9 Steps to Online Success
Any business owner understands the importance of branding. Branding identifies your company to online prospects, separates you from competitors in your niche and allows you to personalize the values of your company. In short, it’s an essential part of your online strategy.
Excellent branding increases engagement with your target market and creates higher rates of interaction between your company and your prospective customers. Branding drives emotion and establishes a connection that elevates your presence in the marketplace and increases conversion.
If you want to build your brand online, but have no clue of where to start, here are 9 tips to execute on to separate your company from competitors.
1. Create Your Mission Statement
Every strong brand needs a mission statement. Your mission defines your company’s core values and pushes them into the public view. It doesn’t matter what niche you operate in, whether you’re selling bobby pins or expensive electronics, your mission defines your online presence.
When drafting a mission, ask yourself why your company matters and what you want to achieve in the long-term. Why do you exist? What’s your purpose and vision? What are your company’s core values? The answers to these questions are different for every online business, so take some time to think about the solutions and then structure them in a few short sentences.
Your mission should be concise and deliver a clear view of your business. Anyone who reads your mission statement should be able to identify who you are, what you offer, and why you’re different from other companies in your niche.
2. Assess Your Online Reputation Strategy
Your online reputation is the cornerstone of your company’s success. Have you ever encountered a company with a weak reputation? Would you buy products or services from them? Of course, you wouldn’t.
Prospects want to know that they’re making an informed purchase decision that has social proof. No one wants to spend their hard-earned money with a company that might not deliver for them. Read through an online reputation strategy guide and seek help from professionals to build an online reputation that drives traffic to your site.
3. Build a Blog
A blog is an essential part of any online brand identity. Your blog allows you to communicate your company’s thoughts and ideas to your target market. It’s a direct channel to prospects and existing customers, so make sure you populate it with fresh, relevant content. If you struggle to write or create ideas, consider hiring a writer that specializes in content pertinent to your niche.
4. Plan a Social Strategy
If you aren’t using social media in the digital age, you may as well close your doors right now. Social marketing is perhaps the most effective means of pushing your brand identity into the public realm. Traditional methods of marketing your business, such as print, outdoor media, radio, and TV ads, are dead. They don’t deliver the results you need to build your brand.
Social media marketing allows you to refine and target a niche audience with laser-like precision. With social, you can obtain a global reach, at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing strategies.
5. Use Video Marketing
Vlogs and video clips are like your blog on steroids. Human beings are visual creatures, and we gravitate toward real-world content that we can relate to and understand at a personal level. A video can create up to ten times the amount of engagement you would typically receive from a static advert.
The best part about video marketing is that is doesn’t take expert, classy, video production to create a video that gains a tremendous reach. The overwhelming majority of viral videos are simple edits taken on mobile phone cameras. This marketing medium is low-cost and tremendously effective and efficient.
6. Innovation not Imitation
The internet is awash with duplicate content. Statistics show that the entire written history of humankind is uploaded to the internet every 48 hours. That’s a staggering statistic to get your mind around. However, it’s important to note that the online community does not reward duplicate content.
If you decide to take the branding approach used by other companies in your niche, you can expect your target market to view your company as an imitator and take their business to your competitors. Build a band identity that’s unique and innovative, provide real-world solutions to your customers, not a rehash of someone else’s ideas.
7. Find a Mentor
Following the advice of a mentor is the best way to reduce your learning curve and improve your chances of success online. Mentors have been there and done that already. Therefore, they can identify the pitfalls of building your brand, saving you from making the same mistakes that cost them time and money.
In the digital age, it’s not necessary to build a personal relationship with a mentor. You can gain plenty of thoughts, ideas, and advice from brand-building gurus online. Many of them offer online courses and mentorship.
8. Plan for the Long-Term
Building a brand requires time, patience, and commitment. You need to do something every day that advances your brand identity and captures more customers and prospects. Take a long-term approach to your online marketing and build your brand identity at a steady pace.
Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Stay consistent with your efforts, and it may take months for you to build traction. However, when the market starts to notice your efforts, you can expect results to be exponential.
We hope you enjoyed this promoted piece as much as we did!
