Social Media, Web Design, Digital Marketing, SEO and their roles in creating an online brand

 
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Starting an E-commerce business is not just about generating leads and making sales from the get-go. To achieve that sort of position, there is a lot of preparation that needs to happen behind the scenes before a scenario is reached where the website or the app starts generating business organically and consistently.

One of the more important factors to consider is the building of the brand that will be visually representing the business. At the end of the day, it is the brand and its ethos that resonates with a prospective customer even before the product. This means that if your brand story does not hit home with your target audience, your products or services, will not either.

Online businesses can spend years building up the core business, developing a product mix, adding staff, growing relationships with key partners in the industry, and investing in a website to attract its target audience, but if they do not invest time, effort, and money in building an online brand, they soon come to realize that they will lose a concrete and much necessary way to generate leads as well as for their business. A healthy reputation, a quantifiable and strong online presence, an effective digital and social media strategy all plays an integral part in consistently driving an online business towards sustainable profitability. A well-run campaign including some or all of the aforementioned not only helps the brand grow societal equity and reputation, it also generates actual leads and sales for your E-commerce venture. Here are the five basic macro steps that one needs to consider while building a brand strategy.

Research

Well-conducted, thorough research is the bedrock on which a sound branding strategy and brand building exercises are conceptualized and executed. While imitation is often considered the purest form of flattery, there are several regulators in the E-commerce market which ensure that you cannot just plagiarize a thought and especially content and brand it as your own. This tells us that while Googling what Amazon did maybe the eventual answer, it is most certainly not the immediate solution.

Looking at a successful brand’s journey, its parameters, its challenges, its success stories, and the way it endeared itself to a sizable audience are all important steps to understand what you can do with your brand-building initiative. Researching your competition is an invaluable step because it helps you to better understand not just brand building but also the E-commerce and online business in its entirety. It also helps you to develop an analytical frame of mind that will help you stay realistic when it’s finally time to get into the financials of launching, sustaining, and finally turning your small business into a significant brand.

Another important part of researching your competition is to also understand what their customers are saying about them. And yes, while some reviews can be manipulated, it is incredibly difficult to tamper with every review that has been placed on the internet. Studying customer reviews once again not only helps you to validate your research and learning about a particular brand, it also prepares you on how to read the pulse and mind-set of your prospective customers once you have launched your business and are getting feedback.

Doing research can be a significantly daunting exercise, so our final tip to you on this particular step is to not delve too much into the brand stories and journeys of every single E-commerce business out there. Instead, try to identify the online business models that are closest to how you want to conduct your online branding exercises and then read up on them in minute detail. Picking quality over quantity, in this scenario, stands to become far more beneficial for you as it helps you not get too distracted while keeping you on your chosen path at all times. It can get easy to be distracted by brand stories and their incredible journeys of either success or failure, but neither should be allowed to influence how you want to run your business too directly.  

Find your audience

The target market is the specific set of people that your business is planning to sell your products or services to. Knowing your audience and being able to find it is a defining step in building a successful brand and a profitable E-commerce business. This is, however, not as simple as it sounds. Most brands in the online world tend to make the cardinal error of being too vague or generic while identifying their target audience. While this may lead to a few wins in the short term, it is the long-term scenario that generally starts to look bleaker and bleaker. To be able to find the right audience, it is integral that you first understand what the right audience is.

Your target market or audience is a group or subset of the population who want to consume your products or services making them your end-users. Identifying your target audience has a direct impact on any future brand strategy and business decisions that your company will make, which is why the foundation of knowing your customer and their likes and dislikes is extremely essential. 

A deep, data-driven, insightful, knowledge base about your target audience will also help you to determine ever-evolving trends in the online world better and also course-correct your product and services portfolios to answer to those trends. A potential target market is usually identified and defined using the geography, demographics, and behavioral aspects of the subset of people within a particular area.

Targeting is an essential practice when trying to launch and sustain an E-commerce business. Not all your products and services on your e-store will be suitable for everyone out there. The flip side to poor targeting is that a customer may actually patronize a product or service which is not ideally suitable for him or her and then go on to hate it. This means having to contend with poor reviews and in all probability, a potential repeat customer lost forever. 

Brand Strategy

E-commerce revenues just in the US are slated to hit US$4.9 trillion by the year 2023. To effectively function in the E-commerce market, a well-defined and thought-out brand strategy is an absolute must to drive brand awareness and increase sales. Benjamin Franklin very correctly stated that a failure to plan is pretty much a plan to eventually fail. The need to have a thorough and in-depth understanding of your E-commerce market coupled with a focused and achievable branding strategy, helps you achieve your marketing goals and your sales figures. Otherwise, you would just be shooting for stars in the dark.

Your brand strategy will need an executive summary where you have outlined from the very beginning what it is that you would like to achieve, not just in terms of sales figures and numbers, but at a more macro level with your target audience. Every strategy also needs to be goal-oriented which means defining relatable and achievable goals beforehand in your brand strategy. There is no harm in altering your goals as your journey progresses, however not having a specific target to work towards can be damaging for the growth of your brand and your E-commerce business.

Develop a mission statement and a value proposition that differentiates you and your brand from the incredible amount of competition in your market. This statement forms the basis of what you and the brand stand for and how you intend to conduct business with the right set of morals, objectives, and intentions not just for you and your brand but also for the community at large that you will be functioning in. 

Being able to conduct a thorough situational analysis is also an important part of your brand strategy at large. Also, the ability to identify potential obstacles and possible gaps even before you launch in what is otherwise a well thought of process, is an essential and economical way of saving on unnecessary heartburn at a later stage when you as the online business custodian will have several other things on your plate.

Your research will enable you to best understand pricing and positioning for your products and services. It is crucial that both work towards adding value for the end-user and getting both pricing and positioning of your brand right could actually be a make-or-break step in the journey of your business.

There is little worse than your marketing plan working overtime to get you an order which you then cannot fulfill. Do your very best to ensure that the distribution and back-end processes that any successful and scalable E-commerce business will need, are in place and are working smoothly.

Brand Design

According to the design enthusiasts, good branding cannot be seen, its impact can only be felt. People immediately associate your E-commerce online business with your brand visuals and design. Your logo, font, and typography used, specific visuals, even brand ambassadors are what identifies your brand and de-clutters it from the scores of other companies that are also selling their products and services online. It’s little wonder then that getting the look and visuals of your brand correct is such an important step to establishing and running a successful E-commerce entity. 

Starting with the right logo is the first step. The biggest and best brands in the world are immediately recognized because of their distinctive logos that have withstood the test of time and all sorts of design innovation to continue to be relevant even after several years. Examples that immediately come to mind include Nike, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's, just to name a few.

Typography is everything to do with the appearance and style of the written word. Fonts affect people’s perception and behavior and help change their mindset towards your brand and its identity. There are essentially five types of fonts that a brand could go with to display how it showcases its written terminologies. Serif, Sans Serif, Script, Display, and Handwritten fonts all play their roles. While Serif and Sans Serif fonts usually generate a more business-minded demeanor, script and display fonts are more ideal to call out attention. In an era where everything customized and bespoke generates a lot of interest a handwritten script font usually tends to signify and symbolize varying degrees of personalization that your brand is capable of.

Colors have the potential to evoke various emotional responses from the desired target audience. Marketing and branding experts around the world believe that associating the right color with your brand has the potential to increase brand recognition by up to 80% with your target audience.   

Once you have your logo, font, colors, and visuals in place it is important to develop a sense of continuity and consistency in all your marketing campaigns going forward. The only way your customer will identify your brand regularly is when it talks the same design language for a long period. If Coke were to change its color from red regularly it would be difficult to associate it as the biggest soft drink manufacturer in the world. Similarly, if McDonald's did away with its arches in their logo, and replaced it with a burger suddenly, how would it be differentiated from the several smaller restaurants that also offer burgers on their menu.

Advertising channels

It is one thing to get the look and visuals correct for your brand and any promotional campaigns. It is another thing altogether to bring them to the virtual doorstep of your consumer, thus encouraging him or her to patronize our online business and make a purchase. Understanding and picking the correct advertising channels depending on your products, target audience, and other demographics is one of the last things that you need to get in order before you launch your E-commerce entity.

Video content is generally touted to be the best of the advertising channels in the digital marketing spectrum, and if the numbers are true, then it is so for a very viable reason. According to a survey conducted to test the effectiveness of video content marketing 72% of businesses say that video content has improved their conversion rate while 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions. These are remarkable statistics that speak volumes in favor of generating good, clean, viral, and trend-worthy digital motion content.

Email marketing is another important digital marketing channel due to its ability to bring in very high ROIs (Return On Investments). A good email marketing campaign can bring in a staggering ROI of almost 3800% according to LYFE Marketing. And that is on the conservative side of things. There are about 20% of E-commerce companies who claim to be able to generate an ROI of almost US$70 for every US$1 spent.

Content marketing is also an effective digital marketing channel because of its ability to generate almost 6 times the leads for about 62% less than traditional marketing. Blogs, infographics, checklists, case studies, webinars, and white papers are all excellent lead generators that are incredibly effective in speaking to your target audience.

Almost 71% of consumers who enjoy positive experiences with a brand on its social media channels are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. Word-of-mouth just took on a whole different meaning, did it not? To have an effective social media strategy in place, there is a constant requirement to develop and innovate, new content that can be consumed on several different social media platforms in place today. Leveraging social media advertising platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, to name a few, is also a great way to increase the digital marketing effort.

Building a brand is all about building an entity that resonates so deeply with your customers that they will continue to patronize your online business even when no sales discounts or promotions are running to entice them back to your online shopping store. This indicates quite clearly that online branding isn’t a marketing gimmick, but a key ingredient and even a priority as it can help your business achieve its targets by driving incremental revenue for it.

AmareSol Global is a digital business consultancy creating innovative change through a team of talented designers, developers, and strategists creating digital experiences for brands and companies around the world. We are continuously fueling growth across constantly changing and advancing digital landscapes, by seeking and formulating newer and better ways to service clientele on a global scale across industries. Look up more about us at www.amaresolglobal.com

 
 
 
AmareSol GlobalSEO, Social Media, Digital Marketing, Web Design