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.
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.
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.
Targeting – Your advertising should appeal to the demographic where you place your ads. Consistent messaging that conveys your the values of your product or service is key to driving recognition or recall for when they’re in a buying mode. Creating top of mind awareness with consistency and repetition can build equity. It’s surprising how often people will think one ad will suffice for all. This isn’t print. You can rotate different creative and run with your best performers.
Social Media – Engage with your audience. It all sounds easy, but it mostly falls apart in a week or three. While starting with good intentions, other duties call. Most companies don’t have the luxury of hiring a dedicated social media specialist to manage these things, so it usually gets added to the list of tasks an employee needs to do. The best way to manage it is scheduling a block of time at least once or twice a week. Find the medium that suits you, but also look at where your customers are. It’s also recommended to grab your brand name as a username for the bigger sites like youtube, facebook, twitter, flickr, technorati, ning, delicious, yelp, scribd, and others.
Reputation Management – Staying on top of what you rank for and the conversations around your brand allows you to stay a step ahead, and possibly avoid putting out fires later. If you were to google your brand name, do any of the top ten listings have negative impact? Are you monitoring the dialogue around your brand in social media? If you see negative results in the top 10 listings when searching for your brand, you’ll want to address it before too many customers come across it.
Search Marketing - If you run an affiliate program and pay for leads, you might consider taking over bids on your brand name in Google Adwords. Why pay more for leads if you own the trademark to your brand name? Run your own campaign for those searching your brand to retain control.
Search Engine Optimization – Companies searching for your brand name obviously know of you already, but what about the ones searching for the products or services your offer? These are targeted prospects, often in buying mode. Many companies make the mistake of not including SEO in their marketing strategy. The game has changed, and those that are late will have to work twice as hard to catch up, probably more. Displaying in search engine results for phrases your customers are looking for is an excellent way to build credibility for your brand. Being synonymous with a phrase strengthens that top of mind awareness and would be comparable to branding on steroids. If you’re a customer and searching for a phrase, research shows 42% click the first listing, and 74% of the results clicked are in the top 5 positions. In a recent study, SEO shows to provide the best ROI over all other forms of online marketing.
As most marketers know, targeting is about segmentation and delivering key messages of relevance to the target market for a product or business. Delivering relevant messages that fit with your customer profile affect respsonse, behaviour, and conversion. The main advantage to this is you have a targeted message that can make a connection with the recipient. In other words, we’re talking relevance, and this makes all the difference.
Once you’ve identified a potential customer’s needs, characteristics, its time to develop a segmentation strategy.
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.
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.
It’s now recognized that online branding is more than banners ads to raise awareness. As marketers looks for ways to stretch advertising dollars, the web has become mainstream for branding online, but with little information on just how create an Internet branding strategy, this post hopefully provides its readers a place to start for the vast opportunities of online branding.
Online Branding
Online Advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of on-page and off-page optimization to improve your rank in the search results for keyword phrases that have been targeted. This practice is highly recommended for online branding as once you rank your customers will associate you with particular phrases. The SEO process is not a fast track to branding online and often have marketers questioning how long does SEO take?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Also known as Contextual Advertising or Pay Per Click (PPC), this is one of the fastest ways to launch a campaign or raise awareness for your brand. Although the amount of clicks approximately 20% of what you might receive via natural/organic search results, Search Marketing is often used until an SEO campaign starts to work.
Video Marketing
With online video views increasing so much, marketers are looking at ways to include this in the mix. While it’s no small feat to create a successful viral video, you can create your own videos inexpensively (which can also go on your blog) that will be available for others to find. A recent report suggests viewers of online video are on the rise.
Online advertising allows many options, but display advertising (i.e. banners) is still the most popular. Available as both static and animated, recent advancements now include video and interactive advertisements. For the latest news see the IAB website.
Classified Advertising
Online advertising often mirrors offline publications in advertising options, and classified advertising sites like Craigslist and Kijiji allow almost everything to be posted, often for free. Although not commonly used, classifieds provide another opportunity to promote your brand.
Mobile Marketing
A fast developing area, this includes forms of advertising such as with game/video, banners, it is mostly dominated by SMS advertising. A recent report by Gartner suggests mobile ad spending will increase significantly in 2011.
Email Marketing
This can include either marketing communications with your own list of customers or placing ads in email newsletters. This form of communications can be an effective form of communications to keep customers and fans informed of company developments.
Affiliate Marketing
By creating an affiliate program for your product or service can extend your reach and marketing efforts by way of compensation to others for promoting your offering. This is typically provided as a per lead or per sale basis.
Social Media
Social Networks
Most social networks focus on connecting users to share interests, information or activities. With tremendous growth in the last few years, these types of sites are looking to monetize their user base and often have various ways of segmenting their audience due to the information at their disposal. Ad performance is said to be average, but the more advance targeting options make it a viable option. Some of the bigger Social Networking sites include Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn and other social media sites.
Online Marketing Spending 2009
Top Social Networks - Jan. 2009
Social Bookmarking
A popular way for web users to share sites of interest, social bookmarking also allows users to vote and comment on the sites, blogs, videos, articles and other media that is submitted. As opposed to search engines, which rank websites based on an algorithm to determine what site is most relevant to the search query, social bookmarking sites allow their members to vote can which bring a particular site into the popular category. There are numerous social bookmarking sites covering many categories. Some of the most popular are Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Kaboodle, and Slashdot.
Blogging
Short for Web Log, blogs are online journals on just about every topic which allow its author to write entries and include images and/or video and allows readers to comment on blog entries (AKA posts). There are several platforms like LiveJournal and Moveable Type, but the most popular is WordPress. A free blog platform usd by many is called BlogSpot. Many blogs have become some of the most popular websites on the web. Blogs went through some blowback from journalists for re-reporting the news, but have gained credibility in recent years. To see some of the top blogs you can refer to the Technorati Top 100.
Micro Blogging
A condensed form of blogging, it allows users to create brief updates which followers of that user can see. Entries are smaller in size and usually limit the author to one or two sentences. Some of the more notable options being Twitter, Tumblr, and Identi.
Niche Networks
As social networks caught on, many spin offs developed evolved to cater to who wanted more specific groups and conversations of interest. An extensive list of niche networks covering everything from booklovers, artists, lawyers and more is available at Mashable.
Multimedia
Available in many formats, some of the more popular being text, audio, video, animation, and images. Sites like Youtube allow for video sharing, Scribd allows users to shares documents and presentations, and Flickr is a popular site for sharing photos.
Events
Coordinating events and meetups with social tools make party planning and event management much easier for groups and communities with sites like EventBrite or Wild Apricot.
Wikis
A wiki is a website allowing a group or community of users to collaboratively manage content. Popular examples include Wikipedia and Google’s Knol.
Reviews and Opinions
These types of social communities allow members to share comments and vote on assorted products and often include price comparison options. With little policing of postings, their popularity has diminished due to debate of authenticity for some posts. The features of reviews and ratings have since been incorporated into many ecommerce and social media platforms.
If your organization hasn’t taken the leap its time to get started. Besides making announcements on company news, sharing viewpoints on interesting articles and online resources can prove valuable. Some corporate blogs are run by CEOs and others have multiple contributors to carry on the conversation. List of top corporate blogs.
Blogger Relations
If you want to be effective at online branding, you’ll need to get others talking about you. Bloggers are a great channel to get your story out, so long as you follow some PR pitching guidelines you should be able to include them along with mainstream media in your online branding strategy. Some of the more important ones include being relevant in your pitch. Taking the time to find the right bloggers will pay off in more mentions in the long run. The old “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” method never works. Also, a personalized pitch is far more effective than drafting a one size fits all email and using BCC to blast away. Keeping it brief and to the point with a sentence or two (think elevator pitch of 15 seconds) and a link to where more info is available is usually one of the best ways to get buzz. Much better than pasting a press release of 500 plus words that will never be read.
Video News Release (VNR)
Regarded as the video equivalent to a news release, these are often used by corporations and agencies to inform on products or services.
New Zealand Sustainable Tourism – Video News Release
Social Media News Release (SMR)
The social media release consolidates many of the options available today into a single page that combines traditional and emerging forms of communications such as links, social bookmarking, multimedia, video, and other communications tools.
Overview of a Social Media Release
Reputation Management
Monitoring your brand online and the conversation on blogs, forums, websites and in the news used to be an almost impossible chore, but with social media and reputation management tools in your arsenal you can spend more time building your brand online.
You can also make use of Google Alerts for media mentions.
Also see this list of reputation management tools.
One of the things to keep in mind for online branding is you’re seeding the idea to pave a path to your website. Whether you choose SEO, Social Media, PR, or all of them, the idea is to engage and be part of the conversation or search.
There’s no end to the real opportunities of Internet branding and online marketing. Some of the opportunities worth investigating include mobile applications, social network applications, widgets, crowdsourcing, video blogging, lifestreams, virtual advertising, sponsorships, and more.
Offline marketing is vastly different to doing so online. With traditional advertising, a media buyer takes a budget and selects a few channels (print, outdoor, tv, radio, etc) and decides on which are the best match for the demographic of the product or service. After organizing the buy, they present their recommendation and then usually move forward with their selections. And they’re done.
Internet marketing shares a few similarities, like targeting to a suitable demographic, but not a lot. The creative which might work offline doesn’t necessarily translate well to an online audience, or tweaks need to be made to work with the campaign. With online advertising you’re able to track effectiveness and use split testing to optimize for the best possible conversion. And with online markeitng data available in near real-time, you can adjust your campaign to dial up or down, or move your budget to better performing options.
Internet Marketing
Many companies measure the success of online advertising or social media simply by the increase in web traffic versus their usual traffic volume. Defining your goals is the ideal place to start for online advertising, search marketing, online branding, or social media. Some of the goals you might pursue for these are;
Search Engine Rankings – when your SEO strategy is moving in the right direction, you should see your site improve in the search results pages (SERPs) for predetermined phrases that you have chosen to pursue. The end result is an increase in both web traffic and leads.
Online Branding – while this includes an SEO component, an online branding strategy also includes internet marketing and social media. Online branding is not just ranking to have your website become synonymous with certain searched phrases, it also involves advertising online within the right circles to create that top of mind awareness with your brand. Additionally, it also employs social media tactics to develop your online brand essence and assist with online reputation management. Another way to measure is noting an increase in mentions on other websites, hopefully for the better.
Increase Sales – SEO can drive leads to your site, and if you’ve optimized for conversion, those leads should result in an increase in sales. This is a more common metric that is preferred, but not always the right one. If you’re running a pay per click (PPC) campain, then it might make sense, but if you’re campaign is social media or SEO, more suitable metrics might be followers or ranking.
As the economy takes its toll on advertising budgets, marketers are looking for ways to stretch their ad dollars and get more for less. For some, that means shifting their budgets towards Internet advertising.
Even though the ad spending revenues were down 5.3% in the first half of 2009, according to the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers, I suspect that with the strengthening of the DowJones will carry optimism and more advertisers will loosen the purse strings a little.
And Google shares in the optimism after stellar third-quarter results and reporting the strongest quarter in the company’s history.
In fact, the Guardian reports the Internet advertising has surpassed television ad spend for the first time in the UK. The internet now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets, a first in UK business history.
“We are in one of the most difficult economic slumps in decades. As the economy improves, we’re confident that brands will devote an even greater share of their budgets to reaching consumers as they make interactive media a larger part of their lives.”
- Interactive Advertising Bureau Chief Executive Randall Rothenberg
About 60 percent was spent on UK search advertising, the majority of which is understood to have gone to Google, the largest player in the search market. Which reminds me, Google is looking for a new head of marketing in the US.
Could these be hints that the economy is showing signs of recovering?
This whole post was the result of a video. It made me start thinking about online advertising, search, where we are, and where we’re headed. Considering the advances in just a few short years I doubt anyone can predict where we might be at 5 or 10 years from now. The video is called Did You Know 2.0 and includes lots of interesting stats.
