Everything you need to know about building a great brand online and creating a thriving business online
Table of Contents:
- What is a brand identity?
- The importance of building a brand online
- Who does a brand affect?
- The Top 7 steps to build a brand online
Resources:
- Customer Persona Template
- Customer journey EBook
What is a brand identity?
A brand is how people associate with your company and your products and the sentiments they carry when they do business with you. It is of extreme importance to build a great brand these days and more significantly, to build the brand mighty and tall online. Building an online brand requires the right strategy and implementation.
It is fascinating how so many companies have merely an online presence and operations, moving away from the conventional brick-and-mortar type of business model. This need not necessarily be the case for all businesses, making it essential for all brands to build a strong online presence to establish themselves among numerous companies.
The importance of building a brand online
Entrepreneurs often underestimate the impact a great brand presence can have. A company’s efforts towards giving it the right touch of branding can directly impact its customer acquisition, customer experience, brand loyalty and preferability.
Digital penetration is increasing at an increasing rate in every part of the world. This makes the online world a great marketplace for businesses of all sizes and scales. Did you know that The number of internet users will grow to 5.3 billion by 2023 globally?
This number is a representation of the opportunity waiting for you to scale up and grow exponentially.
Who does a brand affect?
Customers – Brand perception plays a huge role in customer acquisition, retention and loyalty.
Employees – Employees can feel higher belongingness and a sense of pride when the company has a good brand presence
Potential customers – If someone is considering buying from you, they will have all eyes and ears on your brand
Referral partners – Your existing customers or those even just familiar with what you do so that they can refer you.
Here are the top 7 steps to build a brand online
- Brand name and logo
- Brand motto, vision and mission
- Building an online presence
- Identifying the Target Group – TG
- Plan for brand awareness
- Marketing plan to extend it from awareness to purchase
- Comprehensive marketing plan and lead generation
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Brand name and logo
Hearing about the brand name or developing familiarity with the logo is the first touch point for a prospect or a customer. This is the beginning of brand awareness and perception. Make sure to keep the brand name simple and easy to catch. The more simpler and sensible the brand name, the easier it is to recollect and remember.
A brand name should be beyond intuition or taste. It needs to be backed by quantitative research, analysis and market research and survey. It is recommended to have a 2 or 4-syllable in a word or have two short words at max, for the brand name. One word could be a keyword if it fits the context and relevancy.
The brand logo is recommended to be decided based on the industry, target group and location. For instance, the logo for a women’s clothing brand will be different from that of a technology company. There will be a difference in fonts, typography, colours and the type of logo altogether.
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Brand motto and vision
Both the books ‘Start with why’ and ‘Find your Why’ by Simon Sinek are great ways of understanding a brand’s motto, vision, mission and the ‘why’. By identifying these crucial elements of the brand, one can reinstate them during online interaction with prospects in different channels.
Building an online brand requires writing in a people-first approach, making it crucial for you to understand what moves and drives your brand.
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Identifying the Target Group – TG
Every business knows who they are selling to. But, when it comes to selling in the online world, we need to fine-tune our understanding of our prospects and customers. The criteria that who we consider customers are also digital users with a pattern of decision-making and behavioural style, makes it an additional challenge to grow.
Refer to our worksheet to understand how to build your customer persona as an exercise to understand your TG.
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Building an online presence
This step refers to creating your website, social media accounts and digital assets. This is a one-time investment of time, creativity, approach and possibly monetary investment too. But it is a defining stage for every brand.
It is necessary to identify the platforms where the brand can score visibility and the format of content that works there. This stage involves a lot of ideation and strategy to house the foundation of a great online brand.
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Plan for brand awareness
There are two ways to look at this particular phase of the online marathon. You could either be a prominent or “famous” brand offline now venturing into the online space or a brand starting its online journey while building a strong foothold in the offline world too.
Both these phases require the company to work for brand awareness, which is making people know that they exist online to solve a problem you may have. Building brand awareness is a basic stage that needs to be executed with brilliance.
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Marketing plan to extend it from awareness to purchase
Understanding this requires us to understand the customer journey. There are 5 stages of a customer journey. These are awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy. Once you have started to establish brand awareness, you need to progress towards moving the customer in the value journey.
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Comprehensive marketing plan and lead generation
The final step of creating an online brand is charting a comprehensive marketing plan that works for you and your customers. This can be charted according to the resources and budget available to you. The most crucial step of marketing and brand building is also a way of identifying how you can unlock the potential of content marketing for lead generation.
As marketing takes a lot of time and effort, it is important to create a system to measure the RoI on the activities done. The best way to measure is by creating systems to analyze the traffic and leads that your business generates.