Make a name for yourself
Positioning your brand means occupying a mental space in the minds of your prospects that sets it apart from competitors. This is one of the most difficult aspects of creating a website. Whether it’s an online or offline business, a successful brand is essential. There are a lot of rivals out there. Vying for the same customers that your company is after, so grab their attention. Create an online value proposition that is one-of-a-kind and essential. When it comes to introducing your brand to the market, it’s critical.
Create a brand identity that is consistent
Your brand identity is made up of all of your company’s physical and emotional characteristics of your brand. These include your name, logo, colours, tagline, images, sounds and smell that your target audience can feel, touch, sense, hear, smell and see. Depending on the nature of your business, some of these will be more important than others. For example, a perfume manufacturer will have a smell as a primary brand identity element. Together, these brand elements combine to create a compelling offer that is irresistible and unforgettable with your target audience and hopefully leads to brand preference at the time of purchase.
Pick a winning name
A name is the most important feature of the brand identities of most brands. It’s one of the easiest things that people will recall about your brand and here are some guidelines to construct yours:
• It should be unique
• Easy to remember
• Should be short
• Easy to pronounce
Register your brand
You can register your brand name and brand mark with the trademark registration organisation International Property Organisation (IPO) to give you exclusive ownership of its use and enforce anyone who uses it without your permission. It also helps to ensure that you don’t suffer litigation from anyone who claims to own it.
Secure domain names
As you research your brand, you should also check that domain names are available to register or have the financial resources to buy them from current owners. The two main top level domain names are .com and .co.uk for UK brands or the equivalent in your country and move quickly to register these as you wait for the acceptance of your trademark registration. Also, register other domains like .net, .biz and .org to ensure that your competitors don’t try to steal some of your traffic. It may also be worth registering close variant domain names to protect your name and not lose traffic to other sites when people misspell your name.
Promote your online value proposition (OVP)
Use every opportunity to promote your OVP that includes all the benefits that your target markets need or want. Your OVP is a combination of your unique selling proposition that differentiates your brand from competitor brands and the benefits that are of importance to your customers and are also your strengths. With a strong OVP, your business will be more profitable, and you will stand out from competitors and this will lead to greater market share.
Create brand rules
Your brand rules state how your organisation will use your brand identity, staff, partners and other stakeholders for advertising, in communications and wherever prospects come in touch with your brand on the web. This is especially important if you work with designers, freelancers and agencies and you can create a document stating how your logo and other brand identities are to be used in all communications.
Create a video
Video is powerful for putting across your concepts, ideas, products or services because of its audio and visual elements. There has been an explosion in video production over the last 5 years, and YouTube is now the world’s second largest search engine. There are many free tools to use to create a video, and even professionally created ones are cheap and will do wonders for your business.
Online Press Release Campaign
If you are about to launch a new product or service, don’t lose the opportunity to create buzz around it by releasing a press release. However, you should state how it benefits your customers or the general public and make it newsworthy too. If you have little experience running a press release, it’s best that you hire a PR expert or use a service like http://www.prnewswire.co.uk
Create YouTube Channel
YouTube is now the second largest search engine and is catching up fast with Google Search, so it can’t be ignored. This tool is effective in increasing brand awareness, and if you have a product or service you are launching or just need to educate your target market on your products, then this is the place to be. It’s now much cheaper to create professional videos, and there are freelancers on sites like Fiverr and People Per Hour that can create your videos for a low fee and upload them to YouTube.
You can also create a video campaign in Adwords and promote your video to any or all audiences.
Stay Alert
Keep track of any news about your brand, company and products by signing up to Google Alerts. It will help you with online brand management, and you can quickly respond to any comments or questions people have about your offers. It also helps you to keep a close eye on competitors and on what is happening in your industry.
Advertising Budget
One significant error made by countless online brands is to set a low budget for their advertising and branding campaigns. This makes achieving marketing objectives almost impossible when there are insufficient resources to implement the online strategy and the tactics.
Also, the budget should meet or exceed competitor budgets because they will be chasing the same customers and it’s important that you have the resources to promote your products or services.
Consistent brand messages
Inconsistent messages lead to dilution of your brand values and leads to confusion with your target markets. Wherever your brand is represented, whether that’s your website, social media platforms or in your advertising such as pay per click advertising, you should have a consistent brand identity that resonates with target audiences and positions your brand as the solution to their wants and needs.
Overall, you should stick to the promise that your brand makes. Whether that is always low prices or a premium quality service or whatever that is, you should maintain it in all communications.
Brand identity
Your brand identity encompasses all visible parts of your brand such as your name, logo slogan, colours, fonts, images and any other physical properties. This is what target markets associate with your brand, and it communicates in a physical way the promise that your business makes.
However, some organisations take shortcuts while building their brand identity and will often build their logo or engage an inexperienced designer to create an impressive company mark and logo. This demands experienced guidance, and it’s crucial that you select a proven team of experts to contribute to creating all parts of your brand.
Register domain names
When you establish your brand and are ready to promote it to the world, it’s probable you would have registered the key domain extensions like .com and .net and your country level domain like .co.uk for the United Kingdom. However, you should register as many extensions that are available such .business and .org so that you can prohibit people from registering these names and establishing up alternative websites that will steal your visitors and customers.
Without protecting all domains including close versions you risk losing traffic in the search engine results, especially when competitors rank well for the sites that they establish.
Build Awareness
If the purpose is to raise awareness, then decisions should be taken about what % of the target market should be made aware of the brand and by when. This will often occur at the debut of the brand when it has minimal awareness with potential buyers, so the business has to design a strategy regarding how this awareness will be reached and by when. An example of a brand awareness objective is: “Achieve 70 percent brand awareness with online customers by December 2016.”
This brand strategy target will require particular internet channels and technologies to launch and handle and some of the biggest ones are display advertising, social media marketing and Online PR. With display advertising, for example, Google Display Network campaigns can be established which focus entirely on banner advertising put on sites that closely correspond to the business and its target markets.
Channels like search advertising are not as efficient at raising brand recognition because the target buyers need to be aware initially of the brand before they can start looking for it. However, there are generic search terms that people will be searching with, and these might be incorporated in search advertisements to promote the new brand.
Create an emotional connection
Creating an emotional connection with target markets is not viable for all types of brands notably with corporate brand names acquired for company operations. However, For many consumer companies, developing emotional ties is typical with many significant brands like Apple, Coke, BMW, Disney and others, and it is conceivable for a wide range of enterprises that operate in the digital sphere.
Here, experience is of fundamental value, and this should be the purpose of the website and landing pages to create an experience that leads to high visitor interaction and strong client retention. Social media is also a fantastic medium to promote the benefits of the brand and create excitement around its features.
Convey distinguishing traits
The positioned brand should be delivering higher value than what competitor gives, not merely in pricing and reductions, but in benefits supplied and advantages that clients obtain from acquiring the brand and not competitors’.
The brand identity should be original and appealing, and it should reflect the ideals that it stands for. In communications and advertising, the differentiating traits should be identified and displayed to show how they trump competition traits.
Gain credibility and trust
To achieve credibility and trust, the brand should live up to its claims. If the promise is to supply things within 24 hours after purchase, for example, then this should be its number one objective and all efforts should be focused on attaining this. Anything less than the promise that the target clients have bought into, will lead to frustration and lack of trust and credibility.
The website is vital here also and should have all aspects that help to develop trust such are safe pages, info and FAQ pages, customer contact data, quick loading pages, proper navigation and so on.
All promises made in advertising efforts, particularly in pay per click advertising should be supplied just one click on the ad. If not, then visitors will bounce and never return, and you will accumulate fees but no sales from your marketing.
Achieve buyer preference
One benefit of building a brand especially online is that it makes obtaining buyer preference easier for the brand. Customers are more likely to trust a brand they are comfortable with and are prepared to spend more to acquire them.
