10 Tips for Successfully Branding Your Business Online

Having a strong online brand is vital for every business. A bad online perception of your brand can affect your reputation and potential customers who make buying decisions.

Here are 10 tips for successfully branding your business online:

1.     Understand your customer

Ask yourself, who is your target customer, and what product or service do they want or need? Most importantly, make sure everything you’re sharing online is in line with your brand and is in some way relatable to your target customer.

2.     Create a “voice” for your company that reflects your brand

Is your brand fun, friendly, formal or ritzy? Whatever your company voice, it should be incorporated into all your social media posts, blog articles, etc. including the visual images. All images and text shared online should reflect the voice of your brand.

3.     Create and Adhere to Brand Standards

Use the same color schemes, logo placements, look and feel throughout all your online content. This will help make your brand more recognizable and memorable to potential clients and customers. You don’t need to be fancy, just consistent.

4.     Utilize Social Media

Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote and enhance the visibility of your brand online. Social media marketing promotes recognition, engagement and brand loyalty and can also help generate leads and grow sales. Make sure your brand has a cohesive presence across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. If your product or service is best represented visually, you’ll want to have a presence on Instagram and/or Pinterest.

5.     Communicate in Real-time

While most businesses schedule some portion of what they share online, it is also important to commit to communicating in real-time with people who communicate with you. This means responding to likes, comments, DM’s, re-tweets, etc. in a timely fashion. This is crucial to building your brand. Especially, when someone asks you a specific question about your company, products or services, they will expect a quick response.

6.     Blog

Blogging is one of the best ways to increase visibility of your brand online. It can improve your search engine rank, give validity to your brand and increase your overall reach. Posting links to your Blog articles across your social media channels can be a great way to cross-promote online and drive more traffic to your website.

7.     Optimize Your Website Content

Maintaining and updating your website is one of the most important aspects of branding your business online. Optimizing your website for optimal performance on search engines is key for driving traffic to your website and improving your online visibility. Here are a few simple things you can do to optimize the content on your website:

·        Use keyword-based Page Titles to help establish page theme and direction for your keywords – Learn more about page titles here: https://www.webpagefx.com/blog/web-design/5-common-seo-mistakes-with-web-page-titles/

·        Create Meta Tags to influence click-throughs — Learn how to create meta tags here: https://www.metatags.org/create_meta_tags

·        Place strategic, keyword-rich Search Phrases throughout each of your pages to help search engines quickly determine what each page is about. — Learn more about using keywords on your website here: https://www.shivarweb.com/3136/how-to-use-keywords-on-your-website/

8.     Connect Social Media with Your Website

Create buttons on your website that link to all your active social media accounts and make sure your website URL is listed on all your social media accounts. Doing these two things will maximize the amount of engagement and interaction you can get online.

9.     Leverage Video Marketing

Posting branded videos relevant to your niche on YouTube, Vimeo, etc. is an excellent way to promote your business online and drive traffic to your website.

10. Produce and Distribute Great Content

Creating and curating great content on a regular basis is the best way to create brand recognition and increase your online reach. Quality and consistency is key. Even small-sized businesses should try to post original content on social media daily and post a new blog article at least once per month. For larger businesses who can produce a higher volume of content, they should try to post multiple times per day on social media and produce new blog articles at least once per week.

For most businesses (who are not already highly-recognized brands) it is a good idea to stick to the 80/20 rule for posting on social media, to maximize engagement and follower retention.

Post 20% branded content that links back to your website, blog, YouTube channel or other social media accounts. This includes any product or service spotlights, discounts or promotions, email or newsletter sign-up requests, event announcements, etc. Any more than 20% can appear too self-promoting and may lead to loss of followers.

Photos are an exception to this rule. Visuals have become a very important aspect of online marketing. People tend to scroll their feeds and like, comment, share and re-tweet images that catch their eye because they are humorous, helpful or insightful in some way. People also very much enjoy seeing the faces a company, before and after photos of completed work, photos from trade shows, company events and outings, etc. This is particularly important if you are a business who takes a large volume of photos at various business activities. Always try to post the photos to new albums on your website and Facebook as soon after an event as possible.

Post 80% potentially-sharable content that is of interest to your target customer. This can be posting a tip on Tuesdays using the commonly-searched hashtag #TuesdayTip or posting a quote on Mondays for #MotivationalMonday that is in some way relatable to your target customer. Also, if you’re looking to target a specific geographic region, you can post or share interesting News articles about something happening in your town or city. The goal with this 80% is to post things of interest that your target customer will look forward to seeing in their stream and potentially share or re-tweet to their friends and followers, thus increasing your brand awareness and overall reach.

When creating/building your online brand presence, be consistent across all platforms and make sure you are presenting your company in an honest and clear way. A potential customer should be able to (at a quick glance) understand who you are and what products or services you provide.

What worked for you?