Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Internet Branding Is Key To Today’s Marketing

Internet Branding may still be in its infancy, with social media attracting most of the attention and buzz. But its an integral part of the online brand building process, and only one aspect to a larger picture. While its a separate channel than offline marketing, its critical to include with the web being what it is now. Many companies are slow to move, figuring a website, twitter page, and possibly one on Facebook is enough. Unfortunately, the laggards will have to work 3 times as hard to catch up. Social media and Internet branding is not a fad.

Building brand equity online can take enormous amounts of time, money, and energy. A culmination of online advertising, social media, SEO, and even online PR, big brands want to listen with social media tools to guard their online reputation management.

In this video of Dan Colbey entitled “What physics taught me about marketing” he discusses positioning brands and how one incident can erode much of the brand equity built.

What’s your game plan? Do you have a strategy that takes you past the next year?

How about a social media crisis plan should your brand come under attack?

Positioning and protecting your sweat equity with proper planning can help retain the strength of your brand should it ever find itself in the crosshairs. And if you haven’t come up with one yet, now is the time to start thinking about online branding strategies so that you have a path to follow and measure down the road.

Tags: online branding, strategy

Must Read Roundup

A few articles worthy of sharing on social media, online branding and advertising…

5 Reasons Why Your Interns Are Better At Social Media Than You Are

If you’re hands aren’t dirty from being inside your company, then you shouldn’t be blogging. Thinking like an intern means remembering that passion you used to have about every day business and bringing it to the blog. Interns share how excited they are about new products.

- businessinsider

How to Manage Your Online Advertising

Lucky for even the most luddite entrepreneur, a new wave of ad management and placement software and systems have emerged that can make handling ad flow almost as simple as updating a Facebook page.

- Inc

The do’s and don’ts of effective tweeting when building your personal online branding

Twitter has become a vital tool over the past few years, allowing folks to chronicle everything. A recent study suggests the microblogging site can improve relationships in RL (that’s Real Life). But it’s also become a venue by which people may — to put it plainly — overshare.

- CNN

Eroding Site Equity With A Brand Strategy

For many ad agencies, building a mini site for a client is often the answer to a new campaign. It allows creative control, a chance to grab a cool domain, and to create something fresh as an extension instead of being tied to the brand identity guidelines.

What most advertising agencies and businesses don’t realize is when they build a mini site, they’re giving up some of their brand’s equity by doing so. Links are like an Internet marketing currency of the web, and the equity they build also builds the brand online. Rather than creating mini sites, which can be cool, its of more value in the long term to keep everything on your main site.

First off, even though you could redirect it later, it dilutes the strength compared to any natural links that are deep linked into your site. If you have to have that cool domain for a campaign, you could redirect it. But the best advice is to keep it all on your site for the direct links instead of resorting to redirects.

If the new addition goes a few pages deep, you might also acquire new deep links as well. When it comes to link strategies, it’s all about keeping it natural. And deep links should probably out weigh the ones pointing at the root by at least 3 to 1. There’s no reason a campaign can’t be a sub directory of a mini site, and you can even deviate away from the main design. But it’s strongly advised to have the logo clickable back to the index so visitors can explore the rest of your site deeper.

I had talked to some folks about their site recently, and after examining their other web properties and a little investigating, it seems a few agencies they worked with each had them create new sites for new projects. Now they have some nice sites, but had these all been incorporated into the main one, they’re site authority would be stronger by the sheer volume of the links combined pointing at the main one. Containing within the main site would also probably lead to more stickiness and pageviews, which in this case would help, along with stronger rankings for a variety of phrases.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for mini sites either. Often there is a need in SEO to build out a network of these in order to improve your inbound links (IBL’s). The advantage being you control the anchor text, and so long as they maintain relevance and a few other things its all good right? Well, yes and no. A surge of low ranking sites without being interwoven into the network or social web is just a bunch of low ranking unauthoritative spam to the search engines, and possibly does little for you. And you also tasked with creating links for all the new sites as well. In the long run, if you don’t do it right, you probably made twice as much work for yourself.

The majority of the time you’ll want to keep your content, campaigns, and mini sites within the framework of your main site. It’s your brand, and you want to create the equity through content and social strategies, not campaign clusters.

Creating Influence Online

Possibly the shortest Internet marketing conference ever, the Influence Project involved 60 speakers for 60 seconds. Some of the speakers included Brian Clark, Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Joel, Muhammad Saleem, Brian Solis and more.  MP3 recording and transcript  available through the above link.

Tags: branding, influence, Marketing

Why Online Branding

If you ask yourself this, consider the logic behind why branding is part of almost every marketer’s strategy. Besides the consistency of a brand’s identity, you want to create a strategy for online branding that not only works with a marketing plan, but also with its target audience. But wait, there’s more, it isn’t as elementary as that.

Online branding is a bit different that it’s offline counterpart. The channels (advertising, social media, search) are different and the tools offer more opportunity through interactivity. And whatever channels you use, the real kicker is you can track your successes in near real time and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Remember the days when you might do direct mail or some other offline advertising and would have to wait weeks to tally the results? Tracking your Internet advertising and social media marketing campaigns allow you to see what’s working within hours. But you’re hear asking Why Online Branding?

Using the tools within the channels, not only can you have farther reaching and more targeted campaigns, you can capture better data and do multivariate split testing on your landing pages, copy, design, and creative. Again, in near real-time.

But beyond the control and monitoring potential, you also have lower production costs and better ROI for your campaigns. With most campaigns, you can’t even measure that with offline advertising!

You run your ad in print or outdoors, and unless your call to action includes a special offer with a unique landing page URL or 800 number to call, all you know is what the potential reach is. Like a newspaper or magazine have x readers, or a radio station have x listeners. Even though branding isn’t always about taking action at the time of mention, having the ability to track your campaigns allows you to maximize your spend so you can funnel your budget where online branding will be most effective.

While advertising online let’s you put your brand in front of potential customers on websites with traffic, and social media provides new opportunities, search marketing (both SEO and SEM) can get your brand in front of those customers when they’re in buying mode and searching for a specific topic. Being in the top search results helps create that synergy between your brand and a phrase, and contributes to top of mind awareness. SEO has also proven to provide the best ROI of all online marketing channels.

So when you’re thinking to yourself ‘Why Online Branding’, its hopefully more clear. Better tracking provides improved spending, the changes in advertising can be on the fly to account for improving your campaigns, and a higher level of interactivity also provides more bang for your buck. Marketers keep shifting their budget to online for this reason, and the growth in this channel has outperformed offline marketing options for the last few years. Television advertising might still be king, but the cost to produce and place the ads, along with poor tracking options makes it questionable which is the best choice.

I don’t think you can expect one to replace another, as they reach different segments, but keep in mind that Pepsi skipped their annual mutli million dollar Super Bowl TV ad last year, and put it in online advertising and social media.