The digital economy has seen demand for branding reach a new high. Gain helpful tips on how best to leverage quality branding services to thrive.
Once the Thanksgiving and New Year holiday leftovers are devoured, most brands quickly switch gears into next-year plans. Process improvement and avenues for new and exciting growth opportunities are a huge part of that. Plus, it’s never a bad time to check for blind spots and loopholes in your digital branding.
… and who’s to say you cannot deepen the wells of loyalty with your audience, whipping up an entirely new digital brand that leaves your competitors eating dust?
Statista reports that in January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide. Let that sink in for a minute… 4.66 BILLION (That’s a whopping 59.5 percent of the global population!).
Now, combine this vast reach with its relatively low cost of access and its 24/7 availability. Then, you have a cheap, easily adaptable channel that allows you to vie for the spotlight and get your fair share of digital eyeballs on your brand.
Have you ever wondered how the biggest companies in the world today have been able to achieve so much brand reach, reputation, and recognition (We mean the Amazon, Tesla, Nike, Netflix, Airbnb of this world)?
These companies are known by millions of people around the world and provide different types of services to consumers. But, they’ve all done one thing successfully — they’ve been able to harness the digital space to maintain their brand identity, developing fruitful and mutually rewarding relationships with their target audience.
Each of these companies utilized digital branding services to intricately design, for themselves, a name and an image that connects deeply with consumers. Then, using the internet, they relentlessly marketed their brands to people globally.
With a top-tier, award-winning digital branding agency handling your digital branding, your firm can witness tremendous growth, irrespective of the business’ size (whether small, big, or medium scale).
In this post, we dive deep into how you can implement digital branding services to shape and position your organization for more value to inspire loyalty and brand awareness.
What is meant by branding services?
Branding services are a group of activities focused on building unique, distinct identities of businesses. This newly formed corporate identity intimately connects businesses with their customers.
What do branding services include?
Branding services include Logo Design, Website Design, Landing Page Design, Presentation Design, Product Design, and the creation and promotion of brand messages.
What are digital branding services?
These services expand your business by combining digital marketing strategies with creative brand design. They propel your brand into mainstream awareness using the digital landscape as a medium.
What Is Digital Branding?
Digital branding is simply the entire process of molding a company’s digital identity. Digital branding services handle everything concerning a brand’s persona online, from designing the logo to creating dynamic web content and managing social media accounts.
In fact, it’s a marriage between internet branding and digital marketing because it involves creating a digital identity designed to connect with consumers on a deeper level, with the end goal of marketing more effectively to them.
Genuine digital branding is consumer-centered. To achieve the best results when using digital branding services, you have to focus wholly on your target audience. Your digital brand should be a smooth blend of your company’s values and the desires of your target audience to evoke feelings of familiarity and fondness in your consumers.
Professional digital branding agencies have a great mastery of this concept and, thus, focus less on advertising and more on designing digital content to formulate a personality online that people can resonate with.
An example of a company that does this remarkably well is Sony’s PlayStation — With a jaw-dropping 18.7m followers, Sony’s PlayStation is the most followed brand on Twitter.
A study conducted by UnMetric shows that PlayStation has acquired 376% growth in followers over the past five years, totaling 120 million followers. How have they been able to achieve this? PlayStation has masterfully assembled a digital brand identity that is passionate, imaginative, innovative, and creative. It’s an identity that anyone and everyone can get behind.
Image source: https://twitter.com/PlayStation
Are you looking to equip your firm’s corporate identity with these endearing traits? Let us do a free analysis of your project and give expert tips and creative solution outlines!
Digital Branding and Digital Marketing: Two Sides of a Coin?
While digital marketing is more concerned with promoting products or services to boost sales, digital branding is more about connecting with the consumers.
A digital marketing campaign will involve product design, price, and the implementation of various marketing strategies such as paid advertising. Digital branding, on the other hand, involves creatively designing an online image for a company that aligns with its essence and values.
The Nike brand and its commitment to social change is a useful example. The fact that they are well known for their strong social statements in the digital space humanizes them in the eyes of customers and fosters feelings of fondness and loyalty towards the brand.
The Importance of Digital Branding
A company without a digital identity has no face, no way of relating to the target audience online. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that firms that underestimate the power of their online presence and do not utilize professional digital branding services often find themselves struggling to keep up with the competition.
Consumers in today’s rapidly evolving marketing world no longer choose a product or service solely because it meets their needs. The sheer number of options they have makes that impossible.
Nowadays, consumers choose a brand because it delivers an intensified experience and makes them feel good about themselves and it portrays certain values or aspiration they share.
Take Coca-Cola, the biggest beverage company in the world, for instance. With a remarkable digital positioning, they designed an enticing consumer persona and publicized it using digital media outlets. They consistently preach that consumers of Coca-Cola are happy, vibrant people who ‘taste the feeling’ of satisfaction and contentment when they drink the beverage.
Soon enough, their message became deeply ingrained into public consciousness: Coca-Cola = fun times.
Image source: https://us.coca-cola.com/
When you utilize the digital branding services provided by a professional, award-winning agency with high-level creativity like Stan Branding’s experts, you gain the ability to engage with potential customers deeply. This’ll help effectively promote your message while designing an improved customer experience that infinitely draws your target audience in.
Digital branding increases the value of your business because your audience will choose to pay more for your products if they perceive your brand as luxurious, even if there are other competitors in the market producing similar products for a lesser price.
Similarly, if your brand is poorly designed, people will instantly forget your name and logo the moment they see it and go for a more popular brand, even if your products are more reasonably priced.
Digital branding is the golden shovel with which your business can pack a heap load of value (for both customers and investors!) without having to change a single thing in your product’s design.
Benefits of Digital Branding Services
Gone are the days when companies spent a ton of money placing adverts in newspapers, billboards, and every other kind of media outlet available, on the off chance that their target audience might see them.
Today, almost every business can connect directly to their target audience simply by using the more efficient and cost-effective method of digital branding.
With professional digital brand services done by a professional agency, the sky is truly the only limit to how big your company can grow. Below are a few benefits of digital branding.
Global Reach
Almost 60% of the earth’s total population uses the internet. All these people. In one space. Digital branding gives you the power to interact and meaningfully engage with your target audience across various digital channels.
An interactive platform like the internet allows you to have two-way communication with your customers worldwide and see how they feel about certain products and offers in real-time. If your target audience falls in love with your brand message and brings word-of-mouth endorsements your way, your brand could even go viral!
For instance, a brand like Gymshark has built an impeccable content strategy around TikTok that has earned them around 1.7 million followers on the platform.
Digital branding increases brand visibility & equity
How well known your firm’s brand is, is directly linked to how big of an online presence it has? Every aspect of digital branding — logo, website, brand name, brand purpose, social media management — is targeted at boosting visibility online.
This visibility, in turn, can largely determine its value. Because consumers find it easier to trust in an organization that has a professional logo and website and is well known by other users, you’ll get a stamp of credibility on your business which, in turn, raises your market value.
Digital branding distinguishes your business from competitors
How does a customer differentiate between your company and others that offer the same service? Why should they choose yours over all the others?
The single, most effective way to set your business apart from all the other competitors is to create a unique digital brand. Using the services of a professional digital branding agency, you can create an online personality for your company.
This personality should be focused on spreading your brand’s message, which has been carefully crafted to persuade your target audience to identify with it. Then, through this digital brand, connect intimately and interactively with them.
Canadian ginseng company, Grace Mountain Ginseng, hinted Stan Branding agency about the birth of their business through their CEO, Eric Johnson. Eric put a call through to Stan Branding after an online search pointed him in our direction.
The ginseng market is an age-long one, with the corporate identity of most companies rooted in years of tradition, strict quality control, and know-how that greatly influence the value chain.
They had previously purchased a logo from an online logo designer on Fiverr. At best, it was functional. But on an emotional level, it was uninspiring and a bit cliché. To be fair, anyone can develop with a logo. But developing one that connects with the brand message, values, and overall corporate identity is the stuff of only experts!
Realizing that they needed a team of experts with deep commercial understanding to take these elements on board and come up with a winning design, they called us, and, of course, we were more than happy to help them forge a compelling proposition to their audience through quality digital branding services.
Kicking off with a responsive logo featuring a symbol of the ginseng roots to reflect its authentic origin. The logo paired beautifully with the ultra-modern typography and the color scheme, and this tied into their overall corporate identity.
This project took a month of high-level creativity from our expert team to execute, and we can say confidently that our team and Eric’s are proud of the eventual outcome. According to Johnson, since the branding project, their prospect-to-customer conversation numbers have gone up a whopping 11.4% which is huge progress. They have our best wishes for the future.
Developing Your Digital Branding Strategy
Implementing a digital branding strategy for your firm involves using internet-based mediums to communicate your brand’s identity to your target audience.
An effective strategy establishes your presence in the digital world, captures and sustains the attention of your target audience (who are intrigued by the value your firm provides), and builds a meaningful (and profitable) relationship with them.
This relationship translates not only to customer acquisition but also unwavering loyalty (that breeds unpaid advocacy) and, of course, an increased bottom line. Here’s a step-by-step process to achieving this:
Identify your target audience
Who are you trying to interact with? Who exactly needs your product or service, and how best can you reach them on the internet?
You cannot be everything to everyone. It’ll be both tiring and fruitless to even try. Identifying your target audience helps you to speak directly to the people that are truly in need of the products or services that your firm provides.
To narrow down your customer base, identify their demographic characteristics such as age group, job, gender, income range, marital status, and location. Find out personalized features such as their interests, values, lifestyles, opinions, motivation, most used social media platforms, specific problems, and possible solutions.
All these assist you in understanding your target audience and what makes them tick. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be in an optimal position to develop an effective and accurate digital branding strategy.
Establish your brand’s mission & vision
The mission and vision of your business defines your organization’s corporate identity, what you offer, why you offer it, your goals, and how you intend to achieve said goals. It serves as a bridge that connects you with your target audience, giving them valid reasons to care about the products or services you offer.
Thus, it’s important that you create a compelling mission and vision statement that succinctly explains who you are, what you do, and highlights your commitment to your customers. The statements should also be true, believable, and easy to understand.
You may include an expanded version of your mission and vision statement on your website’s “About” page. Use this opportunity to tell your brand’s story. Talk about how you began, your journey towards the goal you hope to achieve, and your client’s role in the attainment of that goal.
Assess your competition
Identify the key players in your industry and research how they compete with your business. There are three categories your competitors may fall into:
A) Direct competitors: A direct competitor sells the same products or services as you are to the target audience. An excellent example is a competition that exists between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
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B) Indirect competitor: Indirect competitors sell substitutes to your brand offerings. You both seek to satisfy the same need, however, through different strategies. For example, Burger King and Popeye’s Chicken are indirect competitors. Both businesses provide fast foods to the same group of consumers. However, Burger King specializes in burgers, while Popeye’s offers fried chicken, biscuits, and shrimp.
C) Tertiary competitors: Tertiary competitors do not compete with you in any way but may become indirect competitors or potential partners in the future. They are usually difficult to identify due to their inherent unpredictability and may become serious market obstacles — for instance, Lucozade Sport and Adidas.
In-depth competitive research usually carried out by a team of experts with deep commercial understanding allows you to identify and understand your competition’s online positioning so you can decipher how to create a separate digital identity and build a positive perception in your customers’ eyes.
Pro tip: The easiest way to start your analysis is by searching your firm’s name or product on a search engine and taking note of other businesses that appear on the search engine results page (SERP).
You want to assess the size of the competitor’s business, their audience reach, tone of content, social media platforms, and visual identities. Another thing you can do is to observe the strengths and weaknesses of your competition’s overall digital branding strategy and utilize your results in determining the best route to outshine them.
Comprehensive competitor research is just one of the many ways we can help you supercharge your branding digitally.
We’re super proud of the recognition our expertise has earned us locally and internationally, including our emerging as one of the TOP 10 branding agencies according to Clutch for 2021.
You can trust us to have a deep commercial understanding, high-level creativity, and a professional approach to your project that places you firmly among the high-flyers in your industry. Click here to get a free development of your project with our CEO.
Define your brand’s visual identity
Your brand’s visual identity is the overall blend of visible elements such as logo, font, color palette, website user interface, and imagery. These elements come together to create a corporate identity that makes your firm unique and easily recognizable across all digital touchpoints.
When you see a little white bird with outstretched wings embedded in a blue box or an apple with a side bitten off, you already know which brand, and what their product offerings are (Twitter and Apple, of course!).
Your visual identity takes you beyond where mere words can. Since we remember visual cues faster than verbal traits, your visual identity sets the pace for awareness and engagement. This, in turn, yields better conversation rates and increases sales.
Design a user-friendly website
Nothing makes a potential customer smash the “back” button faster than a website that’s rigged with irrelevant ads, takes ages to load, or responds slowly.
A user-friendly website features a streamlined design, free of any clutters. Such a website is easy to navigate, loads quickly, and presents essential information in easy-to-find locations.
When designing your website, ensure that the color scheme complements your logo to maintain brand consistency. Your brand name, logo, and other key details should also be presented in bold, legible fonts, so potential customers do not have to go through several pages to find the information they came looking for.
For car geeks and potential customers who must’ve logged on to Ford’s website, they are bound to get caught up in what we like to call the ‘ultimate car dealership experience’, which we think is very on-brand.
Here’s the thing: In a car dealership, you either pick a car for purchase right away or peek around for your desired features in your choice of car to snap it up at a later date. Ford’s homepage gives you the best of both worlds with its website functionalities. The result? Visitors have the same exciting experience they would’ve had if they walked into a physical Ford car showroom.
Adidas’ one-of-a-kind website sliders also come to mind. The captivating visual elements on their homepage are one thing. But what really gets visitors a wholesome feel of the Adidas brand’s innovation is the display of its best-selling, top-tier products with seamless timing and flow.
Now, any ‘sneaker head’ will surely love the sight of that. And that’s why it is no surprise that in terms of income generation, the brand has continued to soar over the years.
Publish (helpful) branded content
Content fosters interaction through engagements which build deep relationships between the brand and its customers. Valuable content means engaging, meaningful, and solution-giving, and easily digestible bits of information. It could come in the form of written posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts.
It’s a content-saturated age. And with content being the resource used to fuel traditional advertisement efforts, how does your digital branding strategy tie into your content marketing strategy?
It’s simple. Having a digital branding strategy means branded content that works better than traditional advertisement as it helps garner more attention and brand recognition.
Customers react better to branded content because it doesn’t feel like a sales pitch. Readers can attribute the content to your business, so they feel the content is created with them in mind. This bit of customer-focused branding will endear your business to their hearts, leading to better loyalty and retention. It gives you the competitive edge.
Social media presence
The reach of social media is vast. One single post can be viewed by millions of people, making it one of the most efficient advertising methods.
Whether Facebook or Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, you’ll find that almost every brand uses one social media platform or the other. And if your potential customers are on a platform, you had better hop on it as well, or you’ll be losing a large portion of your clientele.
Every social media manager and fashion lover alike can only blush at Fashion Nova’s excellent use of Instagram for their social media branding strategy. Fashion Nova knows a large chunk of their following is on Instagram and they maximize this (they post 20-30 times a day on Instagram).
Though heavily reliant on Influencer Marketing to drum up buzz (#NovaBabes), their Instagram showcases their army of influencers of diverse race, sizes and ethnicities. It’s earned them their giant status as one of the most searched fashion brands at a time where they had little-to-no SEO strategy.
Take away: Determine the social media platform(s) that your target audience uses the most and ensure that you’re active on them. Post frequently, and if possible, on a schedule. Be consistent.
When it comes to digital branding, out of sight is out of mind. Respond as soon as possible to direct messages and engage replies to your posts. This humanizes your digital brand and allows your target audience to connect with your brand on a much deeper level.
At Stan Branding agency, our team of experts delivers the full package, just as we did for a British company Powerhouse Pumice high-quality cleanings in residential and commercial settings at a reasonable cost.
From a small cleaning company to people who carry out professional cleaning for shopping and business centers, Powerhouse Pumice’s massive growth has been remarkable. And they want just that — a remarkable rebranding exercise — to reflect their new positioning in the market.
Powerhouse Pumice’s Marketing & Sales department reached out to us after they realized that they had run short of time to reach their target of a brand relaunch ahead of their company anniversary. The goal for this rebrand was clear — reflect the recent growth and position the company for future expansion in the super-saturated global cleaning industry.
Research into this industry was going to be a huge part of this, of course, and our team of experts dug deep by spending interrogative sessions with the CEO, CMO, and other members of the Marketing & Sales dept. With the insight we got, we were able to keep key stakeholders aligned with what was to be the brand’s value, culture, and vision.
The creation of the web design and new logo and a new brand identity built on values of quality, perfection, and taste followed — so it gave off that luxury feel. Recall that they were on a time crunch for this project all this while. Our award-winning designers put in all the hard work (which included working overtime, and some sleepless nights to meet targets) to realize this project ahead of schedule.
Powerhouse Pumice was selected as a finalist in the world cleaning services showdown contest. What’s more, they won the contest. Using our newly built brand identity, we helped create a video and a presentation deck to help their company win £750,000.
For us, it was a huge reward for the high level of creativity our expert team had put into this project. The freshly minted, recognizable brand identity has served Powerhouse Pumice incredibly well, as they now boast a giant reputation in the Cleaning Industry. Marketing has been an absolute breeze as the brand has acquired so much brand equity not only in the UK, but in Europe.
What Can a Digital Branding Services Agency Do for You?
Much has been said about the wonders digital branding can do for your business. However, successful implementation of a digital branding strategy requires more than knowing how the concept works or how you can benefit from it.
Creating and maintaining a positive brand identity on the internet often requires the knowledge and expertise of professionals in the digital branding field.
This is where a digital branding agency comes in. A professional digital branding agency like the expert team at Stan Branding can draw from deep commercial understanding to establish your company’s presence and corporate identity online.
It builds and successfully implements digital branding strategies to boost your brand’s awareness, deliver value to your customers, and create unforgettable brand experiences that deepen the wells of loyalty between you and your target audience.
Let’s put your brand right on the map!
A robust digital identity for your brand contributes mainly to the success of your business. The stakes are high when it comes to projects like this. So, the high-level of creativity needed to develop winning designs is best left to the passionate hands of professionals.
Think about it: We have at least 6-8 unique projects developed per month (we don’t take too many projects at once so we can drill down our focus to serve our clients most efficiently) where we create innovative winning solutions for some of the finest brands on a local and international scale.
Now you can picture how many uniquely undertaken projects with proven results we have developed for our clients since we came on the scene in 2016. Quite a lot, right? It suggests one thing — Stan Branding is an agency with enough skin in the game!
So, whether growing your brand visibility, brand reputation, or acquiring more customers without having to break the bank, a robust digital branding strategy can give your brand a good head start.
Need a bit of help with your digital branding strategy? Reaching out to our agency is a step in the right direction. Or, even better, you can click here to request your free pre-development consultation from our CEO.
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