Building Brands Online

Television has always been a lead medium for advertising from ages. From past few years, digital medium has posed a challenge to TV with organizations shifting spends to digital channels for tapping consumers on the digital touch points which they are getting increasingly hooked to

Digital media does offer a myriad advantages over the traditional media like – sharp targeting, re-targeting, rich analytics, feed-back and feed-forward and most importantly tie-up consumer with purchase (especially incase of e-commerce companies)

Many niche brands have opted for digital as it’s relatively cost effective and offers efficient brand building opportunities. Building brands online is a new ball-game in marketing but the fundamentals of brand-building remain the same, irrespective of medium. Broad structure for building a brand on digital platform is as follows:

• Define your TG. Be it TV or digital, sharp definition of TG is critical.
• Connect marketing objective to digital media strategy. Eg: For new brands the marketing strategy could be to build brand salience and the media strategy will be to gain brand reach on digital. For established brands with focus on ‘consumer preference’ the media strategy would be to build brand engagement
• Choose the right media mix – digital offers a wide variety of platforms across paid, owned, earned media (paid platforms – brand social pages, search campaigns, affiliate marketing; owned platforms – websites, brand apps; earned media – blogs, mentions on social, webportals). The media strategy should flow into the choice of media mix.
• Set up a team of content creators for ‘always-on’ content – build content discoverability and generate virality through consumer relevant, authentic & real time content
  Managing social platforms is exciting and even more challenging at the same time. Brands need to build continuous conversations with the consumers to build consumer connect and build preference for the brand. FB recently launched responsiveness measure for page admins to track the speed of response to consumer posts on brand pages.

Once the fundamental structure is in place, the digital marketing analysts/ social media managers can build a robust brand listening & consumer data models which generate rich consumer insights for brand building.  A few steps to leverage digital channels for generating insights and driving brand sales:

• Set up a digital listening tool for your category which generates insights on the key words for brand, category, brand social pages & competitor mentions/social pages
• Generate patterns of brand mentions (linked to promotion either on TV or digital) &competitor mentions. Re-align brand promotion spends accordingly
• Also build thorough understanding of consumer’s needs/wants/fears/motivators which drive his/her attitude towards the category. Craft out consumer purchase journey on digital platforms and create a plan to seed brand at every stage of journey – awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, advocate and looping it back to consideration
• Generate a repository of data from all the channels – social, search, website visits, mobile apps and build purchase linkage campaigns with this data. E-com integration provides a faster and easier route for brands to drive online purchase

Digital has become a secondary medium for most of the mass brands and primary medium for premium brands for brand building activities. My personal pick would be ‘Red Bull’ which has been doing brilliant digital brand building campaigns with edgy and cool content in-line with brand essence. Overall for the brands to be successful on digital they need to be authentic, responsive, always-on and meaningful to consumers