https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPKFQ4YXjoY&feature=youtu.be
A strong, consistent online brand presence is imperative to attracting and retaining your client base and maybe their first touchpoint with your brand.
In short, having an online brand presence that echos your brand across the world wide web can make or break your business. If your customers can find all the product, service or location information effortlessly online, they are more likely to take the next step along the path to purchase. That may even be the point that they purchase. The time dedicated to building an online presence for your business is time well spent.
How do your clients find, learn, try and purchase your brand?
Where do I start with Planning a Online Brand Presence?
Who? Why? What?
We Start by asking Who are you trying to attract? Why will they be coming to your site? And in line with your brand strategy, what are you uniquely qualified to offer?
Understand that a transaction online is typically the by-product of offering useful information to the Internet user
From here, we can build a strategy to build a great destination. Focusing first and foremost on the message you want to send online to potential and existing clients helps you develop your brand to be clear and consistent across all your Internet platforms. Three ways out of the thousands of directions you can start are:
Referral Programs
Users will gladly spread the word of your product or service when they know they’ll get an added perk. Dropbox is a great example of how smart referral programs can growth hack a business.
Friends get friends to go to Dropbox because they get something in return
Dropbox gives existing users 500 MB of extra storage space for every friend they refer (up to 16 GB). Back when Dropbox was still new, this referral program helped generate tons of word-of-mouth, delivering a huge number of sign-ups and saving Dropbox countless advertising dollars.
PPC (pay per click) Advertising
SEO becomes more competitive every day, while organic Google real-estate shrinks, PPC is a smart solution for getting your brand seen on Google. With targeted keyword research, you could be showing up at the top of Google for relevant searches. Even if customers don’t click on your ad, seeing you at the top of Google makes an impression and builds brand awareness.
Influencer Marketing
Having friends in high places is another easy way to boost your brand awareness. Find existing influencers in your industry whose business you could potentially complement rather than compete with. Make use of your partner’s influencer network to promote your brand (while also building up valuable partnerships you can continue to make use of long-term).
What is the best type of Online Brand Presence?
To understand where you can best focus your efforts on building the online presence, you need to understand the “Who? Why? and What?. This will aid the direction of what platforms best fit the brief. It may be that your brand doesn’t even require a full website, with many brands building their online presence on social platforms.
Do you even actually need a website, or will your presence be more based on social channels?
You have a brand with a purpose, but do you have a personality? When building your online presence, give your brand a personality! Going online, it’s easy to be very corporate. Don’t forget that there are humans behind that online presence. Your company needs to act human and interact, give back, be useful and so on. If you do that, your online brand will be strong from the start.
What are the benefits of a strong Online Brand Presence?
1 Help your customers to find you
Where do you look first when you’re trying to find a product or service? The answer is the internet. The days of leafing through your Yellow Pages are long gone. Your customers are online and if you’re not there too, then they’ll find someone else who is.
2 Reach more people
Do you want to expand your reach out of Australia and go global? Get online. Suddenly, you’re no longer limited by the Australian population, you can reach people all over the world. Powerful marketing tools such as Google and social media are all about reaching people to hang out and talk to them about things that interest them.
3 Build a stronger brand
Your brand is what will differentiate you from your competitors. Customers may be drawn to your company because of the way you present yourself, the language you use, the beliefs and values you stand for. Therefore, creating a strong online presence for your brand is a key part of how you will stand out from the crowd. Social Media allows you to show some personality, and its the place where your customers can explore and learn everything about your business and brand.
In a world where a third of us are online regularly are you there for your customers?
4 Increase your credibility
Your future customers are more brand-savvy than ever before. They’ll research their options and guess what? They do it online. If you don’t have a strong online presence, then immediate, you become less credible, and your potential customers are much more likely to look elsewhere.
5 Reputation management
Your customers are online and chances are, they talk about you! This can impact your business positively or negatively, depending on what they’re saying of course, but if you’re not involved in that conversation you’re powerless to maximise the opportunity – or to implement some damage control.
6 Cost-efficient marketing
Social media is an incredible tool for any business. But did you know that email marketing is even more so when it comes to returning on investment? Email marketing sees an average ROI of $44 for every $1 – 3 times that of social media.