Benefits of Refreshing Your Digital Brand
Creating a flexible brand across all digital media can make significant impacts on your revenue growth. With a growing number of content distribution platforms, it is important to have flexibility in your brand strategy.
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Discover:
- Biology of a digital brand
- Brand strategy for different platforms
- What level of branding is right for you
- Success stories you can leverage for growth
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WHAT IS
Digital
Branding?
It may surprise you to know that digital branding is NOT a projection of how you see your company, nor is it a logo or color scheme. In fact, it’s not exclusively related to appearances at all.
The concept of a brand is often mistaken as surface-level, but in reality, it stands for something far larger and more significant. Your brand is the embodiment of everything your company is, the catalyst for everything your company does, and the basis for every experience your company delivers to customers.
Without getting too existential, think about yourself. What makes you who you are? Is it the color of your hair, skin and eyes? The style of your clothing or the way you talk? Of course not! You are so much more than what others see at face value. As you might have guessed, so is a digital brand.
WHY DIGITAL BRANDING?
Traditional Branding = One-Way Communication
A customer sees an ad but cannot directly interact with the brand.
Digital Branding = Two-Way Communication
A customer sees an ad and can directly engage with the brand.
In 2003, barely anyone had more than a single network-connected device. According to Statista, the average person today could have as many as six. In business terms, this means a lot more ways for your company to directly and indirectly communicate and interact with target audiences.
Benefits of Digital Branding
- Improve awareness and recognition
- Create trust between business and buyers
- Provide clarity and focus around your offering
- Differentiate your company from competitors
The Biology of a Digital Brand
Developing a deeper, more meaningful connection with customers is the ultimate goal of digital branding. But to get there, you first have to create something worth connecting to.
Brand appearance
As much as we try to not be judgmental, the act of using what we see to draw conclusions about others is a survival skill as inherent to humans as the faculty of sight. Here’s what you’ll need to make a positive and lasting first impression:
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Logo
Your brand’s trademark; a symbol that reflects your brand personality that differentiates your brand from competitors.
Tagline
A memorable, dramatic phrase that supports your brand identity and helps customers feel more connected with your brand.
Colors
Specific colors used in all digital and print branding to help with recognition and to inspire emotional responses.
illustration
The visuals that will be used to support your logo, typeface and the words you use to communicate with customers.
Photography
A suite of professionally shot photos that support your brand messaging and visually represent your business.
Typography
How your brand sets and arranges its type, including fonts, font size, letter scaling, letter spacing, font weight and capitalization.
Iconography
A set of icons or symbols used to help customers quickly and effectively navigate content.
Brand Essence
Brand essence adds depth of character to a brand by attaching feelings and emotions to its ideals and behaviors. As you know, emotion drives purchasing behavior, which means developing a brand essence your target audience connects with can have a powerful influence over sales and customer retention. Here’s what you need to bring your brand’s metaphysical qualitiesto life.
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Value Proposition
Your most powerful conversion tool; a concise statement that clearly answers the one question every potential customer asks: Why should I pick you?
mission statement
A concise declaration of your brand’s purpose beyond selling products or services. In other words, your brand’s greater intention.
Brand Story
The narrative of facts and feelings that explain why your brand exists and how it came to be.
Vision Statement
A concise declaration of your brand’s aspirations: Where your brand is going, what it hopes to achieve, and whom it aspires to become.
Values
The principles your brand stands by in business and life. The moral standards that guide your company’s daily decisions.
positioning statement
The visuals that will be used to support your logo, typeface and the words you use to communicate with customers.
BRAND PERSONALITY
The key to humanizing your brand is to give it a personality. This is what makes a brand interesting and unique. People use several measures to gauge personality, but perhaps the strongest indicator is how someone speaks and what they say. Here’s what you need to create a likeable character.
Brand Voice
What you say. Your brand voice is a uniform style of communication that your brand will use across all environments — online and offline — to express its position on certain topics, convey its identity and engage with target audiences.
Brand Tone
How you say it. Your brand tone is how you will use your brand voice to accommodate different audiences, environments and situations. For example, shifting from playful to serious dialogue.
YOU HAVE A BRAND,
Now what?
Being human isn’t just about what you look like, who you are or what you say. It’s also about where you spend your time and how your presence in different environments impacts those around you. Ultimately, this is what it means to exist.
content
Content is the primary way in which your brand communicates, interacts, and forms relationships with customers. Content is also how your customers learn about who you are, what you stand for and how you can help them.
editing/style guidelines
These guidelines provide an explanation of every detail concerning your brand, including its specific appearance, essence, and personality attributes. This guide will govern how marketing teams, sales teams and third-party partnerships present your brand to create consistency across all platforms, online and offline.
Content marketing strategy
This focuses on how you use content to create brand awareness, generate leads, convert prospects and win customer loyalty. The act of maintaining a loyal customer relationship hinges on the strategic placement of touchpoints. Touchpoints can be any interaction that takes place between a brand and a consumer and they come in many different forms, such as:
- An email
- A social media post
- Meeting a rep at a tradeshow
- An eBook download
- Seeing your logo
- A sale
- A remarketing campaign
- A customer service call
When using content as a touchpoint, the idea is to distribute the right content to the right person at the right time. Each interaction is like a stepping stone that guides the consumer through the buyer's journey. Here’s the catch. A pathway paved with touchpoints doesn't have a beginning and an end, nor does it travel in a straight line. Therefore, your content marketing strategy must be agile enough to take action based on real-time insights. Now, do you understand why so many companies outsource content marketing to an expert agency?
Furthermore, different audience segments will look for and use different content touchpoints based on personal preferences and where they are at in their decision-making process. To remain relevant and valuable during this courtship, your content marketing strategy must be a diverse mix of topics and assets, including:
- Blogs
- How-to guides
- Emails
- Newletters
- Videos
- Memes
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Hashtag Marketing
A powerful way to develop your brand voice, reach the far corners of the internet and create buzz around your brand is by using hashtag campaigns on social channels. There are several ways to execute a hashtag campaign. The most apparent strategy is to design a slogan around your brand name — for example, #ShareaCoke or #MyCalvins. You can also create a call-to-action hashtag that inspires audiences to participate in a brand initiative.
Social Media strategy
How your brand will use social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to distribute content and engage with target audiences. Considering that the average person spends 142 minutes per day on social channels, your brand’s social media strategy is a crucial pillar holding up the structural integrity of your entire content marketing strategy.
Case study
REI
REI launched one of the greatest hashtag campaigns ever in 2015. The company announced that it was closing shop on Black Friday, the retail industry’s most profitable shopping day. Instead of enticing their patrons to shop, REI encouraged customers to go outside, spend time with family and share pictures of their adventures on social media using the hashtag #optoutside.
In doing so, REI didn’t just tell their target audience how much they care about their employees, patrons, and the outdoors (like so many companies tend to do). They showed it.
Sources: The American Association of Advertising Agencies and Media Post
1.4
million people used
the hashtag
the hashtag
6.7
billion media
impressions
impressions
170
organizations showed
support for REI
support for REI
1.2
billion social
impressions
impressions
33
straight days of
media coverage
media coverage
Over 1M
new member
sign ups
sign ups
92%
increase in job applicants
14%
increase in brand awareness
7%
increase in purchase intent
3.6x
normal traffic increased in-store
WHAT LEVEL OF BRANDING IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
With a complete understanding of what a digital brand is, why digital branding is important, and how to execute a digital branding strategy — it’s time to consider the degree of branding you need to accomplish your goals.
Brand enhancement
Updating a digital brand but still reflecting much of its current identity.
Why Enhance?
- To keep up with new market/consumer trends
- To realign brand with offerings
Risks & Considerations:
- Losing the essence of your brand
- Making a change that audiences disagree with
- Poor timing that fails to earn publicity
rebranding
The complete repackaging of a company’s digital identity, which may include a new brand name and significant changes to appearance, essence and personality traits.
When to Rebrand?
- If a brand inadequately represents your product or service
- If a brand no longer resonates with audiences
- If your target market has changed
- If your company has changed (growth, merger, acquisition, etc.)
Risks & Considerations:
- Alienating or confusing your existing audience
- Inadvertently complicating the brand message
- Negatively impacting company culture
brand new
Creating a brand from scratch because one does not currently exist.
When to Build From Scratch?
- If you are launching a new business
- If you are dramatically altering an existing business
Risks & Considerations:
- Underestimating budget, time and effort
- Failing to create a brand that resonates with target audiences
- Lacking audience insights
- Designing the brand for you, not the audience
See how Green Circle Growers became one of the largest orchid distributors in the Midwest through rebranding.
Digital branding can be a powerful competitive advantage that enables your business to grow in size, influence and profitability.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. In the same way that business leaders pay careful attention to how they present themselves and interact with colleagues and cohorts, the same focus must be given to the digital branding process. Image truly is everything and, thanks to our increasing level of connectedness, one branding mistake can destroy the public’s perception of your company in an instant.
It is extremely difficult for many business leaders and owners to emotionally detach from their life’s work and step back far enough to see what the company looks like from the audience’s point of view. This is why, according to Deloitte’s most recent CMO Survey, executives are increasing their brand spending and outsourcing more marketing efforts to branding experts like Kuno Creative.
When you are ready to evaluate your branding or rebranding needs, contact Kuno Creative for a strategic look at your digital brand.
