Digital brand strategy is crucial for examining consumers’ digital and real-life behaviors, especially their brand interactions and shopping patterns. In today’s digital landscape, a comprehensive digital branding strategy is needed for businesses to maximize their desired outcomes and particularly, to be perceived as they would like to be by current and potential consumers. According to a study done by the Pew Research Center, 51% of consumers make use of mobile devices to identify new brands and items on the market, and 88% of consumers don’t resume or go back to a website following a bad experience. Thus, businesses need to focus on creating a strong digital branding strategy to stay relevant in between their competitors.
To gain further insights on the importance of digital branding strategy for businesses, I asked four industry experts to share their thoughts and knowledge on the subject, and here’s what they had to say:
“The main aspect you need to focus on when creating a digital branding strategy is understanding the consumer. The construction of your buyer persona or ideal client is the fundamental pillar of any digital marketing strategy. Accurately and exhaustively knowing their needs, concerns or tastes will allow you to carry out a more precise branding strategy. Answering questions such as, who is our ideal client? how can our products or services help them? how should I communicate with them? and through what channels? will help you identify and learn more about your potential clients, which will benefit you to align your Brand Identity (what we are) with the Brand Image (what they think of us).”
Nancy Martinez
Digital Marketing Expert, AD-N Agency
Fallon Chattaway
Director of Marketing Ops & Growth, Publicist
“Businesses need to focus on brand positioning and trust when creating a digital branding strategy. Often brands focus too much on shouting why they are the best and end up shouting just the same as their competitors to create more noise. When focusing on brand positioning, think of offering solutions, connections, help, and resources first, this will work towards creating brand trust, and then when customers are ready to buy, they will think of your brand above all others.”
“Businesses need to focus on performance data, past and present, to create effective digital brand strategies. Data is key to determining the performance of any marketing initiative based on pre-set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Based) goals. The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) selected for these SMART Goals would help establish if strategies performed as intended based on the overall company goals.”
Sergio Costa
VP of Sales & Marketing, Empire Medical Training
Tata Cortes
Senior Director of Global Affluent and Core Product Marketing, Visa
“At a high level, businesses need a digital brand strategy for effectively building relationships and customer engagement. One thing they need to have present is well-defining their brand and identifying brand purpose, target audience, and competitors.”
Conclusion:
In helping brands build long-term digital market presence, businesses must use a variety of digital branding techniques and core elements, as mentioned in the quotes attained by several industry experts. Their comments provided a full range of what digital branding strategy is all about and touch on important points that businesses need to take into consideration when building their digital branding strategy.
It is key for businesses to understand their audience, their consumers’ wants, needs, and concerns, and emphasize their brand vision to deliver on the promise the businesses want to portray. Oftentimes, businesses do not set SMART goals or do the necessary research prior to working on a strategy making them unable to track key performance indicators and failing to grow.
Digital branding strategies should have a defined architecture that measures existing brand imaging, brand awareness, detailed information with direct competitors, and their effectiveness. Strategy concepts should be tested more than once in order to maintain relevant information for the consumers. This information and strategy should be consistently tested and analyzed in order to attain an effective result. Therefore, in order to achieve strong digital marketing and growth goals, brand tracking through digital branding strategies is crucial in creating and maintaining an effective digital brand.