How To Build Your Online Brand? 4 Tips for Success

What Is A Brand And How Is It Represented?

According to Wikipedia:-

‘People engaged in branding seek to develop or align the expectations behind the brand experience, creating the impression that a brand associated with a product or service has certain qualities or characteristics that make it special or unique. A brand is therefore one of the most valuable elements in an advertising theme, as it demonstrates what the brand owner is able to offer in the marketplace. The art of creating and maintaining a brand is called brand management.’

If you promote your brand through a website you will want to rank well with the search engines. The best way to achieve this is through having high quality valuable information with lots of links pointing to different layers on the site.

The sum of all points of contact with the brand and is known as the brand experience.

Mark Jackson, of Search Engine Watch says…”you may have heard it mentioned that Google wants to rank brand Web sites. It isn’t so much that Google only wants to rank big brands. But they do like all of the signals that these big brands carry. Big brands, more often than not, have very deep/informational Web sites and have their share of other Web sites linking to them. These are two very important “signals” of the authority of these Web sites.

Is branding off-line different from branding online?

The main difference between off-line and online branding is speed. Reading from Seth Godin book, Unleashing the Idea Virus, he points out the following stats:

Up until the end of the 20th century, the amount of time it took to reach 50 million users/viewers was:

• Radio – 38 years
• TV 13 years
• Cable 10 years
• Internet 5
• Hotmail 1 year

The ability to influence more people more quickly is never more true. But just because you can reach more people, it does not mean you can influence more people.

4 Tips For Building Your Brand Online

1. Do Not Rely Solely On Your Website

With the existence of Universal Search, relying on your text only website is becoming less effective when it comes to spreading your companies message. Building your website should only be the start of your online marketing efforts and building your brand is definitely not going to happen if you just stick to your traditional website.

When trying to build your brand you should give your company every opportunity to get noticed. Using text is naturally one way, but how you deliver that text has become much more important. Having a website is only the starting point. You should be delivering your brand through:

• Blogs incorporating:
  • Text
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Images
• Social Media
• Online Press releases
• Link building strategies

Start targeting up and coming websites that can give you extra exposure in the search engines. Some examples of these websites are Hubpages and Squidoo.

2. Offer Subscriptions To Your Your Blog Via Email And RSS.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an extremely effective method for people to get notified of changes to your website and blog. If one of your customers has a large number of websites that they want to keep up to date on, instead of checking the actual websites every few days, simply let them subscribe to your website using your RSS feed. This way, they get all your important new content delivered straight to them. This is possible using a piece of software called an ‘Aggregator’ or ‘Feed Reader’ Popular aggregator’s are:

• Google Reader
• FeedBurner
• NewsGator

3.  Actively Engage in Social Media Marketing:

The social media websites below should play a key part in your online brand building strategy. As these websites are used by the larger search engines for content, you will get more visibility when you start to build a presence in these web 2.0 sites.

4. Think About Viral Marketing Ideas.

Viral marketing is an excellent strategy for spreading your message and building your brand through ‘word of mouse’. Perfecting a viral message is not an easy thing to do. A couple of recent/current examples of viral campaigns listed in Wikepedia are:

• Burger King’s The Subservient Chicken campaign, running from 2004 until 2007, was cited in Wired magazine as a striking example of viral or word-of-mouth marketing.^[7]
• Cadbury’s Dairy Milk 2007 Gorilla advertising campaign was heavily popularised on YouTube and Facebook.
• In 2007 the New York Times’ advertising columnist Stuart Elliott wrote about a business-to-business viral campaign for a software company, showing that viral advertising has application in areas outside of consumer marketing.^[12]

When they start spreading your message for you, without you having to advertise or push the message, bingo! The more effective the viral message, the more online visibility you get.

The ultimate online viral marketing concept is pushed one step further to a concept developed by Seth Godin – the ‘idea virus’. This is where your message spreads with lighting speed due to several factors. Godin explains that you can deliberately set-up your marketing campaign so that it stands every chance of becoming an idea virus. (That’s definitely another post!)

In Summary………

Building your brand online should be an ongoing exercise that continually looks for new ways to get your message out there. Increasingly online users are getting information sent to them rather than going searching for it.

Your ability to create a buzz has become increasingly more important, it only takes months now to reach millions of potential new customers – the trick is knowing how to find them!

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