Online Branding Techniques

In today’s business world people want to do business with others more so than ever before! This is why it is so important to focus on building a brand.

Why?

Because we trust people, we know. We trust people that we have relationships with, and most of all – we like to do business with people we trust!

• Create a brand creates awareness.
• Create a brand gives us instant opportunities to create likability.
• Create a brand elevates our credibility.
• Create a brand allows us to gain trust.

The time has come for every entrepreneur to get serious about building an online brand , so that we can enjoy the benefits of all these points, and more.

With this in mind I’m going to cut through all the fat and give you the bare essentials you need to get started with building your own online brand.

10 steps to make online brand

Building Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is when people identify your brand to be yours under different conditions; whether they’re on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. The first step is making your brand memorable – and a blog is the perfect vehicle for doing that. So, let’s break that down a little.

• Unique Website Design – The key to becoming memorable is making a good first impression and having a unique blog design can do just that. You’ve got to think of a mix between great design, and the ability to have your blog stand out from the rest. Although having a uniquely designed blog is not more important than your brand’s message, it still plays a big visual

• Proper Logo Designed -This doesn’t have to be overly fancy – having something that symbolizes your brand’s image will help in building brand awareness and recognition. For example, if your site is about “discussion and relationship building”, so choose a speech bubble style in logo, with the focus on brand colors.

• Nice and Related Tagline - a tagline is a phrase that lets your visitors know exactly what you’re about the minute they visit your site. This works best when the tag line states a benefit.

- how to build awareness for our brand, lets zoom in on creating some likability for ourselves, shall we?

Building Likability around your brand (Likability Halo)

After making it easy for people to recognize your brand, you need to work super hard at getting them to like you. The best way to do this in todays market is by connecting with your audience on a personal level. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather speak to a real person when calling a company than talking to a pre-recorded message. As new-age entrepreneurs if we want to be liked, we need to be personable.

The great thing is that you audience WANTS to be able to connect with you on a more personal level, and when they can do that, they’ll be more likely to do business with you. Here’s how you can continue to build your brand, and at the same time create some likability.

• Build ‘About Me’ and ‘Start Here’ Page – This page is the perfect place to speak a little about yourself, so that your visitors can get to know you better. Ideally, you want to put your audience first here. So try focusing on a few benefits as to why they should stick around on your site. You can then feel free to toot your own horn a little. Just be sure not to miss the opportunity of converting the casual visitor into an email subscriber and have an opt-in offer somewhere on the page.

• Embed a Facebook ‘Like’ Box – Giving people a way to connect with you through your Facebook page opens up the opportunity for them to reach out to you with a question, or feedback in a setting that they feel comfortable conversing in.

• Add Links to Other Social Media Channels - Don’t go crazy here, but remember that your brand continues to flourish off your main platform (ie. a blog). Twitter and Facebook are my main social media channels of choice, but I also provide links to my Google+ and LinkedIn profiles, just in case people would like to reach out to me using these mediums.

• Publish Online Video & Pod-casts – Steps 5, 6 and 7 are all about being human. Here is a scenario I think you will enjoy. Pretend there are two business experts. They both have blogs and they both put out really good content. However ‘Expert A’ also has a Facebook page, talks to you on Twitter and publishes video clips and podcast episodes regularly – while ‘Expert B’ does not. Which expert would you feel more comfortable calling up and hiring for consulting? If you picked ‘Expert A’ then you get where I am going with this.

Online video and podcasts allow us to make very different personal connections with our audience. Seeing us ‘in the flesh’, or inserting us into their earlobes creates an immediate reaction that reading a blog post, or an eBook simply cannot.

- It is time to talk trust and credibility!

Building Trust & Credibility (Trust & Credibility Halo)

Now, you could be the coolest person on the planet, but that still does not mean people are going to start throwing money at you. Your audience needs to trust you, before they will buy anything from you – as I said earlier, building trust is the single most important part of the ‘sales process’.

The sad thing is that this is where most people get stuck, because it’s the part that takes the most work.

Building trust in your brand is all about adding value to your community in the form of high quality, extremely helpful, consumable (and sharable!) content. Let us look at how you can use your platform (blog, YouTube channel, and podcast) to build trust.

• Have a Unique, Compelling Content – As strange as it may seem some of the most successful blog posts I have ever written have been very simple to put together. I simple answer questions in different posts in my site. (Provide solutions to problems). Creating this type of compelling content needs to be the cornerstone of your brand. If you help people, affect change in their mindsets and the way they conduct themselves in some way, you will quickly become the go-to source in your niche online.

• Creat Unique Free (Opt-In) Offer - While everything I have mentioned will help you boost your brand awareness and likability, the content should always be your main focus. Without great content, nothing else matters. Your audience will begin to trust you (and your brand) when they see that you are out to help them. Having an insanely valuable piece of content to give away as an incentive to sign up for your email list is one of the fastest ways to build trust. There are still people using crappy material in an attempt to get email sign-ups. That is not only damaging to your brand that also destroy the relationship with your potential customer before it starts.

• Be Yourself - Being yourself is by far one of the most important parts of building your brand. Nobody can duplicate you! You are the only one of YOU out there, and you need to use that massive ‘edge’ to your all-out advantage in the battle for peoples eyeballs, trust, loyalty and business.

References : https://www.chrisducker.com , https://www.entrepreneurship.org , https://buildingabrandonline.com , https://www.jeffbullas.com , https://www.iranmct.com

Photo : https://www.epalettedesignstudio.com