You can do all the internet marketing in the world, target the best keywords, and promote yourself endlessly, but it will all mean nothing if you don’t have a memorable brand.
In order to have a strong presence online, a strong brand is essential. You must develop a logical, effective strategy designed to target your desired audience and bring in sales. The work doesn’t stop there, though — once you’ve developed your brand, you need to continue tracking its impact on your business as a whole. That may be an intimidating prospect, but we’ve put together some guidelines to help you get started.
Creating a Brand
Establishing your brand is a challenging and pivotal part of building a successful business. You need to take into account the way your materials represent your business across a variety of mediums in order to create a memorable face for your business.
Brand is as much about how your business works as it is about visuals and advertising. If you’re projecting the image that your business is fun and upbeat, make sure that your client-facing employees reflect that with an upbeat attitude and pleasant demeanor. In contrast, if you’re emphasizing professionalism, don’t decorate your office in bright, mod colors. Every piece of your business contributes to the whole; strive to avoid dissonance.
Visually, you’ll need to establish a recognizable logo to represent your productions. This can incorporate the name of your business, a slogan, or just a graphic, depending on the feel you want to project. Here are a few tips for establishing a logo that’ll work for your business:
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Keep the design simple. The more intricate your logo is, or the more components, shapes, colors, or words it involves, the harder it will be to scale for multiple formats.
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Consider the feeling your logo provokes. Color, shape, and style can immediately form a perception in the mind of a potential customer, even before they know what you’re selling.
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Test your logo with friends and family that fall in your target demographic. Just because the design makes sense to you, doesn’t mean that it’s communicating what you want to customers — you have contextual information that your customers may not.
Online Marketing
You can have the best branding and logo in the world, but that won’t do you any good unless people actually see it, which means you need solid online marketing. Living in a digital age, online marketing can mean just about anything. You need to contend with social media presence, Google rankings, strategically placed ads, and the ever-volatile review game.
Social media is its own beast. It’s all too easy to fall down the rabbit hole and spend far too much time creating posts that may or may not bring in the results you want. Instead of trying to hit all the platforms, pick two or three that best reach your target demographic and focus your energy there. You also have to choose between self-promoted posts and paid advertising on the platforms; the latter makes lead-conversion easier, but some users find obvious advertisements off-putting.
To improve your web presence outside of social media, it’s important to create solid, helpful content on your website. You can share this out on social media, but if the content is authoritative enough and well-optimized, you may be able to rank on Google for search terms relevant to your brand. Another important tactic for improving your brand’s search presence is linkbuilding; having strong, widely focused content will make this much easier as well.
Finally, having authentic reviews will help your business immeasurably. In the digital era, it’s rare that someone will make a major purchase decision (or even a decision about where to eat dinner) without consulting online reviews. Encourage current customers to leave honest, cogent reviews on various online platforms — don’t solicit positive reviews specifically, as this gets interpreted poorly. Honest reviews look more realistic, and it gives you a chance to publicly address any concerns expressed.
Overall Effectiveness
Understanding if your branding and marketing are reaching the appropriate audiences will let you know if you made choices that benefit your business. Obviously, if you rebranded your business and almost immediately your conversion improves, it’s an indicator that you did something correctly. However, to avoid assuming a cause-and-effect relationship where there may only be a correlation, look at a few simple things:
Lead Tracking
Understanding where your leads come from and where your potential clients are will help you to follow through on more sales (and hopefully close more deals). There are different schools of thought on how to define and assess leads that you’ll want to consider when setting up your metrics. Assess what a qualified customer looks like, how you identify them, and what actions to take to most effectively follow up on those leads.
A/B Testing
If you significantly updated any portion of your mobile or web platform in your branding process, or you were stuck between two designs, consider A/B testing. If you rebranded, you’ll find out how much of an impact the new design is having, and if you’re just starting out, you can try two competing designs and see which interfaces better with your customers.
All Possible Explanations
If your lead analysis and A/B testing don’t line up with the results you’re seeing, it may be time to consider other explanations. For instance, do you work in a seasonal industry? Are you coming up on your busy season? Did something in the market affect prices or need that potentially sent customers your way? Did your community do any sort of small business promotion or was there a local news story or other event that may have spotlighted your business?
When looking for other explanations, it’s important to consider even those things you don’t think make sense. Sometimes, business comes from unexpected places, and identifying that will help you capitalize on it in the future.
Ongoing Evaluation
After you’ve performed your initial brand analysis, don’t stop there. You should always be looking for ways to improve the way your brand functions to convert clients. That doesn’t mean rebranding every six months — you need some stability to be memorable. However, evaluating the type of advertising you’re doing and how it’s affecting public perception and your bottom line will allow you to grow and develop as a business.