Online Branding Blog – reactorr.com

Branding Infographics

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

More »

Tags: branding, infographics, online branding

SEO, Social Media, PPC Compared

SEO, Social Media, and PPC were recently compared for effectiveness at generating leads and sales in digital marketing between B2B and B2C in the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report amongst 500 U.S. online marketers, with about two-thirds of all respondents identified themselves as B2B marketers.

The results? While the clear winner is SEO, about 60 percent of respondents said they will increase their budget for social media marketing; with 53 percent planning to increase their budget towards SEO and 40 about percent will be increasing their PPC budget.

While social media is clearly the trend as of late, it’s often difficult to measure. But despite this, social media is not hype. What needs to be understood is that it takes time, and it can have significant influence towards online branding efforts.

SEO might take a while before seeing signs of progress, but it’s the clear winner. With the highest conversion rates, SEO outperforms all other means of online marketing. It’s worth mentioning that while PPC can bring traffic almost instantly, it will cost more over time than SEO, and is most suitable for starting a campaign to acquire traffic until an SEO campaign kicks into high gear. Additionally, PPC only earns about 10% of the potential search traffic, and if you’re not in the top spots (which are more expensive bids) then you won’t see a lot of visits.

Report

Tags: online branding, PPC, SEM, SEO, Social Media

Brand Building and Story Telling

Great brands aren’t only built by advertising, they have a story to tell. Marketing and advertising might be tools of the trade, but they are merely devices for getting the story out so it can be shared. Social media has become a game changer that works well with SEO, complimenting online PR to drive the brand and create opportunities. Telling your story can improve influence, reach, and shape perceptions of your brand.

Story telling often creates an emotional connection that the listener can identify with. One of the great examples of story telling would probably be Nike. In case you haven’t heard, they sell running shoes. Nike’s positioning strategy has been to appeal to those that not only take their sports seriously, but the product is also for those that want an edge to be at the top of their game.

The heritage of your company could be an intrinsic part of corporate culture, and also your brand. There might be a story there.

 

 

 

Recommended:
The Importance of Story Telling

How to Tell a Great Story

Steve Jobs and the Power of Story Telling

 

Tags: branding, communications, online branding, PR, public relations, story telling

Online Branding SEO

Let’s clear the air and get this in the open to remove any misconceptions. They aren’t one and the same, but one can have a significant impact on the other.

Online branding and SEO (along with social media to some extent) have shown an increasing value to each other in the last few years, but somehow more than a few don’t get it. So let’s break it down and get to it.

When taking the approach of using online branding with SEO, you need to build your rankings for keywords of relevance so that your brand begins to become synonymous for a phrase through search. Read that last sentence again.

Not only does it have a positive affect on your online reputation, it also creates momentum for the entire marketing initiative.

It’s not one versus the other, they need to work in a cohesive manner.

 

Tags: online branding, SEO

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

Tags: online branding, Online Reputation

40 Social Media Case Studies

One of my favorite examples of an effective social media marketing campaign would have to be the one for Best Job in the World. Countless media mentions, lots of buzz, and thousands of blog entries. Not to mention the 35,000 people that applied for the job.

Created by the Queensland Tourism Board in Australia, they asked prospective employees to post one-minute application videos to YouTube so they could create a short list, and choose someone (eventually) to be the caretaker for Hamilton Island for six months. The only real task as caretaker would be to blog about how much fun he or she is having doing their “job”.

As promised, here’s a few social media case studies worth looking at…

3 Things We Can Learn From IKEA’s Facebook Campaign

How Does Microsoft Do Social Media Marketing?

Old Spice Social Campaign Case Study Video

Social Media and Car Insurance: A Match Made in Heaven?

The NBA’s Social Media Strategy

Best Buy: A social media case study

Being HUGE on Twitter – A Small Business Case Study

Old Spice – The Man Your Content Could Smell Like

How Social Media Helped Cisco Shave $100,000+ Off a Product Launch

Case study: The Home Depot

Twitter ROI Case Study – Dell Generates $3 Million in Sales Utilizing Twitter

Social Media case study – Dairy Queen

Canadian Social Media Case Study: Loblaw

Case Study: How To Blatantly Advertise Through Social Media And Get Away With It – H&R Block

Hotel Social Media Case Study: Fairmont Chicago

LEGO Click case study

Clorox: Rewiring The Brand Experience With Social Media

Social Media Marketing Case Study – Twitter Drives Traffic, Sales

Molson Canada – Harvard Business Review – Social Media Case Study

Also see:
5 B2B Social Media Winners
How Social Media Drives New Business
Barack Obama’s Social Mediea lessons for business
http://www.debbieweil.com/blog/list-of-67-big-brand-corporate-blogs/
26 social media marketing examples
300+ case studies for social media
Social media case studies from Nokia, Disney, NBC, and 17 more
Social Media ROI and the Pepsi Refresh Project
6 Social Media Marketing Case Study Lessons
Working With Your Brand Enthusiasts, Not Against Them
Integrating PR and Social Media
Understanding Luxury Brands and Social Media
3 Killer Social Media Case Studies from SMC San Francisco
5 Case Studies Of Social Media’s Viral Power
Marketing lessons from the [Grateful] Dead – David Meerman Scott
Breakdown: 4 Ways Brands Are Earning and Buying– Followers on Twitter
Why does Comcast care about Twitter?
Influence Versus Popularity on Twitter: Celebrity Kim Kardashian Social Media Case Study
1000 + Social Media Marketing Examples – Peter Kim

http://www.womma.org/casestudy/
http://mashable.com/2008/07/23/corporate-social-media/
http://nowisgone.com/case-studies/
http://www.getelastic.com/social-media-examples/

Tags: B2B, B2C, branding, case studies, case study, online branding, Social Media, strategy

Video Branding Online

Since the third screen has gone mobile, branding online can mean asking for the click. Brands are now engaging with consumers in a variety of new ways. They can be direct sellers, content producers, and deliver mobile applications to entertain and interact with consumers.

In a study comparing repurposed TV ads versus made for web video, it was found that online ad awareness enjoyed a bigger lift from the repurposed video ads than made-for-web video. Recent research conducted by Dynamic Logic shows that re-used TV spots resulted in higher brand awareness metrics than made-for-web ads.

The study found that the highest completion rates for repurposed TV ads were primarily from retail outlets (60%), while made-for-web creative completion rates were 37%. The highest completion rates for made-for-web video were in the food and beverage industry, at 58%. Repurposed TV spots hovered around 40% completion rates.

In Dynamic Logic’s study there were a some interesting points worth noting:

• The brand needs to be displayed in all frames of the creative
• Reveal ads don’t work well – in any category
• Viewers should never have to interact with the ad to see the brand or message
• Online creative that relate to an offline campaign reap synergy

Publications such as the NYTimes.com and other top online publishers are increasingly using video to monetize certain content options, and 30-50% of the visitors watch the entire ad.

So who’s watching? Online video is reaching all major age groups, with over half (52.9% ) reaching viewers over the age of 35 years old.

Tags: online branding, video

Online Brand Protection

Being proactive in online brand protection can reduce the chances of taking a serious hit and eroding value to your brand, but where to start?

Understanding the different types of online brand protection is your first step. Many aren’t self-evident, and most are easy to manage. While its costly to buy up every domain extension of your brand, you should grab the ones of the most value. These being .com, .org, .net, and even your country domain at the very least. Less discerning online marketers will try to capitalize on your brand by using a domain squatting to acquire the trust it carries in their hopes of increasing sales or for some other use. You don’t need to host a copy of your site at all of these additional domains, but you should use a 301 redirect to point them to your main site.

Another form of protection is grab online real estate and claim user names for social media properties like twitter, flickr, youtube, facebook, vimeo, scribd, digg and more. Their are possibly thousands, and it would be impossible to get every single one, but grabbing some of the more popular ones will prove valuable at some point.

You also want to watch out for traffic diversions, where contextual ads (aka PPC) are placed on search engines. This not only siphons potential leads, it often erodes brand equity as well. Keep an eye on the sponsored listings in popular search engines like Google or Bing.

Site fraud is another one to be on the look out for. Sometimes you can find those engaging in the above traffic diversions that use your brand for paid search marketing steering the clicks to a carbon copy of your site in hopes of better conversion and more sales.

One other issue that’s of growing concern is plagiarism or content theft. This can actually have an effect on your ability to rank for brand related products or phrases and should be checked on occasion. Many have found the site copyscape to be useful for monitoring this sort of thing.

Any company that invests in its brand needs to safeguard for online reputation management and online brand protection. Imagine what potential customers or clients may think if they search your name and find a spammy site one or two down from yours. Using free services like Google alerts can also be useful for watching out for situations like the above. Obviously having counsel and trademarks helps as well.

Tags: online branding, Online Reputation Management

Building Brands In a Digital World

Interesting discussion about online branding, the old and the new, and the shift happening.

Tags: online branding

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