Digital Branding 101
As a former account manager for a brand design firm in South Florida, I am passionate about the art and practice of branding. Branding is a term coined from the old practice of branding cattle. Cattle owners would brand their cattle with a hot iron. At the end of the iron rod was their mark – a logo or symbol of sorts unique to them. The ensuing burn on the cattle’s backside would produce a lasting scar. Over time, as the owners sold more and more of their cattle, purchasers began to relate the quality of the cattle they purchased with the cattle owner’s brand.
Much has changed since the days from when this practice began, but the underlying principles remain the same. Create a unique mark, apply it to your communications mediums, and over time consumers will begin to associate your brand with your products or services. The effectiveness of the branding comes by way of your consumers remembering their experience and the brand associated with it.
Digital Branding 101 is meant to be a brief article highlighting some of the unique opportunities to develop one’s brand in this incredibly vast and intimidating new world of digital media. Be it in the form of a web site, a Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter page, a blog or any other form of digital media, the number of users able to come into contact with your brand is virtually limitless. At the mere click of a button, a user can forward your brand to 500 of his friends or followers, who in return can forward your brand on to 500 of their friends and so on. Each online impression contributes to the ongoing growth and value of your brand. The rate at which your online brand can propagate is like nothing the world has ever known.
All of this lends to an unprecedented opportunity to share with the world what you have to offer. The entire internet-using population is now potentially your audience, whether you want them to be or not. How will you communicate with them? How will you present yourself, your products or your services? How will they remember you? I’ll cover each of these questions in sequential order below.
How will you communicate with them? In the most obvious sense, you will communicate with them with any of your content made available on the web. But this question begs to dig a bit deeper. By ‘how’, I mean what will you have to say, to whom, and how will you say it? Let’s assume for example that you offer pool cleaning services in your local area. Your target market would presumably be anyone that has a pool. Dig deeper, and the target market becomes more clearly defined into multiple markets. There are hotels with pools, condominium buildings with pools, apartment complexes with pools, homeowners with pools, neighborhoods with pools, and so on. The next step, naturally, would be to determine who the decision-maker is regarding who cleans the pools, and this individual will change within each market. At a hotel, it may be the maintenance engineer. At a condominium building, it is likely someone on the condo association’s board. With a homeowner, it’s probably the person paying the utility bills. Each of these markets will have their own preferred methods of researching vendors, contacting them and contracting their services. The key is to customize your communication most effectively with each one. Talk to them. You can drill down those sub targets even further. The hotel maintenance engineer for a local Embassy Suites may very well have different expectations and demands than the one from a nearby Ritz Carlton. Although it is crucially important to be consistent in the delivery of your brand, it’s not only acceptable, but becoming more and more critical to the success of any online marketing and branding initiatives to customize and personalize communications for your individual target markets. Again, talk to them.
How will you present yourself, your products and/or your services? As just identified, it’s important to customize your communications for each target market, yet it’s just as important to consider the medium being used to convey those messages. A web site is the ideal medium to professionally communicate to viewers a general overview of your company. Most web sites follow a somewhat standard format with a header, a navigation menu, a main content area, perhaps one or two sidebars, and of course, a footer. Most visitors to your site will expect some level of consistency in the layout and delivery of your content, so in most cases, it’s best not to stray too far from that norm, else you run the risk of causing confusion for the viewer which may result in them seeking out a competitor’s site to get the information they want or need.
Another common medium being used today is the Facebook Fan Page. Fan Pages are restricted for use by businesses, professional groups and organizations, governmental agencies and the like. The Fan Page differs in this regard from personal Facebook pages which are somewhat limiting in comparison. Fan Pages are the perfect medium for sharing the personality of your company with visitors to the page. It’s a great outlet to share pictures of you and your team, projects that you’ve worked on, etc. You can incorporate just about anything from your web site into your Fan Page, although the content will be limited to a 520-pixel-wide column. Visitors to your Fan Page have the option to ‘Like’ your page by clicking a ‘Like’ button. In doing so, they become a ‘Fan’. Your company or organization will then become listed on their personal Facebook page as one of their ‘interests’. Any future postings that you publish on your Fan Page will then appear on their ‘Wall’, which is nothing more than an ongoing list of published content by their respective friends, interests, etc. Anyone of their friends that may be reading content on their wall or reviewing their interests stand the chance of seeing your company’s published content. If they perceive any value in what you’ve shared, they may very well choose to ‘Like’ it themselves, thereby sharing it with everyone connected to them. With over 500,000,000 users (yes, 500 million), it’s safe to say that there’s great opportunity to share your content with a massive community, locally, nationally and abroad.
Two other popular online mediums are Twitter and blogs. Twitter is still very new and frequently misunderstood. Although made available via a web site through your computer’s web browser, it is best served through a mobile device (e.g. a cell phone, a tablet PC, etc.). Twitter allows you to share thoughts, ideas, news or whatever tidbit of info you feel like sharing. These are referred to as ‘tweets’. The one caveat is that these messages must be limited to 140 characters. Brevity is the key to Twitter. You can choose to ‘Follow’ other Twitter users, and they can choose to follow you. If they do choose to follow you, they’ll then be recipients of any future tweets that you send out. They (and you) have the option to ‘retweet’ any tweet that you receive, meaning that if you receive a tweet that you want to share, you can easily retweet that tweet, and all of your followers will instantly become recipients of that tweet. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers… I know. Read it a few times and it should start to make sense.
Blogs, on the other hand, are almost the exact opposite of Twitter. Blogs are mostly used for more in-depth articles or discussion about a given subject. They allow for commenting by readers, control of comments by the blog’s moderator and they’re a great opportunity to present yourself as an authority in your field of work. Most blogs run on what’s called a content management system (CMS). WordPress and Blogger are just a few examples available for free to any aspiring blogger. Blogs can be published to your Facebook Fan Page, incorporated into your web site, or be completely stand-alone. Many blog articles have multiple hyperlinks to other articles, creating a ‘web’ of interlinked, relevant content.
The last question… how will they remember you? The best advice I can give is to be consistent in the delivery of your company’s personality. Incorporate your company’s logo into each of these mediums where applicable. Use keyword-rich content to aid with optimization in search engines. Speak with a consistent voice, albeit tailored to the individual(s) you desire to reach. In a sense, let people get to know you (and your company) by expressing yourself, what you have to offer and why anyone should choose your company over the next one.
In a world where corporate dominance has tainted people’s trust, it’s ever-so-important to be transparent in who you are and what you do. Hiding behind the veil of a rigid, impersonal, corporate entity won’t win you too many new clients. Letting them see inside your company and your team will start the process of building trust, which is the ultimate way to earn business. We all want to know that our money is going into the hands of people that appreciate it, do their job well and will treat you as an individual rather than customer #5033123519.
- Benjamin Gray
Principal, Gray Spectrum
