Branding is a business marketing campaign necessity.  Having a brand helps clients and prospects remember your company’s name and services and forms a comfortable association between your product and offer.  In an increasingly competitive market, utilizing branding techniques builds a dependable and trustworthy identity for your company, one that your customers and potential customers will rely upon when making a choice of product or service.

Understanding how to create a brand or identity utilizing Internet marketing strategy is important for businesses to compete in today’s new media marketplace.  While creating a website that proves well in the search engine rankings is great, it’s not the only mechanism or tool a marketer must have to build an effective marketing campaign that drives conversions.  Even the best seo will understand that if there is a disconnect between the keywords and the Internet presence,  you may have all the traffic to your site that you need, but conversions won’t happen.

I recently was asked to do SEO for a a company that was concerned because they are not getting sales.  An evaluation of the online assets revealed that the company’s website had good traffic, and they were ranking for keywords that were appropriate.  So, why weren’t they getting sales?  Frankly, it’s because the branding was a disconnect with the customer’s expectations.

If you are offering a product that is handcrafted and upscale, you should pick appropriate colors versus offering a product that’s popular and young.  With the handcrafted item, colors that are rich and luxurious like ivory and burgundy and sage would be appropriate.  With a youthful, popularly priced product, go for the brights.  In either case, the message and the look and feel should match to create a powerful brand message.
Here are 3 key aspects to branding in today’s marketing:

1. Branding your website is the important first step. Understanding who your customer is and what their preferences are is important to identifying how to brand your website.  Especially if your color palette is inconsistent with customer expectations, you’ll find out pretty quickly that you’ve made a mistake.   Not only is color critical, it’s also important to create a user interface that reflects what your customer is searching for more than what you feel you want to present to the customer.  Having a website that’s all about “us” versus all about “you” is a common mistake. however having a unique graphic design, graphic logo, color theme and a smart targeted message will differentiate your company from the competition.
2. Branding your Social Media is key to business engagement.  Recognizing your brand when connecting with social media reinforces your company message and identity.  Just having a Twitter account with the default icon is enough to inspire a lack of trust by potential customers.  You should brand all of your social media accounts to match the look and feel of your website consistently.  Facebook business pages, Google+ business pages and your Twitter profile are all part of a cultivated business brand that inspires trust and conveys branded messaging that is mutually reinforcing.  Utilizing social media also enables you to identify customer issues and react to them quickly – creating a rapport between you and your customers that wasn’t achievable before social media became a popular marketing tool.
3. Branding your business blog is important for developing credibility and authority.  The difference between a blog and static pages on the website is that the blog is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader and build content dynamically for your website.  The blog is used to answer questions and pose helpful ideas as opposed to selling your product or service.  Branding your blog to complement your website is an important approach to creating a brand identity.  Branding your company blog helps to establish your your business’ reputation as a valuable source of information.

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, your marketing strategy is important, and now with the power of Internet marketing, it’s critical that all components work in unison to build brand recognition.  What is your branding strategy?  Have you identified who your customer is and what their persona is?  How do you know that your marketing is working together to create a powerful brand?  Is it?