or “Spam”.
7. Online advertising
Online advertising is an informative way for you to promote your products to the target customer group of your business.
There are many ways you can market your business digitally, including:
- Advertising on the Google search engine.
- Display Ads.
- Advertising on social networking platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Zalo, TikTok, …).
- Advertising on mobile devices.
- Advertising Remarketing.
8. Content marketing
Today, advertising is no longer just “advertising”. Many businesses take advantage of their website to attract user interaction and build customer loyalty.
If advertising helps you grow sales and sell more products, content marketing helps your business move closer to the hearts of customers.
9. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a marketing method where businesses use celebrities (or people who have influence in a certain community) to promote your brand.
Instead of doing direct marketing activities, you leverage the influence of celebrities to reach your brand further and reach your target audience.
According to research from EMarketer (a famous marketing research organization in the United States), in 2015 up to 80% of brands globally used influencer marketing campaigns on their digital platforms.
When implementing a marketing campaign with celebrities, you need to master a few rules such as: Choose the right celebrity (with a clean private life, a suitable image for the brand and influence on the audience). your desired target customer); always ready to face and deal with brand crisis; accept a higher than normal campaign budget;…
Hopefully the information that Malu has just shared will accompany your business in the upcoming marketing campaign. Thank you for following this post!
