Standing out online is becoming more challenging every year. In this article we discuss How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Your Brand: 4 Actionable Tips You Should Try
Consumers are becoming overwhelmed with the options of companies to buy from, and messages that were effective just a few years ago are now being tuned by their target audience at an alarmingly increasing rate.
And although, according to the Technology Mergers and Acquisitions Forecast for 2019, the valuations of online businesses remain on an upward trend, becoming one of the success stories is not at all guaranteed.
In fact, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to succeed without a strong brand – if your company isn’t known to the market, you’ll have a hard time getting anyone to choose you over the competition, even if you can offer the most value.
With so many scams online, consumers have become extra vigilant when shopping on the web, and thus having a strong company brand is now one of the most crucial aspects of succeeding online, since people need to trust your brand to even consider buying from you.
But how can you grow your brand while at the same time increasing your presence online?
Well, with the help of digital marketing, you can accomplish both – you can not only attract the most relevant customers for your brand but also reengage them multiple times, familiarizing your audience with your brand and forming a single idea of what your brand is all about.
Let’s explore How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Your Brand: 4 Actionable Tips You Should Try.
Table of Contents
Define Your Ideal Customer
Before we dive into the specific digital marketing strategies that you could use to grow your brand online, we must first figure out who your ideal customers are because it will determine the majority of the decisions that you make.
After all, if you don’t have a specific picture of the person that you need to get through to, how can you make any decisions in terms of positioning your business and choosing the right digital marketing strategies?
But if you take the time to develop a detailed customer profile, you will discover not only who your ideal customer is, but also his biggest pain points, as well as his objections, preferences, and even online browsing habits.
The hard part is gathering this information in the first place. So where do you start?
Well, the first step is to use a free business plan template to figure out your own goals and what your business is all about. Then, you can start looking for audiences that could be interested in what you have to offer and digging deep in trying to understand who they are.
It’s important to be patient during this process because the accuracy and depth of the information that you collect will determine whether you are able to develop a branding strategy that is more effective and more in line with what your audience responds to best than what your competitors are doing.
Engage Your Audience on Multiple Channels
A prospective buyer needs five to seven impressions or interactions with your brand until he will remember it for a longer period of time.
And with so many companies competing for the attention of the same audience, that can be tricky – people have learned to tune out a lot of the promotional materials that they see online, so even if you can engage a person at one point, the effectiveness of your campaigns will diminish over time.
That’s why it’s crucial to use multiple platforms to engage your audience and keep your brand on their mind.
The great thing about online marketing is the ability to market your business in so many different ways – you have multiple social media platforms, many of which are likely frequented by your target audience.
Then, there are Google Ads, search engine results pages, various blogs and publications, or even banner ads, all of which have their place in your marketing and branding strategies.
If you can create messages that are relevant to your audience and fitting with the platform that you are publishing them on, you can showcase your brand’s identity, values, and voice, giving yourself a much better chance of standing out from the competition and improving customer loyalty in the process.
Nurture Personal Communications on Social Media
People love brands that they can relate to.
64% of consumers cited shared values as the primary reason they have a relationship with a brand, so you need to find ways to communicate those values in an authentic way that will generate a positive response from your audience.
And that’s where social media can be so useful.
Billions of people use social media every day, and the majority of your target audience hangs out there as well, so if you want to break the traditional dynamic of a faceless company and the mass consumer, using social media to engage individual consumers can produce brilliant results.
Instead of trying to tell people what your brand is all about, you can prove it with actions by being active on social media, responding to people’s questions, and helping them solve issues.
You might fear the consequences of getting so active, assuming that you couldn’t deal with the potential influx of discussion points, but there are ways to simplify matters. For instance, you can use a shared mailbox to centralise the follow-ups. A shared inbox can draw social media threads together so you can follow a conversation across several platforms.
Many brands have achieved tremendous success by using humor and a strong personality on social media, finding a more organic way to become a part of their audience instead of looking like a company that’s just trying to make a sale.
However, one thing to remember when engaging your audience on social media is to be helpful as well – it’s critical for you to be able to actually offer useful solutions to the people who have questions or complaints because otherwise, the entire strategy can backfire and you may see negative comments pile on in a matter of minutes.
Therefore, you may want to consider using knowledge base software to create a centralized hub for information on how to handle different issues, which could be used by your support staff, social media managers, or even serve as resources that could be shared with the customers directly.
Provide a Consistent Experience on Your Website
It’s hard to expect success with your branding efforts if they lack consistency.
When your website or your communications don’t have a singular brand identity, your target audience won’t be able to form stronger associations with your brand, and the effectiveness of all of your marketing and branding campaigns will suffer.
That’s why it’s so important to make sure that your website consistently presents your brand on every single page.
Everything from the design elements to the content, to the voice that you use in your communications, must be in line with your target audience’s expectations and preferences.
You should also always be looking for ways to improve your branding efforts and look for tangible data that tells you what your customers seem to respond to best.
For instance, if you track your WordPress form conversions, you can see which messages or landing pages were the most effective, and split-test various aspects of your marketing efforts to refine your approach as you go on.
Over time, you should be able to pinpoint the specific aspects of your brand that your audience responds to best, and start making it a central feature in all of your on-site and off-site marketing efforts.
We hope this article about How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Your Brand: 4 Actionable Tips You Should Try has been helpful, and please leave any comments you have below.