3 Best Ways to Improvise Your Branding on Digital Channels Careful use of social media channels can make your brand do wonders
By Rohan Ayyar Edited by Dan Bova
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Consumer behavior and buying patterns have drastically changed in the digital space. Thanks to mobile phones and on-the-go purchases, your audience is practically just a click away from choosing you or your competition. Unless your brand has a good digital presence and has actively nurtured brand loyalty across all these channels, you may not win the battle.
So, how do you get it right? How can you build and manage your brand via digital marketing so that your leads think of you when they make a buying decision?
Crush it on All Social Media Platforms
Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn are great channels for you to explore. The trick is to find the channel that works best for you and run the majority of your campaigns on that channel, while maintaining a brand presence in others. Here are some tips to help you run it smoothly
Be consistent: Social Media never sleeps. So, once you take the plunge and start your brand page on a social channel, you need to monitor it constantly, post consistently and engage with your audience on that channel. Depending upon the volume of enquiries you get, you may have to hire a dedicated resource and invest in tools that will help you automate regular posting. Remember to use hashtags (both trending and your branded ones) to get the maximum reach.
Measure and analyze: The success of your online campaigns does not depend on likes or followers - it depends purely on engagement and shares. See how many people share your posts and repost them. Analyze which posts receive the maximum engagement and create more content around that topic.
Be ready for unhappy customers: Social media is also the perfect platform for your unhappy customers to have a hearty vent. Anticipate trolling, criticism and customer complaints and put in place guidelines to deal with it. Remember never to ignore negative review - always assure your customers that they are heard and reassure them that you are taking steps to rectify their problem.
Not having a social media presence or having a poorly managed page will negatively impact your brand image. An ideal social profile will increase engagement with customers, interested leads and brand followers. If you run your branding campaigns right, you can definitely build a loyal audience base on social media.
Get Your SEO Right
Optimizing your content or your website so that it ranks better on SERP are on-page SEO tactics that improve brand visibility. What you may be missing out is certain off-page SEO that is equally important. It tells the search engine (like Google), how your brand is being perceived by the digital audience.
Posting on platforms with good authority: Parasite SEO tactics that use other pages' authority to boost your own brand are a quick way to improve your authority. All you have to do is create content on a platform that is already well ranked and link back to your site. For example, you can answer a question on Quora that pertains to your brand and direct the reader to relevant content on your site. Yes, it constitutes a valuable back link. More importantly, it gives your brand visibility to an audience pool who are actively searching for answers. They are the ones most likely to convert.
Brand monitoring:There are many more digital channels that are better for branding than social media. Your brand is most likely being reviewed, mentioned or talked about on other forums and blogs as well (lucky you!). While it is a great sign that you are doing your digital engagement right, it also means that you have a large scope of content to monitor. As a marketer, you will have to be aware of and respond to every positive/negative mention of your brand. Using a Brand Monitoring tool like the one from SEMrush will help you track all backlinks, mentions and reviews.
Learn from your competitors:Track not just your own mentions, but also that of your competition to see how they are winning in the digital space. A great example would be to see how they have already done promotions, what has worked for them, which channel is the most rewarding and execute the same for your brand too. It saves you a lot of time by taking the trial and error out of the picture and helps you make data-backed decisions.
A great digital presence and brand recognition is not built overnight. It takes a lot of commitment and patience to pull off. Talk about your product on forums like Product Hunt and get an initial feedback of what kind of response to expect. You can also connect with micro-influencers and thought leaders in your field to build more authority and trust for your brand.
Speed Up Brand Awareness with PPC
Pay Per Click Advertising is not just to attract traffic to your website. It can also help you build your brand image, provided you bid on the right keywords.
Bid on primary keywords and branded terms: Even if the Cost Per Click is a little on the higher side, you have to bid on keywords that make the most sense to your brand. Optimizing your ad copy regularly and getting a good quality score will eventually bring down the CPC. Also, do not ignore branded terms or closely related keywords. Use a Keyword Research tool to check if you are missing out on opportunities.
Rank for competition: While you can be penalized for using competition's name in your ad copy, you can definitely bid for their brands in your campaigns. That way, your ads will be seen every time a user searches for your competition. If your ads are better written and add more value, you can easily win over traffic that was actively searching for your competition.
Targeted remarketing: Remembering what your customers ordered or showed interest in and using it to remarket your product is also essential. Not only will your audience think of you before making the purchase decision, it also drives home an important point - It shows them that you care and that you remember - thus building loyalty and winning conversions.
Over to You
Keep in mind that Social Media, SEO and PPC are linked. Good engagement on social media reflects on your SEO and can influence your SERP rankings. Using PPC data on best performing keywords, you create more targeted content on other sites as well as yours, to get more traction. Ultimately, all three channels are required to provide a seamless digital customer experience. If you do it right, the results will speak for themselves - or rather, your customers will!
