Brand Building Through Digital Marketing: How to Do It and Why It Is Important

If your brand isn’t online, do you even have a brand? The days of having your brand exist offline online are over. If you want customers, then you need to have a presence online. If you want those customers to understand your brand, then you need a carefully planned and executed digital marketing strategy. More than ever, customers are looking for products and services from businesses that they can trust and whose brands align with their lifestyles. It’s not enough to simply have a good product or provide great customer service. Your customers need to know that they can trust you and stand behind your brand, or they’ll spend their money elsewhere. The key to brand building is digital marketing.

Customers and Digital Engagement

Even if you don’t have a strong digital presence, your customers are online. Estimates state that approximately 85% of customers research products, services, and brands online before making a purchase decision, and that number is likely to continue to rise. With these kinds of numbers, you can’t afford to not be part of the conversation. If your brand is not visible online when customers are doing their research, your competitors’ brands will be. Not seeing your brand as part of the mix may lead customers to overlook you, or it may even cause them to lose trust in your business. This is true even if you have an established brand that customers have long engaged with in the real world before the digital marketplace boomed.

Part of the digital experience for customers is also learning more about brands. Having great products and services is the minimum for entry, but they also want to learn more about your brand identity. Because they are seeking this information online, you can only tell the story digitally.

Value of Digital Brand Building

Using digital marketing to build your brand has several advantages. If you’re a small business, digital marketing helps to level the playing field by making it easier to compete with larger brands. Through digital marketing, you can target audiences in a way that offline advertising cannot, focusing your message only on those who will find it relevant. This type of marketing also comes at much more achievable costs for small businesses. Additionally, the recognition that you can gain from digital marketing is extremely important to your brand. If you maintain consistent messaging, logo design, tone, and graphics across your digital marketing efforts, then customers will begin to recognize you and associate your brand with your product or service. Then, when they need the things that you offer, they are more likely to think of you.

Marketing online is also a great way to connect with new customers. You can leverage the social circles of your existing customers to connect to other people who may be looking for brands like yours. You can also discover new markets by tracking who is interacting with your digital strategy. The data that digital marketing can produce about your market can also help with you with more efficient customer targeting. By understanding who is interacting with your digital content and which platforms are most successful for you, you can craft campaigns to precisely target different market segments.

Digital Marketing Strategies

Leveraging the digital marketplace to build your brand involves multiple steps. Before you begin, it is important to be sure your brand has a clear identity. What is your messaging? Do you have slogans or taglines that are associated with your brand? Do you have graphics that are visually cohesive and easily recognizable as yours? There should be a consistent line through your branding so that customers can identify you no matter which platform they are on. Being visible and consistent as customers navigate the digital space will increase trust in your brand and keep you in the forefront of their minds.

Your digital marketing strategy should have multiple components:

  • Content marketing
  • Social media
  • Website
  • SEO

Content marketing refers to informative blogs, white papers, eBooks, and other online publications that you create. The content should be designed to be informative, rather than strictly pushing sales. Content marketing is an ideal way to generate brand credibility alongside recognition. Your social media marketing may include your own profiles on various social media platforms, paid ads, and your direct interactions with your customers on those platforms. Your website and SEO, or search engine optimization, work together. SEO ensures that when customers search for your goods and services that your website ranks highly in the results they get, so they are more likely to click on your site. Your website, then, should have the kind of information that will answer those customers’ questions when they click on it.

These components are just the basics. Your strategy may also include things like PPC (pay per click) advertising, native advertising, sponsored content, online PR, and more. This multi-pronged process involves a lot of moving pieces that must work together to spread your message.

Because of these moving pieces, one of the most important things you can do is work with a digital marketing partner who understands the processes and can create a strategy that is suited to your branding needs. Our digital marketing service is called Salem Surround because of our approach to working with our brands. We believe in surrounding your customers online, so that your brand is visible wherever they are. This strategy requires understanding your market and how to target them, as well as developing clear branding that resonates with your customer base.

We work with brands of all sizes from across the country, and our digital marketing experts are ready to help you solidify your marketing efforts online. For more information and to talk to one of our team members about your digital strategy, call us at (469) 586-0080.

 
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