What The Best Online Branding Pros Do (And You Should Too)
2017 is the year of the personal brand. Now more than ever before your presence online will be crucial to your success. It is no longer acceptable to offer the bare minimum in terms of maintaining a good brand facade on the internet. You will be quickly overlooked, unless you put your heart and your soul into your online marketing presence. Here are some expert tips on what the online branding pros do and what you should do too.
Know Who You Are As a Brand
Knowing who you are and what you represent as a brand will help you ensure that your marketing messages truly resonate with your audiences on a human level. This will make you come across as authentic and it will be easier for you to get creative with your branding and try out new ideas.
Red Bull is a fantastic example of a business with a secure brand identity. The tagline “Red Bull gives you wings” is extremely familiar to all who encounter the brand. And this tagline is used as the theme for all of its major TV adverts and marketing activities. But further, internally, the full mantra marketers use is actually, “Red Bulls gives wings to people and ideas,” which is slightly different. This is extended mantra is designed to help the team filter creative ideas, to ensure that they stay true to themselves. If an idea pitched isn’t seen to be ‘giving people and ideas wings’ then it’s scrapped. This helps the brand create a cohesive message across all its channels.
Think About Your Audience
If you want to attract the right clients, you must first know who they are and how you can make your brand seem attractive enough for them to engage with. This free email course provides lots of insight on how you can achieve this.
In all of your marketing efforts, you need to concentrate on the problems your potential clients face and how your skills can best address these issues.
KLM Airlines solves a multitude of customer queries, all through one app. Customers can obtain their boarding passes, see flight information and book tickets easily from their mobiles. In another clever move, the app also offers tourists information on destinations, to help inform a further buying decision further down the line (or at least alleviate some of the boredom of waiting for a flight).
Show People Who You Really Are
The key to social networking is to be social. Forget about chasing the highest number of Likes and instead add something meaningful to the conversation. If you can get in touch with influencers and maintain a regular and genuinely insightful blog, your brand will have roots that will compel internet users to visit and interact with you again and again.
Dollar Shave Club is a brand that is making a colossal impact through influencer marketing. In approaching popular YouTubers with millions of subscribers, they have amassed a huge amount of dedicated customers from all over the world. Their blog is also filled with quirky and informative articles covering men’s lifestyle issues.
Automate Wherever Possible
For social media posting, being present to react and communicate with your audience will help you maintain a genuine presence online. You must make sure you automate the process of blog reposting, standard updates etc. to make sure you free-up enough of your time to provide the human touch to your postings.
Innocent Drinks have a large following on Twitter because they constantly post updates in their signature cutesy and slightly irreverent tone. Innocent’s updates chime with the tastes of internet users and offer distracting, fun content as well as “relentless smoothie-based marketing messages.” The brand appears more ‘human’ through their sense of humor and diversity of content.
Get To Grips with UX
If your website is the center of your online universe, you need to make sure that every single page of your site is optimized to boost the number of enquires you receive. This means that every single blog post, landing page, even your contact forms should be devised from your understanding of your what your audience expects to see from a brand like yours. Set up your own web store using a subscription service that offers you tutorials and support along the way.
WWF have great UX on their main donations homepage. Through focussed calls to action they prompt readers to make donations, by providing button links and just the information needed to inform a donation. All ‘distractions’ in terms of other pieces information are kept to a bare minimum.
Get Testimonials
Just like with online shopping, people read many reviews before they make a purchase. The same should be so for you and your business brand. Ideally you would want to target high-profile, previous clients and ask them for a short testimonial for your website or Linkedin profile. For some people, approaching old clients can feel ‘icky’ however, you can overcome your nervousness by sending them a simple feedback survey, or offering them a testimonial for testimonial deal.
FitBit gives customers very short surveys which can be filled out in seconds. As a longer-form example, Focus Lab’s testimonials page looks fresh and original and includes many detailed testimonials, building trust in the brand.
Taking charge of your personal branding online will ensure that your talent gets recognized by the right people. It requires dedication and commitment to consistency, investment, and a heck of a lot of research. However, the rewards will be a successful career with exciting opportunities and brand longevity and staying power.