Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Branding Perspectives

Just how important are brands online? When a consumer is interested in a product or service, they’ll typically search for available options. Or they might turn to their personal network for ideas and suggestions. Since over 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user generated content and 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands, it’s difficult to ignore the opportunity to connect.

Its been said that a company can boost profits by 75-100% by retaining as few as 5% of their current customers. Whatever business you’re in, you’re success will be that much greater if you focus on creating a brand. The value behind a brand strategy offer long term benefits that increase your bottom line exponentially.

And with that in mind, here are some branding quotes for further inspiration…

 

“A brand for the company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”

- Jeff Bezos

 

‘Brands are the express checkout for people living their lives at ever increasing speed.’

- Brandweek

 

“If you are not a brand, you are a commodity.”

- Philip Kotler

 

“Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.”

- David Ogilvy

 

“A Brand is not a product or a promise or a feeling. It’s the sum of all the experiences you have with a company.”

- Amir Kassei

 

“A great brand is a story that’s never completely told.”

- Scott Bedbury

 

*A brand is a personification of a product, service, or even entire company.”

- Richard Blanchard

 

“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”

- Walter Landor

 

“A business based on brand is, very simply, a business primed for success.”

- David F. D’Alessandro

 

“A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.”

- Scott Talgo

 

“A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.”

- Al and Laura Ries

 

“The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives. Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.”

- Eric Schmidt, Google

 

“The primary focus of your brand message must be on how special you are, not how cheap you are.  The goal must be to sell the distinctive quality of the brand.”

- Kerry Light

 

“A brand name is more than a word. It is the beginning of a conversation.”

- Lexicon

 

Tags: branding

Positioning With Digital Branding

Creating the authority of a strong online brand requires a strategy that aligns with its positioning. While Social Media, SEO, and online advertising contribute, a critical component to positioning is a strong content strategy.

Driving your online branding strategy often requires one to be perceived as a key resource or authority within your market or niche. Sometimes referred to as thought leadership, aiming to position yourself as “The Source” (or one of the top alternatives) poses more of a challenge than one might expect.

If you’re committed to this approach, read further for details on how to get started.

More »

Does Your Brand Scan?

A colleague was having difficulties in attracting talent to recruit, and soon came to the realization that the company brand stood for very little. From an external perspective, the company had few details available other than some recruiting posts.

It’s often wise to look through the eyes of an external and impartial observer to get a sense of how your brand might be interpreted. It’s this perspective that can contribute to your direction, and help define an online branding strategy.

While social media is a start to the conversation of who you are, keep in mind that search is often where things start. How you go about influencing one’s perceptions of your online brand also relies on is not that different to an offline approach, where positioning can determine everything.

Tags: branding

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

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.

Online Branding Tools

Did you know that 70% of bloggers write about brands organically? And almost half of that is product reviews?

According to Jupiter Research, 52% of readers say blogs factored into the critical moment they decided to buy. And over 40% of online moms use social media for prodict recommendations.

About 65% of blog readers access blogs specifically to get an opinion, and over 90% trust user reviews over an in-store clerk.

Online branding tools for social media monitoring and reputation management are key to tracking and engaging with existing conversations.

Reputation Management

Alerts are a great way to stay informed and are delivered to your inbox. It isn’t a perfect system but effective in combination with many of the others mentioned. Set to comprehensive so you’re informed as they happen. Link

Comments on blogs can provide insight to your brand, and now you can monitor them with backtype and co.mments.

Blogs are easy to watch over with tools like google’s blog search, blogpulse, technorati,

Social Media Monitoring

Radian6 is a popular paid social media monitoring tool

dna13 provides real-time access to TV, print, online and social media content

Brandwatch is a comprehensive social media monitoring service

Brandtology is an online branding intelligence tool

Cision offers another robust monitoring tool

Spiral16 can help visualize the presence of a brand online

ScoutLabs looks very promising

BuzzLogic is used by many large brands

Twazzup gives a look at real time results on twitter

Trackur is a social media monitoring tool that can export results

SocialMention searches the web for any mention of your keyword/brand

Addictomatic provides mentions of your keyword or brand from multiple sources

monitter and twitterfall are great ways to keep an eye on twitter brand mentions

Topsy is a tweet search engine worth trying

Keotag is easy to use and gives  a glimspe across several popular platforms

boardreader helps monitor forum conversations

There are countless social media and public relations monitoring tools to be found online and this list is far from complete, but it gives you a starting point for some of the better options for online branding tools and social media monitoring.

First place to start would be setting up a google alert as it takes less than a minute and its free. You might also create a list of your brand name on twitter for an easy one click reference. The paid tools are far more advanced and often provide a dashboard for social media monitoring, but it might be more than some will need. Try out some of the suggestions to see which works for you.

Another area not really touched on but worth mentioning is online video. Using video marketing through sites like Youtube can be very effective, and your clips can also be embedded in your blog and easily shared.

Last but not least, keep an eye on Facebook. It has over 40% of social media traffic (comScore) and still shows steady growth. Understand that Facebook might not be a fit for everyone, but it’s worth exploring the idea and experimenting.

Social media accounts for almost 20% of online activity.

Branding Online – Why Marketers Need SEO

In an interview entitled Common Mistakes of Marketing Creatives and CEOs, Keith Reinhard (Chairman Emeritus of DDB) explains…

“When I was growing up in the industry, let me entertain you, let me make you smile, I’m very versatile, it was one way.”

Advertising was this way for decades, and what may have worked for the last 40 years clearly isn’t as effective these days. A shift like this comes as no surprise. Whether its advertising or just about anything, things change.
Reinhard goes on to describe the way things work now by suggesting…

“Now it’s we’re better together”.

This is a great point as the emergence of social media has had such an impact on brands, possibly one of the largest in recent times. Consumers are tired of being told and now look within their networks or trusted resources or contacts for more impartial views and recommendations.

An interesting point also brought up in the video mentions how when a CEO is really involved with the brand, the brand endures, has integrity, and can sustain the revolving doors of marketing directors.  A great point as with each change in marketing leadership comes someone that scraps direction and previously built equity.

One of the best definitions of a brand I’ve heard was provided during this interview…

A brand is who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.
One person that has maintained these types of values is Steve jobs of Apple. Over the course of the last 20 years Apple as a brand has probably never strayed far. But one example of branding confusion that comes to mind is McDonald’s. It seems with each new agency they hire (every 2-3 years) there is a different direction in the messaging. For example, they make burgers, they make them fast, and their affordable. But over the years they’ve introduced pizza, ribs, and even salads.

Online branding will take marketing to new heights with the speed at which you can connect with consumers. With social media, search marketing, and Internet advertising a brand can literally grow at sonic speeds compared with the past.

Marketers still seem to overlook the potential of SEO and how it can drive measureable revenue to their online business, yet have adopted to the virtues of social media rather quickly.

Perhaps it’s the inability of the average marketer to truly understand the benefits of how SEO and online branding belong together and how it can help their bottom line.

With paid search marketing results (PPC) accounting for roughly 20% of the clicks in typical search results, that leaves a lot of cash on the table in terms of customer acquisition.

For SEO’s, the following isn’t new information, but it might be of interest to marketers which are less familiar with the practice.
If you try the Google Keyword Tool you can get some insight to the potential of SEO and appearing in natural search results. Depending on the phrase, you can increase your visibility by thousands and more with a properly executed SEO strategy that pushes your site into the top 10 results.

It’s important to note that SEO is similar to branding in one sense. It’s a process and requires a fair amount of time to achieve those top ranking results. Realistic expectations depending on your industry to rise to the top can range from 6 months to several years. One of the keys to increased success in this venture is the quality of your content or offering. By focusing on this aspect, marketers stand to gain advocates, which will assist in the link building process by blogging, tweeting, or linking to your site for you.

You might be thinking tweeting falls under social media, but it’s the content they tweet that should be part of your SEO strategy. Sometimes referred to as link bait, it’s about the creation of quality content that will help to get those links.

Content creation and planning sometimes falls on the shoulders of an SEO, as does PR and many other tasks.  It’s always wise to have an SEO involved in the process but not necessarily depend solely on them to create this sort of material.

The role of SEO is about optimizing a site (for starters), but more important, is to improve the online visibility of said website so that it will rank for phrases that you’re targeting for your business.

When you think about it, there isn’t anything much better than your site showing up in the top listings when a potential customer is in the buying mode and looking for a product or service like one you might offer.


There is more likelihood of them inquiring or purchasing versus presenting banner ads all over. Most web users have banner blindness. Can you recall 3 banners you’ve seen in the last week? Most are lucky to be able to name one they had seen.

There probably isn’t a better way to position your brand online than showing up in the top search results. In the long run, your brand will become synonymous with the phrases you’ve targeted and displaying in those results also provides credibility to your brand’s product or service.

You should note that when you appear in those results, the url in first position will get about 42% of the clicks, while second gets 12%, third gets 9%, and it starts to drop sharply with each position after. And being on page two is like not being found at all.

You can see the entire interview mentioned above here.

Tags: internet branding, Internet Marketing, online branding, SEO

Looking Forward

Let’s start 2010 with some inspirational thoughts and discussion.

How to live before you die

Steve Jobs urges us to pursue our dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself.

William Kamkwamba – Building a windmill

A remarkable story sure to inspire.

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Professor Randy Pausch’s last presentation at Carnegie Mellon talks about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

Professor Randy Pausch made a surprise return to Carnegie Mellon University to deliver an inspirational speech to the Class of 2008 at the Commencement ceremony.

Online Branding Strategy

It’s been a long time coming. Advertising has been about the same for some 50 years, but things just don’t work the way they used to. Within the last 5 years social media has grown so much that customers are more reliant than ever on referrals.

Marketers facing this shift find themselves looking towards social media to get in front of their audience and its a whole new ballgame. One recent development that advertisers should be aware of is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is watching the online space for signs that advertisers masquerading as independent third parties.

Now monitoring blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other social network platforms, the FTC is on the watch for advertisers posing as ordinary consumers raving or providing misleading testimonials on products or services. A recent example posted by Consumerist mentions a well known fast food chain posing as fans of a marketing campaign.

An excerpt from the FTC;

“The fundamental question is whether, viewed objectively, the relationship between the advertiser and the speaker is such that the speaker’s statement can be considered ’sponsored’ by the advertiser and therefore an ‘advertising message.’”

It’s probably a method used as long as the web has been around. I recall reading about ‘seeding’ being done by the music industry to launch new pop stars some years ago, and it probably continues today. But you can imagine how this might affect your online branding strategy should you be caught.

Online branding and reputation management is becoming more imperative to monitor, and with this news regarding the FTC, you’ll want to be listening to your endorsers as well as consumers.

What to take away from all this? Monitor, engage, and also be transparent, providing full disclosure where applicable.

Tags: Advertising, branding, Marketing, online branding

Snake Oil and the Kool Aid

There’s an interesting article at BusinessWeek that talks about the self-proclaimed experts of Social Media. I’ve felt similar sentiments on occassion, and while I believe that social media is an important part to online branding, I’ve noticed that a lot of people have jumped on board the social media band wagon. And most of them seem to be saying the same things. There’s a lot of preaching about building a following for your community, reputation management, and online branding.

They’re often valid points and advisable for an online strategy, but like anything worthwhile it doesn’t come easy either. If you feel that social media is something you wish to do for your business, it’s not only essential to have the right person, they need to be invested in it full time.

Probably this newest label of hucksters is partly because of the endless hype and large influx of gurus. The amount of conferences on the topic, both local and beyond, has businesses drinking the kool aid. But without the right Internet marketing goals in place, many start slinging comments about snake oil salesmen.

There are numerous social media success stories, and even more failures. Probably similar to a business startup, without a good strategy I’d bet than close to 90% of the social media strategies flop. From my experiences, its like most cases involving strategy, even the best one fall short without proper implementation and follow through.

SEO has gone through the snake oil cycle, and depending who you talk to, its still stuck in that light. The main problem in either case is the business often doesn’t understand enough about how it works and what to expect, which can often lead to hiring the wrong individual and being soured on the entire experience.

In most cases, either are important to your business. Both can drive sales, and both can help with online branding. While I tend to favor SEO as I can justify why one might invest in it, there are are numerous examples of social media success as well.