E-Marketing

Online Branding–Basics

By Smriti Shrestha

First lets define online brand building.

Theoretically, it’s systematic means of establishing and strengthening a relationship between your brand and your consumer by means of an online presence (e.g. website, banners, online services etc.) The aim is that the relationship becomes so successful that the price factor is eliminated as the chief reasons for your consumer purchasing the product.

There are two vital issues to branding: Conversion and retention. Your brand building must be able to convert new customers to your brand, and it must retain your existing customers, cultivating their brand loyalty.

But branding tactics that work in the real world don’t always translate online. Getting your company or product recognized on the web is a challenge. Simply because, there are millions of brands present in the net and getting your customers to recall you from memory for your particular industry or product out of those millions is a daunting task. But despite current difficulties in marketing online, in the long run, no one can afford to ignore the medium. As more and more people start using the Net especially the growing children, no marketer will be able to ignore one of their favourite media-Internet for long. The reason being that their consumers will be spending much of their time in the net and the brand that can be recognized in the net will be the one that will become stronger than its competitors.

So, if you are thinking of branding online, the challenge facing you is to build enough unaided brand awareness so that customers (and prospects) have you in mind when they go online. It is crucial because, when people need a product or service, they’ll reach for the familiar. Online branding exercise also attempts to put forward a positive message about your company in front of enough people for enough times so they will think of about your company when they are ready to buy online or off-line.

Here are some of the tips to help you with online branding exercise for your company or product.

1. See Your Brand Vision

A vision expresses a brand’s place in its world. It articulates a brand’s reason for being. Your brand vision should be reflected clearly through every element of your online presence. i.e. through your online presence you should be able to communicate clearly about who you are and where you stand in the market. For instance, would you miss this brand vision "to be the catalyst of change for a whole generation"? I don’t think so. Of course it’s that of "Pepsi!" And if you visit its official site www.pepsi.com you’d be sure to find the site to be filled with lots of innovative features that speaks of the company’ vision.

2. Be Relevant and Consistent

Many companies use ‘gimmick appeal’ to attract site visitors. This includes things such as games, contents and screen saver that have no relevance with your brand. Such gimmicks can cause brief increases in traffic but doesn’t deepen customer loyalty. Similarly consistency is a fundamental branding requirement in every facet of your interactions with the consumer. Consistency ensures synergy between the brand’s messages across all online features of the brand. How consistent is your brand’s Web site message (its voice and tone) with the message it promulgates in the stores or with radio or TV exposure? If you can claim that at least 70 percent of the message—its tone and its content—is consistent across all media channels in exposing your brand to the consumer – and vice versa, the you are in a right track.

3. Be Engaging

Your brand needs to communicate a host of things via its site. But if the site is not engaging enough for the visitor the visitor will simply leave the site. Therefore you have to provide visitors with an experience that rewards them for the time they spend on your site. During their limited time online, your website needs to provide ‘branded interactive value’ to the visitors., Interactive values means, the site tries to create a bond with the customer by trying to add value to their professional or personal lives. The "branded" in branded interactive value means that whatever you provide on your site for visitors is in alignment with your brand strengths. For example, Proctor and Gamble offers the Stain Detective at www.tide.com; Unilever’s Ragu brand has a popular site filled with recipes; and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Clairol site allows consumers to scan in a personal photograph and experiment with different hair colors. The idea is to offer the visitors than just putting up the information about their products in their websites so that consumers spend more time with their brand online.

4. Interactivity

Still a lot of companies – even big companies promote the site exactly the same way they do in print brochures: Click, and you move to another page. There is no interactivity. No justification for being online. The result is the short span of interest of the visitor, which in turn results in poor ROI from the online investment. In the other hand clever sites take every piece of offline content and adapt it to exploit the advantages of the online medium. Cleverer sites forget offline documentation altogether and develop online content created for interactivity.

This is exactly what Amazon does, tome after time. Amazon either invents new site characteristics that would be impossible offline (e.g., one-click ordering and customer reviews) or manipulates the offline possibilities by making them work better for the customers (e.g., the no-questions-asked return policy, the system that enables it to predict which books are likely to interest you, and the advisory panel that helps customers select books). Amazon has managed to use every advantage offered by a real-world bookstore. It’s leveled the offline versus online playing field.

5. Listening, Learning, and Reacting

A brand not only "talks" but also "listens," "Learns," and "reacts." Brands that are able to listen to consumer information, learn from the data, and react with the consumer intelligently and will develop messages that speak to your audience. Think of providing tactical information to enhance the decision-making of your customers and its visitors. Therefore assess how good you, as the brand-builder, are at listening to your consumers, capturing relevant information about them, learning from the data by mining the tons of information you gather and analyzing it –and by reflecting your findings in intelligent one-to-one brand is well on track.

6. Co-Promotion

If you’re a little late on online branding exercise, you may want to develop some branding with other complementary partners who have established names (brands) in your market segment so that you can benefit by the drawing some of their loyal customers. This can include joint announcements, co-branded pages; direct marketing or opt-in e-mail pieces, etc.

7. Add Brand-Relevant Sponsored Content to Your Web Arsenal

"Sponsored content" offers something of value that is not directly related to your product or service. An example of accompany that used sponsored content to raise awareness about their brands is the Miller Brewing Company. It added its sponsored in the site superbowl.com. while the site is about the Super Bowl, it is chock-full of Miller’s brand imagery. The result was 8 million unique visitors in a single month vs. the fewer than 250,000 visitors Miller received at its own Web site. Because of Miller’s long-term brand association with professional sports, this site helped to reinforce the connection and encourage consumption of its product during sporting events.

8. Use the Real World to Enhance Your On-Site Band

Getting your website recognized in appropriate audience is one of the biggest hurdles a company faces, but with a little promotion in the offline media it’s not as hard to get noticed. The vast ranges of options make broadcasting and print affordable, effective ways to promote your web business. These media types have large established audiences where an advertiser can reach thousands at low prices.

Branding builds name recognition for your company or product, and there’s no better time to do this than right at the beginning. By having a powerful campaign in place when the doors opens or the site launches – or both – you’ll have jump-start on future marketing initiative – and perhaps on your competition as well. Effective online branding does not require big budgets, just an understanding of what brand attributes you are trying to build. By making every web transaction brand-relevant and providing your customers with brand based value, you will increase the depth of your customers relationships.