Whether or not you are an established company and want to take your offline brand and build it online or if you are a new company wanting to launch a new online business, here is a quick outline for how to build your brand and grow your business online:
The first thing is to learn about ‘branding’, and why you need to understand your customer (or future customers) and what they perceive as the unique selling proposition (distinct advantage over your competition) for your brand.
I know that you think you’ve come up with this amazing new product or service or technology, which is why you want to start a new organization, but the truth is that the competition will be able to duplicate whatever you’ve done in a matter of weeks or months. You may not have any competition today, but not only will someone be sure to follow your lead tomorrow, they may even be able to do a better job, or sell a similar product or service at a lower price.
The only thing that will set you apart – the only thing that cannot be copied by your competition – is your brand.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that having a strong brand identity is important, and you’ll want to know what steps you have to take to create a strong brand identity. Here are four summarized steps:
Customer Research: Determine your customers’ attitudes, perceptions, motivations, beliefs, values, etc., and how they perceive your brand and your competition --- if you have a brand or competition
Customer Personas: Building buyer (or customer) personas is important in creating your brand positioning and marketing plan. A persona is essentially a representative of a type of buyer that you have identified as having a specific interest in your product or service.
Perceptual Mapping: What market niche will you fill / how will you be perceived, versus the competition, in the minds of the customer.
Brand Positioning: Determine what the unique selling proposition is for your brand. What can you claim, that no one else can claim, that sets you apart from your competition?
Now that you’ve established your brand position (or maybe you had a strong brand off-line and just needed to remind yourself of what sets you apart), the next thing you need to do is develop a strategy and marketing plan for building your brand online. Here’s a quick summary of what this will entail:
Marketing Goals: Establish what your objectives are for building your brand online before you waste precious time implementing your plan. Do you want wide reach or is your goal to sell product, generate trial, or register leads?
Keywords: Determine the most efficient and effective keywords. Gaining and building your presence online is all about having the right keywords and content.
Content: Infiltrate the web with your content to market your product or service online. Developing a sound content strategy is a must.
Creative Messaging: Identify your key messages and create your advertising using the brand personality, tone, and manner that appeals to each of your customer personas.
Media: Understand the online media options (email, search, blogs, forums, social networking sites, virtual events, banner advertising, affiliate marketing, etc) and how each can be used to achieve your marketing goals.
Tracking: Implement a tracking mechanism to monitor response rates, conversions, and ROI to help you optimize your marketing efforts. Then tweak your programs to improve overall results.
Sounds simple enough, and it really is. It takes time and effort, some faith, and a bit of luck and before you know it your brand will be sitting alongside the big boys.
Still want to learn more? Check out the other articles on my website or feel free to give me a call or send me an email today!
Carmen Arnevik Freelance Marketing Consultant (206) 612 – 2723
