Why Online Branding
Posted in Business, Internet Marketing, Online Branding, Online Reputation, Social Media
by Mark Nicholson
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.






