It's no secret that every successful brand already has a digital presence. Lower costs in marketing campaigns and having a global reach are some of the well-known benefits of a digital presence. Moreover, brands must adapt to an ever-evolving competitive market as consumers increasingly turn to digital platforms to purchase products or services.
With the developing AI technology entering the business world, it becomes a fact that marketing rules constantly change, and marketers must keep up to stay relevant. And thus, we have to set an expectation - building a digital brand is challenging. Some companies prefer to do it themselves, but a startup brand that does its in-house digital branding takes away resources and time just to market its products rather than developing them. Companies like Voda delegate their digital marketing efforts to agencies equipped with the skills and experience to pull off a strong digital brand.
This blog will guide you on how we do it, what digital branding is, why it is needed, and what actionable steps you can take right now to build your digital presence.
Let's get started.
What is Digital Branding?
Branding has many focuses, and digital branding is about the brand’s presence on online platforms. It is the marketing strategy that establishes identity through brand assets like websites, social media, online content, and influencers. The usual intent in building a digital build is to generate leads - people interested in the brand but have to decide to purchase their products and services. And thus, the usual marketing campaigns focus on developing interest in the brand by making free content, social media posts, and influencer collaborations.
Why is Digital Branding Important?
Modern consumers wish the connection between them and the brand goes beyond just the products. Moreover, the target audience expects a much more transparent company willing to stand on a brand's core values, engage with them, and make their consumers feel important to them.
For non-profits, digital branding enables a clear advantage to increase awareness of their particular advocacy. A vocal presence gives a better reach to tell your audience where you stand in a cause.
But the best thing about digital branding is how it helps startups and small companies to gain presence even when competing against global brands. Because building a digital brand has a lower cost than traditional marketing, has a global reach, and proper optimization increases organic traffic and thus gives them revenue.
Three Pillars of a Successful Digital Branding
Since one of the primary goals of digital branding is to generate leads, building a digital brand must consider the three pillars of digital branding strategies:
Brand Identity
Brand identity represents your brand's core values through visual or communication assets. One of these assets is the brand logo. Besides core values, one other goal of setting up your digital brand is to set it apart from your competitors and make a lasting impression. For example, you can assert to use color palettes that are novel in your industry, a brand title and logo that is provocative and compelling, or a brand voice that has a relatable and unique personality.
Remember that brand identity will always be built, even unintentionally, which is why most efforts are made to manage how people see you. For example, your brand's core values want to establish a professional and straight-to-the-point personality as a B2B company; you might confuse your audience when your content marketing sounds casual or humorous, like puns or sarcasm. Of course, some brands roll with what sticks and may consider rebranding just to appeal to the dominating perceived identity, but that's up to your marketing team.
Brand Visibility
You may have come up with the best brand elements like logo, website design, and posts, but it's pointless if people can't see them. Brand visibility is advertising and optimizing your digital brand to ensure your target audience sees them. You can make your brand visible through digital ads, where people can click through popular digital platforms to your website, or you can get your online traffic organically through search engine optimization.
Brand Credibility
Now that your target audience has seen your website, your social media post, and your content, comes a question - how can they trust you? Brand credibility is the effort to seek engagement with your target audience to gain trust and authority as a brand and, thus, to your product features. This is a more important focus in digital branding than other types of branding, like product branding, as technology allows you to seamlessly engage with your target audience directly in channels like social media, email, or through websites.
Digital Branding vs. Digital Marketing
When defining these two aspects of building a digital presence, we can essentially say that digital branding and digital marketing exist in different stages of the sales funnel. Digital marketing's main goal is to lead customers from their interest in the brand to the stage when they finally purchase the product or service. This can be done through advertising, product comparison, sales offers, etc.
Digital branding focuses more on customer loyalty, which focuses at the very start of the sales funnel, which is customer interest, and at the end of the sales funnel, which is customer loyalty. Digital branding that gains customer interest can be done through strategies like content marketing and brand loyalty through core values.
Simply put, digital marketing's goal is for the audience to purchase the product, and digital branding's goal is to be interested in the product and stick with the product.
Digital Branding Elements: Effective Strategies and Practices
Now that you've learned the basics of what digital branding is, here are the actionable strategies and steps that you can do to effectively build a digital brand, no matter what your company size is:
Logo
Chances are, if you think of a brand name, they might be another brand with the same name. So to separate your brand from your competitors, you have to design a logo that speaks with your:
1. Uniqueness - You want to ensure that when people see your logo without the name, they will know it is your brand.
2. Core Values - The logo must represent what you stand for and what you bring to your industry
3. Personality - The logo must be consistent with how you want people to feel about your brand as a whole.
Essentially, the brand logo is a condensed visual representation of the whole company, so its significance to your brand identity must be considered. Before designing your brand logo, you must make a checklist to define your brand clearly. Thus you must answer questions like What makes my brand different from my competitors? What principles do I wish to communicate to my audience through the brand? What words describe my industry? How should the brand act, speak, and treat people if the brand is a person? This is just part of the brand research process, but a preliminary process is important in creating brand assets like the brand logo.
Once you have established your brand, here are some logo elements you consider when brainstorming your design.
1. Colors - Branding experts take notes of the guidelines according to Color theory. And that's because we feel a certain emotion based on the colors of a brand logo. Technically, there is no defining rule, and sometimes what we feel in a certain color is inconsistent.
Still, years of exposure to logos does make us think of green-colored brands as environmentally conscious, black as brands that air prestige and exclusivity, and blue as tech brands.
You can look back at the brand personality and core values and ask yourself: what colors do I think when I think of the brand personality? Keep in mind that you can pick as many colors as you like, but make sure not to overwhelm your target audience.
2. Font - For logos like letter marks (logos for acronym brand names), wordmarks (brand name as a logo), and combination marks (image and name), font is the most critical part of the brand logo design. Famous digital brands today seem to have followed the minimalist approach to brand logos, and you may do the same if you wish.
For example, the Google logo in the past used to have serif(a small finishing stroke of letters), embossed(shadows within the font to make it look like it's 3D), shadowed font, and its progress until the modern logo had all of these features all removed into a simple design that states simplicity, and friendliness.
If you wish to make a monogram logo, your design will be based on how you creatively perceive letters as images. For example, if your brand name is 'Bumblebee,' consider making a vertical reflection of two 'B,' which will look like a bee's wings. Minimalistic approaches can also be thought of, like interlocking letters (Louis Vuitton), Letters as the visual (Warner Bros), or making a new typeface(Walt Disney).
3. Image - Symbol, emblem, and abstract logos depend on how they represent your brand. Brainstorming a symbol logo is easier as you can imagine a real-life object representing your brand values or the industry(e.g., trees for outdoor lifestyle). Emblems are logos mostly used for sports teams or brands that have long existed and thus have this sense of legacy in them.
Designing for abstract logos may look daunting but can be simplified by looking for symbols representing an idea (e.g., Tiktok's music note, Spotify's sound wave, and Nike's titular goddess's wings).
Messaging
Digital brand messaging is the strategy to make a statement of how exactly it will be said. Consistency is key, but personality also plays a part, as it goes hand-in-hand with visual brand identity on how you want people to perceive you as a company. Like every branding strategy, proper research of the target audience and competitive trends is the preliminary process before creating the brand voice and personality.
Here are the top brand personalities and voices you can use, depending on your brand positioning, business industry, and core values.
Excitement: If you prefer having a wider reach, or to signify that you are keeping with the trends, having excitement in your brand messaging is appropriate for your brand. Restaurant chains and toy brands often have this type of brand personality. Embody the excitement as a brand voice in your marketing campaigns, like incorporating memes, looking for virality, and being carefree and approachable in your social media posts.
Sincerity: For a non-profit organization that wants to convey a sense of empathy or corporations that seek environmentally-friendly alternatives for products, sincerity will be appropriate in their brand messaging. Research your advocacy properly, and understand that your messaging must be culturally, gender, and racially sensitive, and most importantly, must be genuine.
Ruggedness: Athletic, tough, and straight to the point, you can make your brand personality rugged if your industry has something to do with an active lifestyle like sports. Be rugged in your messaging by writing short, direct posts and powerful slogans.
Competence: B2B brands work with companies who extensively research the services they want, so having an atmosphere of being a leader in a particular B2B industry is good for brand messaging. In your digital brand strategy, being technical in your messaging helps, but if you want people to see you as an expert in a complex industry, you should be able to tell complex things in a way that makes it easier to understand.
Sophistication: If your products or services target customers looking for a premium and exclusive experience, this brand voice is for you. Empowering your audience with messaging that makes them feel special with luxury and exclusivity.
Website
Your brand website must be the holistic representation of your digital brand. As with all digital channels, your brand messaging and visual identity must emanate through every page. However, website design isn't just for their perception but also for its function.
The landing page must navigate the visitors to relevant pages like services, company info, and content, and navigation must also be quick and easy. Transactions within the website, like the purchasing process, must be streamlined and don't take away much of your customer's time, and payment methods must be exhaustive when possible.
There must only be one CTA per page. Don't give your visitor too many options, or they will likely not choose any.
SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a low-cost practice that optimizes a website and digital content to be visible in the search results like Google, thus generating organic traffic - the number of visitors who click a link to your page because it matches their search. Here are some of the key tips for optimizing your digital channel.
1. Create Useful and High-Quality Content - ensure this content's primary purpose is to give valuable information to your visitors for free. Not only this gives you credibility as an industry leader, but it also compels other websites to use your content - which is called a backlink, thus giving you domain authority in that particular topic.
2. Content Optimization - Search engines like Google depend on the words you use to see if the content is valuable in a particular search result. Finding the right keywords might sound tedious, so you can use online SEO tools like SurferSEO and Ahrefs to automate these processes. Other content elements like word count and images also contribute to SEO
3. Audit your content regularly - if you see that your blog content doesn't have traffic within six months, consider further optimization or remove them if they deemed unimportant (e.g., blog about past year's industry statistics)
Social Media
Naturally, if we are talking about digital branding, we also have to discuss social media as a platform for brand building. Different age groups prefer particular sites, so proper research is needed to determine which channels best serve your purpose(e.g., Facebook is a go-to site for an older audience, and Tiktok is for Gen Z). Moreover, if your messaging is catered towards a particular region or country, you must also consider posting there and in their own language.
One aspect that makes social media great is how easy and direct it is to engage with your audience and gather valuable information like audience demographics and feedback. Being vocal about your willingness to take action from the feedback you get tells your audience that you are willing to adapt and evolve as a company and also value the voice of your customers, thus increasing brand loyalty.
Social media may not necessarily be useful, but they must still be relevant to the brand. For example, it would be confusing for a dog food brand to talk about summer fashion, but they can talk about dog clothes. The post seeks virality by being short, simple, and timely.
Remember, be consistent with the brand voice and personality that you have set up.
Influencer Marketing
Though one of the more costly strategies, influencer marketing has steadily risen and has been the go-to for marketers whenever there is a need for greater social proof. The steps are simple: You contact the right person with a big social following that best represents your brand's core values and pay them a fee or commission to promote your brand to their followers through their social media channels. Influencer marketing is an excellent jumpstart for a startup brand that has yet to gain its own loyal followers. Influencers already have established a sense of trustworthiness and have a relatable human face. The huge social following doesn't have to be something other than your criterion since marketing campaigns with micro-influencers resulted in better ROI in recent years.
Make sure that you are careful with the selection of your influencers. You must factor in their on-screen personality, their own values, and the demographics of their audience.
Famous Digital Branding Examples
Here are some examples to get ideas about how global brands dominate the digital market sphere:
Apple
Video ads on platforms like Youtube and Facebook have been a go-to for marketers for great reasons: the information is digestible, appealing, and has a short format that considers the decreasing attention span of modern consumers. And Apple does this by highlighting its value proposition of giving value to its customer's privacy. In this ad, Apple highlights how critical privacy is to health data by making it uncomfortable for the people in the video when the narrator tells it to the public. It addresses the pain points of customers and creates value in the product.
Amazon
Amazon Alexa successfully provided homes with automated solutions to simple things like turning the lights on, living room radio, or even having someone to talk with. Marketers have acknowledged the engagement of their audience on Alexa's often hilarious response that they launched a Twitter account highlighting the great things you can achieve if you have an AI assistant in your home. This digital advertising promotes engagement and, thus, loyalty to the brand.
Final Thoughts
Remember that you need to be open to feedback from your audience and are willing to reevaluate your branding efforts. A great digital brand is built by the development made by your branding team and by the perception the customer has of it as a result.
If you are feeling lost in your strategy, don't fret! Get in touch with Evolv, a team of branding experts who have helped companies like Deep Structure lead the market through a strong digital branding strategy.
You can also check out our blog for the latest branding trends that guarantee ROI.
