“A good brand strategy requires developing a personal dialogue between you and your customers that can evoke at least one of their 5 senses.”
Companies with robust e-branding strategies are likely to maintain greater control over the balance of power between them and the consumers. They can steer a higher market share and premium product prices against generic equivalents. Knowing what the brand wants to speak can help the companies gain a monopoly in the market with a well-thought branding strategy.
What is e-branding, and what are e-branding strategies?
Creating a business’ identity online and imbibing a positive image about its product or services in people’s minds is e-branding. In this ever-evolving, digitally driven era, having a concrete online presence is crucial for any business. Hence, having a well-structured strategy so that your business can get the desired ROI and better customer retention, in the long run, is a must.
E-Branding strategies are a long-term documented strategy for any company that focuses on becoming a successful brand. This plan is incorporated by businesses to create an image amongst their target audience and potential customers.
Once any business implements a successful brand strategy, the customers can associate with the brand and its work without being told about it. That’s how essential these strategies are.
Why any business needs effective e-branding strategies?
Brand-building & identity creation depends heavily on strategies. Choosing the right color palette, logo design, creating a style guide, and a documented content strategy, all these are important components of a branding strategy, and each of them plays an essential role.
Without a well-devised brand strategy, a company struggles to generate leads in the market.
Sure, word of mouth is one way to instill trust among potential customers, but as we all know, a business can’t depend entirely on it. Once the customers know about your brand and your product or services can help them out in some way, as portrayed by a good brand strategy online, your company thrives. A well-structured e-branding strategy gives you good leads, better ROI, and customer retention and builds trust among your target audience.
Components of profitable e-branding strategies
Purpose
The first step in designing a successful brand strategy is understanding the organization’s purpose. While most companies prioritize financial performance in their analysis, the focus should be on the value the business wants to provide customers. Asking questions like “How will our products help solve the consumer’s problems?” can help the industry convey its mission and distinguish itself from competitors.
Customers tend to foster a more powerful connection to a brand with a bigger purpose than making money. For instance, Apple’s goal is to bring the best user experience to its buyers and not just sell electronics and computer software. This approach appeals to Apple’s existing and potential customers because it shows the company’s commitment to providing greater value. Purpose is the base of all e-branding strategies. Because, without a goal, any company remains directionless.
Consistency
Consistency involves assessing all the business activities and deciding whether the actions align with the image being presented to the world. The business should offer a constant, familiar identity to its customers. For instance, all the photos and videos on the organization’s social media pages should showcase a cohesive message without confusing the audience.
Consistency goes beyond the company’s logo and includes vital aspects such as font styles, colors, imagery, and language style. Consistency makes it easy for the audience to recognize the brand.
One way of ensuring consistency in the message delivered to customers is to create a style guide. The style guide provides information on each aspect of the business, from the editorial voice to the idea behind the business’ logo, color scheme, and how to position its products and services.
Emotion
People have an innate desire to form relationships, and a business can tap into this aspect by finding a way to connect with them on a deeper level. For instance, Apple realizes that its audience wants to be social and feel belonged. Hence, the brand uses this mentality in its branding strategy.
In addition, the business also fosters a community where the buyers can share ideas, ask questions, and get updates on upcoming products.
Employee Involvement
Employees can be the most isolated people in an organization, despite being an essential part of the brand. Your team represents the company’s identity in day-to-day operations, hence they should be a part of your e-branding strategies.
One way of tapping into employees’ potential is to enlighten them on the brand identity. The company can arrange training sessions and workshops where employees can get familiarized with how to use the brand voice successfully on its social media channels.
How to implement promising e-branding strategies?
Any branding strategy requires a lot of research before having a proper plan designed and documented. Hence these tips and a few elements about e-branding and e-branding strategies come in handy.
1) Research & Identify Your Target Audience
This is always the first step. Before you build your brand on the internet, you must be clear about your target audience. What type of users would be interested in dealing with your product. Once you find your audience, things get easy. Finding your target audience will help you:
- Generate personalized user experience and relatable content
- Design tailored campaigns for better conversions
- Easy customer segmentation
- Converge and improve your targeting approach
- Curtail your marketing budget
- Invest in the correct direction
By looking at the advantages, you can understand why this is one of the most crucial parts of e-branding.
You can use these tips to figure out your target audience:
- Create a user persona
- Analyze your current audience and their data
- Conduct surveys at designated time intervals
- Use Google Analytics to understand user behavior
- Competitor analysis
2) Outline the USPs of your label
In this competitive market, your business can’t be entirely unique, and every online business has an alternative these days. If we talk about online brands, there are many options like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, etc., available, which take care of the A to Z needs of a customer.
So, it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd, but not impossible. Your (Unique Selling Propositions) USP distinguishes your brand. Thus, it is necessary to outline the key benefits of your brand to make it popular.
3) Create a compelling logo & name
This is one of the crucial steps to a successful e-branding strategy, but we’ve added it in the end since it is quite generic. For instance, what comes to your mind when you hear Starbucks?
Incredible coffee, of course. But what else? It’s their logo.
An attractive logo leaves a powerful impact on your customers, and if users can remember your logo, they’ll remember your brand. Here are some aspects to consider while building a logo:
- Be unique and classy
- Choose an enticing color palette
- Focus on the size
- Make it inspirational
- Use a readable font
- Make it recognizable & memorable
A good logo enhances your e-branding strategies and portrays you as an authentic label. This leads users to trust you, and trust is all you need to succeed.
Click here to see our work on logo designs of Yichi, Frugbi, and more.
4) Write a catchy tagline
Now that you have designed your logo, you should start thinking about your brand’s tagline.
“A tagline is your brand’s purpose in one line.”
A quirky tagline is another strategy that gives your brand recognition. Taglines can also be used for advertising purposes. A few things to keep in mind while creating a tagline are:
- It should be unique, catchy, and concise
- Appealing to the audience
- Candidly depicting your brand
These examples will give you a better idea:
McDonald’s: I’m Lovin’ It.
KFC: Finger-lickin’ Good.
Red Bull: Red Bull gives you wings.
5) Communicate your brand’s story
Stories are engaging and intriguing. By telling your brand’s story, you can create an emotional bond with your customers. Stories can tell the users about your success and failures so they can relate to them. So do not hesitate to tell your brand’s story to tell people about your journey.
A brand’s story connects with the users. Hence, the leaders of any brand should share their stories on the website and keep communicating about their achievements and struggles via social media so that their existing or potential customers feel that they are a part of something big and authentic.
For example: Check out our Grit Case Study to know how we communicated the story of the brand.
6) Documented content strategy
Content is the brand’s voice. If your content is not convincing enough, you’ll struggle to market your product at many points. But having a robust content strategy at the core will help you gain, convert, nurture, and retain consumers.
Reports say 90% of organizations use a content marketing strategy, and it also costs 62% less than traditional marketing methods and generates 3x more leads. A documented content strategy helps you:
- Increase customer loyalty
- Improve engagement
- Generate traffic and leads
- Establishes brand awareness
- Positively impact your sales
- Increases ROI in the long run
- Portrays you as an authentic brand
Everything needs content, whether it’s your social media posts, emailers, landing pages, or infographics.
7) CARES- Contact, Affinity Rewards, Extra Value & Services
This framework is a sure-shot route to achieving enhanced customer relationships in this digital marketing era. Apart from this, Gamification has also taken over the AI world. In the current scenario of this experience-driven consumerism, users are unknowingly playing games on their apps and earning reward points that give them a sense of achievement with a much-needed kick of dopamine!
These small efforts and methods drive customer retention and have become an essential part of a successful branding strategy.
Conclusion
So those are some e-branding strategies that can help drive growth for your product or service. The research speaks that presenting a brand consistently across all online platforms and evolving along with the latest trends can improve revenue by 23%. 89% of customers stay loyal to the brands that share their values.
So, when you want your product or services to achieve the sales target you have set, creating a strong online presence is a must. This can only be achieved with well-structured e-branding plans that can portray a positive brand identity. Hope you liked the components of branding strategies and tips you would need to create one.
For E-Branding Inquiry
FAQs
What does E-brand mean?
E-commerce websites or the businesses that sell their products or services online. Example: Amazon, Flipkart, etc. Be it a brand or an e-brand, all businesses need a branding strategy. E-branding is everything that suits the brand’s reputation in the digital world. It is therefore a necessity of a brand to promote it to online consumers.
How do you promote e-branding?
In-depth research and a structured strategy are the two main factors you need to promote your brand on the internet. Once you complete a detailed analysis of product and market,a documented content strategy for website and social media comes in handy to establish yourself as a robust brand in the market.
What are the 4 branding strategies?
Some of the new e branding strategies include following methods:
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- Product/range extension: This is when a brand introduces a new product similar to the existing one, targeting an already acquired audience.
- Brand extension: This is when an organization seeks to broaden its reach by launching products or services in a new market under an existing brand name. For instance, Disneyland, which is a widely popular extension to Disney
- Co-branding: One of the most increasingly common branding methods in our influencer-inspired world is co-branding. It manifests as a joint product launch by two or more different brands, offering new news to the users of each entity.
- Brand licensing: Leasing or renting the rights to use a brand’s assets to other companies is brand licensing. This occurs frequently in the film industry, where franchises like Marvel license out the rights in lucrative deals.
