Branding is perhaps one of the least sexy digital marketing topics to talk about — because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that come with other digital marketing
For those who may face an uphill internal battle to support marketing efforts, it can often be hard to sell to your company execs on investing time and money into branding because it can be so difficult to measure a return on investment.
Let’s face it, digital marketing analytics and measurement software are great when it comes to tracking everything website visits, lead generation conversions, and online social behaviors. But when it comes to tracking awareness and brand recognition — even the most sophisticated tools can fall flat.
Some might argue this makes digital branding even more important. If you want to raise awareness, attract new clients or customers, then strong branding is critical to your success.
Here are three things you can do to immediately improve your digital brand.
1. Pick the platforms that best reach your audience.
Focus first on one or two platforms — not on doing everything. You don’t have to be everywhere all at once, especially not right off the bat. Look at your strategic plan for your business and see where you feel you can best reach your audience online.
Do some market research on your audience and then also to find out who’s on each platform. For instance, if you have a highly visual service or product and you are looking for millennials as your target customer, then it’s a no-brainer: you should be on Instagram.
If you are a professional service firm, maybe legal, financial, healthcare, then your target audience is on LinkedIn, so that’s definitely a place where you need to be.
Focus first on that low hanging fruit and then only start to expand on new platforms when you feel that you are comfortable on the platforms where you first started.
2. Quality over quantity.
Just as you don’t need to be on every platform right away, you also don’t need to post 20 times a day if the quality of your posts is going to suffer.
Quality, well-crafted content is critical. This applies to the original content that you’re creating and also to the content that you’re curating from other reputable sources online. The only thing worse than no content is bad content.
Bad content will drive people to unlike your pages, to unfollow you on social media, and even worse, perhaps stop considering you for the products or services that you offer.
3. Consistency is key!
When it comes to branding, consistency is key. Right now, make sure that your business name, your phone number, and your address — all of your key info — needs to be the same across every platform that you use — and that what you’re using on social media is the same as what you’re using on Google.
Keep your logo and graphics consistent. Your look, your image must all be the same.
Keep your content consistent with who you are and what you do. Don’t get sidetracked by trending topics — just because people are talking about it doesn’t mean you should be talking about it on behalf of your business! Make sure that your content is always relevant to who you are to keep your branding consistent.