Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Branding Online as a Medium

Does the Internet suck as a branding medium? That was the question I saw on a post at Millward Brown, and I would have to question this for a few reasons. It’s level of interactivity is second to none, providing a vast amount of options. Video, display ads, search, and most communications options seem readily available. Additionally, its far more easy to measure the effectiveness of any marketing efforts, as well as the ability to evaluate and make quick changes.

In many ways, the Internet is almsot a hybrid of most other marketing channels (print, broadcast, DM) with outdoor possibly being the exception. But the segments that really stand out would be social media and search. Engagement and influence has never been known to such a degree before.

Digital Marketing Forecast

Search, social, mobile, email and display marketing is thought to grow to $77 billion by 2016, or 35% of all advertising. Interactive teams and budgets are growing as marketers believe the digital channel delivers better results and measurable returns.

Search marketing continues to dominate with the largest amount of the marketing budget, while social grows moderately. Mobile marketing overtook both social and email this year.

Source: Forrester US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 To 2016

Targeted Social Media

Social media is both a persuasive and influential part of online branding, and clearly the norm these days. It’s estimated that many Internet users are spending up to 25% of their time on social networks, with as many as 53% of them following or interacting with brands.

To understand what’s driving the growth, its important to look at both demographics and psychographics of social media users in order to put things in perspective. Females make up the largest segment of social media users, and 18-34 year olds being the most active among all age groups.

Even today targeting is overlooked. Many are lost in a world of different metrics like followers, likes, retweets and more. Even social media marketing should cater to a customer segment through some kind of targeting.

All this is interesting, but what’s important to note here is how fast mobile is gaining on popularity.

Almost 40% of people now access social networks from their mobile phone, and Web users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of mobile social networking. That’s twice as many accessing social sites from their smart phones as last year.

Branding Infographics

A look at infographics on branding and how they include social media.

More »

Top Brands of Canada 2010

Each year brands will undergo the scrutiny of being measured for everything from revenue to the size of the company jet.

In a study by Interbrand, creators of brand valuation which provides annual global rankings, it rated the following companies as Canada’s top brands for 2010:

1. Thomson Reuters
2. TD
3. RBC
4. Blackberry
5. Shoppers Drug Mart
6. Tim Horton’s
7. Bell
8. Rogers
9. Scotiabank
10. BMO
11. Canadian Tire
12. Manulife
13. Bombardier
14. CIBC
15. Telus
16. Sunlife
17. Lululemon
18. Molson
19. Suncor/Petro-Canada
20. Rona
21. Shaw
22. Investors Group
23. Labatt
24. Imax
25. La Senza

Complete study by Interbrand

In another study by Canadian Business magazine, Tim Horton’s came out on top based on the responses of 2,244 Canadians. The study was conducted by another New York based company called The Reputation Institute. They teamed up with Canadian Business magazine to find what they report are the top 10 Canadian brands.

1. Tim Horton’s
2. Jean Coutu
3. Bombardier
4. Yellow Pages
5. Rona
6. Saputo
7. Canadian Tire
8. Research In Motion
9. Metro
10. West Jet

I’ve never heard of Jean Coutu or Saputo, and would expect to recognize the top 10 as national brands.

So I present to you my completely biased top 10 brands of Canada 2010, based on the opinion of yours truly. This study is based on the response of one Canadian (me) and did not measure anything beyond personal opinion.

I offer no formal training, nor did I conduct any meaningful research. Here we go;

1. Tim Horton’s
2. Research In Motion
3. Lululemon
4. Canadian Tire
5. West Jet
6. The Bay
7. RBC
8. Molson
9. Loblaws/Superstore
10. Canadian Club

Perhaps also of interest, Canada was given the top spot in an annual survey of countries with the most favorable brand — surpassing the U.S. for the first time.  The study was conducted by FutureBrand and asked  the opinion of 3,400 business and leisure travellers on five continents.

Full story at Toronto Star: Canada No. 1 in survey of ‘most favourable brand’

Digital Branding – The Marketing Shift

Marketers often forget the value of online branding. It’s a relatively new concept that’s proving to be challenging for some. Much like branding in general, its about the intangibles, but not entirely.

Digital branding is about building equity through the online marketing channels available, and your online visibility. These can be broken down into a few key areas – social media, seo, and online advertising.

With social media, digital branding is comparable to the PR and communications strategies. Shaping the perception and what a brand stands for helps to create value for your business. Whether online or offline, this part of branding is critical to positioning in a positive manner.

Social media provides a voice for the brand, allowing your business to not only engage, but also listen to the conversations that already exist. The power of social media isn’t to be underestimated, having proven itself several times over. There are numerous social media tools available to monitor and measure your brand online.

SEO is another way to create a shortcut in the mind of the consumer. When someone is preparing to buy, or doing some preliminary research for a product or service, most turn to the web and look up information with their favorite search engine. Since we now know that about 90% of searches never make it to the second page, being in the top ten is where it counts. The value of SEO is often misunderstood, and one way of determining what it might have to offer is by using a SEO ROI calculator to determine its worth.

Internet advertising creates digital branding opportunities across web properties your customer might be visiting and help increase its online visibility. While not all impressions lead to measurable success, they do increase the exposure, regardless of what some might say about banner blindness. Marketers budgets continue to shift to online advertising, social media and SEO, leaving many traditional publishers to rethink their business model.

The rules of changed, and the shift to digital now includes mobile branding. The thing about this whole digital branding business is its more measurable, provides better ROI, and better targeting than anything previously available.

You might also be interested in:

5 Quick Tips for Online Branding

Introduction to Online Branding

Online Reputation Management – Guarding Your Brand

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.

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.

Mobile Branding

Considering the huge growth with mobile advertising (not to mention the recent announcment of iAd) now is the time to start thinking about your mobile marketing and branding strategy.

Take a look at the forecasted spending and growth for mobile ads:

And with iAd, users will have a far more interactive experience, with research suggesting higher click rates than banners.

Profiling for Online Branding

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.

Here’s some online tools to look into:

Hitwise

Prism Market Segmentation

MSN adlab

Google Insights

Google Trends

Or you can consider outsourcing the entire task.

Also take a look at Forrester’s consumer profile tool below.