Helpful Tips For Brand Marketing in Today’s Digital Landscape
Today, everything on the internet is a brand. It doesn’t matter if you’re a solo influencer or a multi-million dollar company, your online presence is a brand that you project out into the world. When you’re trying to attract customers, you need that brand to be consistent, understandable, and pleasing to those who engage with it. Here are some helpful tips that can help business owners perfect their online brand.
Nailing Brand Aesthetic
If you’re starting a brand, you should already know that a consistent brand works best. That’s when the brand’s color scheme, font, and iconography match across numerous channels, so customers can take one look at your output and instantly identify it as yours.
For creative brands, or larger ones, you can also consider tiered branding. This is where an overarching brand puts forward sub-brands that have their own aesthetic. If you need examples, consider Microsoft Office suite, and how each program has its distinct color and logo. iGaming is another great example, where the average website hosts hundreds of slot games at once. Each of those games has its own aesthetic, often by using a theme or unique setting which you can see with the Wanted Dead or a Wild slot. In iGaming, it’s common for slots to use themes set in the past or in fantasy/sci-fi worlds. By presenting them under a consistently branded website, both the site brand and the game’s brand gain prominence with customers.
Having mentioned themed branding – that’s a quick and effective way to give new brands a memorable, familiar look that can attract customers. Brands often hearken back to times, places, and cultures that have long captured our fascination, because it’s a pre-packaged aesthetic that can draw audiences. Perhaps the biggest example of this is Ancient Egypt, which has been used to market fictional stories, beauty products, and even songs via music videos like Dark Horse.
Establish a Brand Narrative
Brand aesthetics are relatively superficial without a brand narrative. This is a newer development that has been kicked into overdrive in recent years, thanks to the internet and its impact on marketing. Without getting too philosophical, we understand everything through a linear narrative. We like a story, and that’s why modern brands try to put forward a positive and compelling story of how they came to be.
Crafting a brand narrative can be tricky for some businesses. That’s because it doesn’t work if you lie – in fact, it’ll work against you. The narrative needs to be truthful while simultaneously appealing to customers and flattering the brand. This means the best brand narratives happen organically, and marketers then capitalize on them to elevate the company’s presence online. A good brand narrative is unique to the business, so it provides a competitive edge that cannot be used by anyone else.
On the customer side, it provides an emotional connection that’s easier to trust. It humanizes the people who created the brand, no matter if they did it ten years ago or a hundred years ago. Some of the best brand narratives belong to the oldest companies, about entrepreneurs whose grandchildren now operate the business.
In reality, most businesses don’t have an epic tale behind how they formed. This is especially true for up-and-coming businesses that are breaking into new industries. So, instead, savvy marketers look to the future instead of the company’s very short history. They use cultural branding to establish what the brand stands for, its values, and what it wants to do for its industry and the people who buy into its mission. Take some examples of brand storytelling from Shopify.
Build a Community
There’s no use broadcasting a marketing strategy into the ether, hoping that it finds its target. Instead, modern brands need to focus on building a community using the tools and social media platforms available. Building your own community grants access to many things, most importantly brand loyalty and market research.
Source: Unsplash
Firms have spent (and still spend) millions of dollars on overwrought market research to decide their next moves. For a smaller, more agile online business, it costs very little to build a community filled with your business’ biggest customers and fans. Then you have a direct mainline to their wants and expectations, so you’ll fall short of them a lot less. Building your own website is best for long-term growth, but every modern social media platform is great at hosting business-related communities and providing user behavior metrics to those who run them.
Customers inside those communities will also have brand loyalty. They joined the community for a reason, because they are interested in repeated engagements with the brand and want to stay updated on everything it’s doing. It also creates a trusted point of contact between a business and its customers, which is great for avoiding scams if your industry is rife with them. By maintaining an active presence in the community, brands can also handle queries (adhering to a brand-friendly tone of voice) and take pressure off customer support channels as a result.
Embrace Influencer Marketing
Brand ambassadors are nothing new, and people like it when recognizable faces put their reputations on the line by backing a company publicly. If you’ve been on the internet, you know how this works already. However, after that section on community building, it’s important to understand how the influencer marketing economy really works.
An influencer is just a one-man brand, who has formed a community around them just like businesses attempt to do. The internet is a very large pool filled with millions of communities, all of them pursuing different interests and following influencers, companies, hobbies, and ideas. Some communities are formed by unassuming things like jokes, which is why meme marketing has become popular for many brands. In each case, the goal is the same – to pull users from an outside community into your own.
Influencers are the easiest way to achieve that since they are solo entrepreneurs who are well-embedded in the sponsorship ecosystem. There’s also no upward limit to the followers an influencer has, because their authenticity can attract hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people. Those people trust the influencer, so when they shout out a company, many of their fans will hop into the brand community. Every internet user exists in multiple of these communities at the same time, for work, play, and everything in between. By making agreements with influencers, a brand can extend its reach far beyond its own community.
