Most business owners give some thought to branding their company, however if you are only just going online with your business, some of what you know about branding may be old hat. It is important to keep up with the times, which is why you are now getting an online presence. But what you did for your offline company may not work for an online one.
Here are 5 concepts to help you keep up to date with branding.
- Yours is not the only business in the market and those that have gone before you – and are still there – have done the work of defining the brand for your industry. What you need to do is see it is delivered on a consistent basis on your website. To do this you need a brand strategy that defines what you stand for including what you promise and your personality.
- People are not as trusting as they used to be. Rather than take note of advertising from a company, they prefer to ask family and friends or even total strangers what they think. Why? Because these people don’t stand to gain anything by promoting a company they like, so their opinion is real and authentic.
- You need to find out what is really working with your marketing strategies and the only way to do that online is to track everything. It is only by examining the results carefully that your marketing team can say for sure what is working and what is not working. They then have to double their efforts on the former and quit the latter to ensure a good ROI.
- Find out where your target market is and go there. It is no longer as simple as taking out an ad in the most popular paper or even on TV. These days many people don’t read a paper and many more watch cable TV with no ads. But there are a lot more people on social media sites. If you are not where they are, you’ll be missing out.
- It’s important to document your strategy and go where the people are, but training your employees is also essential. These days even a casual annoyed remark about a business from a disgruntled employee can cause a great deal of harm. Employees need to watch what they say on social media sites, learning how to converse with and support people rather than putting them – or the company – down. Remember that the public can interact with your employees in many different ways, not all of them will be good unless you do some training to ensure it is.
Every business should embrace at least some of these concepts in order to remain in front of their competition.