Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Online Branding Strategies

For many companies, creating a strong brand resides near the top of marketing objectives. A strong brand can raise awareness, build consumer relations, increase sales, and differentiate itself from the competition. In a sense, you might say that a strong brand creates a shortcut in the mind of the consumer. Once achieved, this type of association with a phrase or category simplifies decision making.

While traditional branding may take decades, online branding has been know to happen in a fraction of the time. The viral convenience of the web allows everyone to tweet, share, post, and more with social media. Facebook fan pages provide an outlet for advocates, forum discussions create a dialogue to engage in, and much of all this happens in real-time.

Brand Strategy 101

It starts with determining your brand’s objectives. Determining just who your brand is, a persona of sorts, creates a foundation and metric to measure by. Is it the best tasting, cheapest, or premium product or service of a category? Once you have an objective, identify who would be your target audience. Selecting a type or demographic works better than the ol’ shotgun approach every time. Targeting also results in better communications and creative that results in better messages, as opposed to trying to appeal all of the people all of the time. Following that, figuring out your brand barriers so you can deal with any issues allows for better marketing. There’s always something; strengths, vulnerabilities, opportunities, threats, political, economic, technological, or social.

A brand is about customer perception, and creating the necessary influence positions the brand in the mind of the consumer. Adding benefits and/or value create brand equity. The assets which provide brand equity in traditional marketing are fairly different than online branding, although there is some overlap. With the traditional way of branding, your strategy may include public relations, advertising, and traditional marketing like pricing strategies, retention plans, and more. Don’t forget your 4 P’s.

Online Branding Essentials

Online branding includes a few key components, those being; display advertising (banners), search marketing (PPC), social media (or SMM, for social media marketing), search engine optimization (SEO), and online reputation management (like online PR meets SEO). Each of these tools can leverage your brand, but when used in combination effectively, its a powerful marketing strategy that can rival traditional marketing.

Online Branding Strategy

The online brand promise, which was conceived while defining the objective, is where the journey begins. It could be anything from convenience or entertainment to selection or value. The important thing to remember is this is your mantra and almost every marketing or branding effort shoud support your brand promise. The promise builds on an experience which helps meet the objective, and build brand equity, if you deliver.

While online branding strategies vary per business, from hotels, clothing, electronics, financials products, entertainment or another vertical, the core of the online branding strategy is still broken down to advertising, social media, seo, and online pr.

Read a summary on reactorr’s online branding services and how it can drive your online marketing efforts.

Tags: Online Branding Strategies

Social Media For Brands

A roundup of a few big brands engaging in social media.

Microsoft will donate $100,000 to Stephen Colbert’s new charity fund to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Colbert and Bing

Pepsi created the Refresh Everything and skipped advertising during superbowl (some saying it was a mistake) to give millions of dollars to fund ideas that will refresh the world to non-profits in six categories. Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education.

IKEA‘s Facebook campaign was a stroke of genius. Using the photo tagging feature, a bunch of showroom images were uploaded to the account of a store manager at their Malmo store. The first person to tag an object got to take it home.

Ford bet on social media to generate buzz to promote the new Fiesta ( story ) and head of social media Scott Monty has been hard at work and winning.

Dell stands out as one of social media’s best examples and have created success through a network of blogs, sale alerts on twitter, and listening to their customers via their community IdeaStorm.

Intuit created a community for it’s Quickbooks software users while being active on Twitter and Facebook.

Starbucks used crowdsourcing to create MyStarbucksIdea so customers share suggestions which others vote on, with the best being implemented.

Blendtec used video for its series Will It Blend and purees everything from the iphone and more for millions of views.

Zappos has an unparalleled commitment to customer service, and social media has allowed  them to form more personal connections with customers.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, had the following to say…

“Brand building today is so different than what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago you could get a few marketing people in a small room and decide, ‘this is what our brand will be’, and then spend a lot of money on TV advertising — and that was your brand. If you as a consumer only had your neighbors to talk to, you had to believe what the TV was telling you. Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”

Or you could say that your relationships are your brand.

Other info of potential interest include this list of corporate blogs,

Tags: branding, online branding, Social Media

Online Reputation Management – Guarding Your Brand

I had been meaning to post on this for a while, and recent news provides the opportunity.

Online reputation management is more than a public relations issue. With social media and even mobile media, a company is never far from the public eye. It’s not just the brand that’s at stake either, there are the products, and even the executives that are an extension to a brand.

Besides the press and social media, you also want to keep an eye on the search results for your product or brand names in search results. Brand SEO? If someone were to google the name of your product or brand, are you content with what they might see on page one?

For a simple start plan you can do right away, you can keep an idea on news or buzz on your brand starting with Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts for quick notification. For online reputation management, social media monitoring or online branding tools can provide other signals that could help you put out a fire before it reaches the media and spreads.

Tools for monitoring social media can include Twitscoop or monitter, or more comprehensive options like trackur or radian6.

The recent oil spill disaster is terrible to say the least. It’s also become an interesting example of how brands might (or might not) participate in the discussion, and precautions they can engage in.

BP has been slow to deal with their online reputation management, and while I’m sure they’re busy (or not…), they made a smart move today.

In order to take some control, BP has started a search marketing campaign and is bidding on phrases like “oil spill” or “gulf disaster” in Google and Yahoo.

In the words of a BP spokesperson:

To Make It Easier for People to Find Out More About Our Efforts in the Gulf and Other Ways to Help

It’s been suggested that BP is spending upwards of $10,000 a day to maintain the top spots.

One strategy that public relations prepares for clients in advance for events that can harm a brand or organization is called crisis management. It’s an action plan that allows for a quick response should a situation occur. Borrowing from this concept, we present the Online Crisis Management Plan.

The first step is to create a team to carry out certain tasks. The team should have each others contact info for both home and work, so if there was any kind of crisis, they can maintain communications regardless of where they are. All team members should also have a access to the plan at all times. Such a plan usually includes senior management. The team should have roles defined of what actions are to be taken, and a designated spokesperson to handle media inquiries. The spokesperson should not be the CEO. The purpose of such as plan is to protect the reputation of the brand.

Should an issue come up that requires attention, prepared statements communicated immediately show your company is aware of the situation and provides the greatest opportunity to control events. Having a news release partially prepared in advance is also recommended so that it can be completed and issued as quickly as possible.

Example:

A ___________________ at ____________________ involving __________________ occurred today at ________________ . The incident is under investigation and more information is forthcoming.

Add additional details and the standard boilerplate below.

To be prepared, its important to have pre-conceived possible events and positions taken on each. Some of these might be human error, unauthorized procedures, quality issues, privacy issues, misuse of confidential information and more. It’s also wise to address what things can be mentioned by employees on other sites.

Other materials for online use that can be prepared in advance could include documents like fact sheets in case the media requests them. Having an online media room on your website, even in the simplest form, can alleviate the burden of putting it together when needed most, and time is of the essence.

You might also consider having incident specific websites ready on standby, to be uploaded at a moments notice. These can prove to be excellent tools to prevent or mitigate damage from your online brand.

You might wonder why you wouldn’t just add a section to your existing website. Its recommended that you take fast action, but also distance yourself in some ways. Should someone search your brand or company name in the future when things have cooled down, some of those links could be displayed below the search results for your company. You wouldn’t want to search your company name and find below your listing a series of negative stories from various media outlets and bloggers. Its easier to deal with if you create a site that is a separate url.

Also, like BP did, create accounts for search marketing to drive search results to your minisite for consumers to find out more.

With a search plan in place, social media mayneed to be addressed at sites like youtube, twitter, facebook, and similar places where you might already engage with customers. A social media risk management plan is essential to online reputation management, and focusses on one aspect.

This is far from comprehensive for any kind of Online Crisis Management Plan, but if it happens to sparks some ideas, motivation or direction to draft your own, our work here is done. Hopefully you’ll never need it.

Last but not least, always tell the truth. The goal is to protect reputation, but part of that includes maintaining credibility.

Great Diversion with Bonus Life Lessons

This is one of my favorite Ted presentations. It not only discusses branding and how advertising adds value, it also provides an interesting look at perceived value.