Today, consumers buy brands, and not just products and services. Thus, by having a bigger sense of purpose, you are positioning yourself well in the eyes of today’s buyers. The element of branding is even more powerful when it comes to online businesses since, in the online world, trust is paramount, especially when you are a new entrant.
To position your business accordingly, you first need to understand what brand is, and what it isn’t. Your brand isn’t who you are, what you are, your products, or even what you stand for.
A Brand can only be defined through the lenses of your buyer persona’s eyes. It’s how your customers and prospects feel about you, your business, and your products. While you may position yourself as an honest and most reliable company, if your customers don’t feel the same way, then that positioning is not home yet.
Why Defining Your Brand Identity Is Important?
There are several reasons why you need to improve the positioning of your brand
1. Personality
Branding adds personality to an otherwise faceless entity. Your brand assets and messaging can categorize you into one or several of the following traits:
· Sincerity
· Excitement
· Sophistication
· Competence
· Ruggedness
You definitely can’t have all the 5 traits in your brand, but you can add in a second option. For instance, you can be known for competent and sophisticated products or services, depending on how you position yourself and the quality of your offers.
2. Differentiation
With several brands offering products and services similar to yours, how do you stand out? The right brand can help you differentiate yourself from the rest of the competing brands depending on how much thought you channel into the development of your brand and how you’ve positioned yourself in the eyes of your customers.
3. Customer Retention
Once your customers find you and they fall in love with your brand, they are bound to always come back, and in the case of a subscription model, they stay subscribed. People love supporting the brands they love if they are getting the attention and the quality they have paid for.
4. Ability to Charge Premium Pricing
If you already have really good offers that people won’t mind paying a little bit more to access, then improving your brand can help you sell those same offers at premium prices, without a significant drop in the number of customers that you acquire every month. A reputable brand with traits such as competence and sophistication can enjoy this benefit of charging premium pricing without additional production costs to develop the brand.
5. High Conversion Rates
Established trustworthy brands tend to convert more of their visitors into paying customers without really needing a complex nurture funnel that spans several months.
Branding Tips for Online Businesses
If you are on your way to developing an authoritative online brand for your online business, or you just want to revamp your existing brand, this article is specifically written for you.
Here are five tips to help you build a successful brand:
1. Create All of Your Branding Assets
If you took a business class in high school a related major in college, then you know that whenever we mention the term assets, we are talking about investments that remain within the company. Surprisingly though, many people choose to invest in expensive marketing promoting an incoherent brand that is all over the place.
Your brand assets are important since they are the visuals that help customers and prospects to recognize you or your business instantly. Some of the assets that you need include the following:
- Color pallet
- Typography: font styles and sizes
- Prevailing theme or style
- Logos, favicons
- Slogans and taglines
- Email signature
- Artwork and graphics
- Internal communications materials; letterheads, business cards, etc.
- Business templates for sales presentations, press releases, videos.
Once you’ve created your assets, you can then manage them within Google docs or any other preferred brand asset management setup. Just ensure that you have storage where you can access all of your digital assets online and can share them with others. You can also create your brand assets kit using programs like Canva.
A clear asset management system will help you get organized, improve efficiency, communication as well as ensuring that all of your assets are up to date and are being used as such.
2. Listen to Your Customers
We all want to associate ourselves with brands that listen. To build a strong brand, be known as a company that listens. There are several ways you can do that online:
- Respond to post comments on social media platforms.
- Answer questions as a human, stop using generic copy-paste canned responses.
- Analyze your social media stats. Each social media platform have their own analytics tools that you can use to see which posts your users are engaging with.
- Analyze your Google Analytics reports for data such as traffic sources, visitor demographics, etc.
By social listening, you will be able to tell what features or products are loved by your customers more than others and why, as well as determine what topics that your target audience is more interested in so that you can adapt your content accordingly.
3. Enhance your Brand on Social Media
Brand awareness is one factor that you can’t leave out when developing your brand. After profiling your ideal customer, and knowing where she hangs out, you want to go ahead and establish your presence there.
Another thing to note is that apart from having your business page (LinkedIn, Facebook) or timeline (Instagram, TWITTER), it’s also important that you build your own community within social media platforms that allow for this, e.g. Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups.
Another strategy is running social media ads to help put your brand in front of your target audience. From Facebook to TikTok to Pinterest ads, you aren’t short of options. With every campaign that you run, make sure you are targeting the right audience, measuring performance, and then using these data to make informed decisions on what to do next to improve your brand.
4. Brand Positioning
This is the process of determining the position that your brand wants to hold in the mind of your customers, and consequentially, the perception of your brand by your target customers.
Some of the areas of digital brand positioning you can leverage are outlined in the table below:
| Quality | Durability |
| Ecological | Ergonomics |
| Fast Delivery | Engagement rate |
| SEO optimized | Fast delivery |
| Seamless automation | Efficiency and reliability |
Of course, these will vary based on your business niche and the products or services that you are offering.
5. Tell the Right Story.
Your brand story is a very important piece in your entire branding strategy. Remember people are buying the why. Every great brand out there, from Google, Apple to Nike, has a great story backing them up.
For your brand story to work, it needs to be authentic. Consumers can smell gimmicks from miles away and this can damage your brand to the extent of setting you back to where you started. However, being authentic isn’t enough for your brand to stick out. The way you tell that story determines whether it’s going to be one that no one ever talks about or one that media journalists are rushing to dissect.
Not all of us are good storytellers, but the more we tell our brand story the better it gets. With time you will realize what aspects of your story do not resonate with your target customers, and which ones do.
Before you start publishing and sharing your brand story, write it down, edit it so that it makes sense. Play around with it. Move parts around. Demolish and start over. Do whatever it takes until you find a format that is clear, concise, and powerful. Then repurpose it into other forms such as a full brand story video coverage, animation, SlideShare presentation, etc.
Conclusion
From having the ability to charge more without going out of business to creating a business that people want to buy into, branding can do wonders in your business.