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The Internet has become the best tool to choose and select the products and services most consumers require. According to wearesocial.com, 86% of Internet users in the US have searched online for products and services, and 81% have purchased online. We discover why Digital Marketing is essential for building your brand.
This statistic highlights the importance of building a brand in the digital space.
Before describing the most expressive benefits of building a brand in the digital space, we need to understand how brands, and (more specifically) strong brands, are defined.
What differentiates a strong brand from a weak one?
Let’s start with the generic definition and work into the deeper territory. A strong brand is a brand that stands out in the minds of your customers, both current and potential. Have you ever wondered what this means?
A strong brand has a clear understanding of its competition. They have a strong sense of how their presence contributes to the landscape of their industry. An important contribution to a brand’s strength is that your vision, mission and values are well communicated and well understood within the business.
Building strong brands means having a strong brand identity and creating a visual synergy that appeals to your target audience. Visual synergy is created when logos, taglines, color palettes, and icons come together in a way that is both easy on the eyes and relevant to the industry you live in.
A strong brand will use this consistently across multiple online and offline touch points. In this way, it becomes ingrained in the minds of consumers (through recognition and repetition), making the brand easily recognizable.
Strong brands view brand strategy and development as a business function rather than a marketing function.
The benefits of brand building using digital marketing
Visibility, recognition and reach because the Internet has a global reach, your brand will be seen by a larger audience than your sales team or brick-and-mortar store can touch on a daily or weekly basis. With more people accessing your brand, awareness of your products or services will be higher than if you used traditional methods to increase brand awareness.
The number of times a brand is viewed is directly related to brand recognition. In addition, presence on multiple digital channels lends itself to increased brand recognition.
The stronger the brand recognition, the greater the chance of being the brand of choice for potential customers. Ultimately, all brand strategists aspire to build world-class brands.
Consumers are more likely to choose brands they recognize. Your brand’s presence in the digital space allows you to nurture your potential consumers from the brand awareness phase to the consideration phase, where they are educated about your products and services.
Once they have decided to choose your product or service over your competitors, they become consumers. And if all the boxes are checked at each phase (awareness, consideration, and decision phases), chances are good that your consumers will become brand ambassadors.
When considering the customer journey, marketing departments consider many elements of digital marketing. Digital marketing consultant planning will include email marketing, social media, mobile marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Credibility and trust
A trustworthy brand is easily recognizable, has been around for a long time, has a loyal fan base or customers, and delivers on its promises.
When a company is seen as a reputable and recognizable brand, its credibility increases both within its industry and among its customers.
As credibility and trust build, so do loyalty and community. The consequence is that as word-of-mouth marketing increases, so does the ease of purchase. This means increased web traffic, conversion rates, blogging and social media engagement, and potentially higher media interest rates in the digital space.
This, in turn, has a direct impact on the competitive advantage of the business.
Build a community
Although community building is traditionally seen as the role of social media marketers, it can be argued that community building is everyone’s job.
The first reason is simple. The nature of the task requires the input and commitment of multiple people, and who better to be a brand ambassador than your staff? The second reason is that the benefits to be gained from focusing on community building are massive.
Brand ambassadors and a loyal brand community make introducing new products and services easier and less expensive. There will also be less work on building brand awareness.
You’re probably wondering why it would be less expensive, right? Because the larger and more engaged your online community, the less you need to use paid advertising and public relations to promote your new products and services.
Due to the advancement of digital marketing services, media platforms and marketing automation tools, community building has become less labor intensive and much easier than traditional community building methods.
Another benefit is related to the word of mouth marketing. As consumers, we hold the recommendations and opinions of our friends and acquaintances with more weight than if we were to see an advertisement for the product.
When the brand community starts to anticipate and talk about the products that are coming, the reach is greater, and this organic reach is considered to contribute greatly to the credibility of the brands.
An added benefit to building a brand community is its access to business stakeholders to better understand your target audience. By building a community, your company embarks on an incredible journey of understanding your customers, their pains, and what they like about your products and services.
Increase brand value
Brand equity refers to the business value gained from how consumers think and feel about a brand and how well it commands market share and profits within its industry.
Having higher brand equity means your business will experience a reduction in paid advertising costs associated with gaining traffic or awareness.
Higher brand equity is linked to higher market share, as consumers prefer stronger brands over their competitors. And for this reason, there is an opportunity to move toward a premium pricing structure.
Strong brands are less likely to recruit actively, as people are naturally interested in working for brands with a good reputation. So, stronger brands have less need to spend on HR and recruiting-related activities.
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