Digital Branding: An Important Success Factor in Brand Building

Branding serves to build and spread your own brand. In digital branding, digital channels are used for this purpose. In an era driven by technology and social media, digital branding has become indispensable for companies. In the course of digitalization, it has thus become the most important success factor in brand building.

How is digital branding successfully approached?

At the forefront of this process is a strategically planned brand development that is hardly different from conventional offline branding:

• Assign a name to the brand and visualize the brand.
• Position the brand with its offerings and unique selling points.
• Developing a strategy for spreading the brand.

Then the brand is advertised — offers are advertised, flyers are displayed, slogans are placed. However, digital branding differs considerably from analog branding in the ways it is advertised. It offers numerous opportunities to offer your target group an individualized brand experience. In addition, the number of customer touchpoints (points of contact with customers) is much higher with digital branding.

As it stands, the competition is high due to the ease of starting a business via the Internet, therefore it is necessary to use all channels relevant and available to make the brand known and expand the customer pool. In digital branding, these channels must be filled with high-quality, creative and unique content.

What distribution channels are relevant?

The website serves as a business card of a company. Already here are possibilities that are not available offline. If a company sells several products or services where the target groups vary, an individual structure of the web categories is possible according to the respective target group and product: colours, logo design and addressing the target group can be designed differently.

In addition to the website, social media platforms in digital branding are in high demand. Social media networks allow for marketing with a higher reach due to the many active users. The advantage that users disclose a lot of data about and from themselves by using social networks makes large amounts of data available.

Due to this data, companies have a foundation on which to run advertising campaigns with greater precision.

But companies should not only use social networks for advertising — social media is primarily a communication medium to communicate with each other. Providing internal insights and communicating their ideals and values to the masses — these are useful for organic brand building through regular posts, stories and other types of contributions.

Another distribution channel in digital branding is newsletter marketing. Customers who subscribe to a company’s mailing list receive newsletters. E-mail marketing tools can be used to individualize the newsletters. Tagging as a function allows users to assign interests to newsletters based on their interests.

Further distribution channels in digital branding are opened up in the course of local search engine optimization (local SEO) through business entries in the search engines. Here, reputation management can make a positive contribution to brand building. Additional advertising opportunities are offered by guest contributions and cooperation with other companies.

Quality is crucial

Because competition is increasing for all companies within and across industries as a result of digitization, quality is a key requirement in digital branding. All marketing measures must be reflected consistently on all appropriate channels. This is a challenge, because when up to eight channels are used, there can be contradictions in the way the advertising messages are conveyed. Marketing that makes sense in terms of content is essential at all customer touchpoints to ensure that digital branding is consistent and effective.

The website must be responsively programmed and the latest technologies such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 must be used. An additional development of apps for cell phones is a concession to the users, which also contributes to a wider reach. To improve brand building, regular use must be made of visualizations — whether in the form of illustrations or videos. Animated films are currently up to date because they simply illustrate facts.