Abhishek Shah September 8, 2020 A generic white shoe will cost $ 15. The same white shoe with a black Nike Swoosh or three Adidas black stripes will sell for $ 150. That is the power of branding.
People branding can make your product sell for 10X its value. You can be a pop-store owner or an eCommerce business operating globally. Whoever you are, if your business is recognized as a brand, it has the potential to sell at an astonishingly high price.
How can business build a brand? Businesses with deep pockets and access to global resources can build a brand they wish. But, how about a small business? Especially one that has to count every dollar being spent and also ensure that there is a positive RoI on it? What kind of safe and certain branding strategies can they undertake?
Enter, Digital marketing
There are several definitions of digital marketing. The one by HubSpot describes it the best.
“Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.”
HubSpot is a pioneer in digital marketing. HubSpot certified digital marketers have the knack to turn any ordinary business into a global brand. Here is how digital marketing can help turn your business into a brand.
Multi-channel marketing
An average user uses five to six channels in their daily life. Mobile apps. Social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) There is again email and the good’ol SMS. Digital marketing acts a unified medium through which you can reach your customers on all these channels.
Here is how:
- Social media marketing to tap into social media user base
- Email marketing to greet your customers in their inboxes
- Mobile app marketing to fetch user interest through apps
- Search engine optimization (SEM) and Search engine optimization to reach them through internet searches
To sum it up, digital marketing enables your business to leverage multi-channel marketing. That way you can build your brand anywhere and everywhere where your customers are present.
Virality
In the past, marketers could have been heard quoting to their clients, “A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years.” That belief has been proven to be wrong by digital marketing. One of the stellar benefits of digital marketing is that it gives virality to posts.
A tweet. A YouTube video. A facebook status. An Instagram image. There are endless types of continent, which if used in the right manner can take an unknown business name into a popular brand name.
Take for instance the case of Roman Originals (The Dress) which went viral with the hashtag #DressGate. Peter Christodoulou, the co-founder of Roman Original least imagined in his wildest dreams that a random wedding photo would help them sell more 3,000 units in less than 10 days. In his interview to Independent, Peter said, ‘It exposed Roman, the brand, to the whole world.’
That is the power of virality. If used well, it can help businesses take their business to million-dollar revenues in no time.
In fact, there seems to be a science of making posts go viral. Professor Jonah Berger who is researching marketing is unraveling the mystery behind making posts go viral. Sooner or later, studies like his would help marketers push out tailored viral posts with assured RoI.
Unique identity
It is no secret that eCommerce has opened up doors to almost every type of business. Even full-time employed executives are running online stores are side gigs. This has heightened competition in every industry to sky-high levels. In such a scenario, there is a necessity for businesses to thwart competition, keep knock-offs from creating negative brand image and also to create a unique identity of their own.
Guess what helps all of that in one shot. Digital marketing. Digital marketing helps establish awareness about your brand amidst the target audience. Since the campaigns are specifically targeted at a group of people who resonate with the brand’s products, the brand awareness is also higher.
The success story of Land Rover
A perfect example of this is the Land Rover engagement ads. Land Rover is one of the top players in the premium car segment. It faces cut-throat competition from the rest of the car manufacturers who are introducing cutting-edge features that are at par with the Britich automaker. Land Rover was facing the challenge of maximizing its user engagement.
Unlike in the olden days when print and media advertising was the default choice, this time Land Rover opted to run engagement ads on YouTube. By using a YouTube Masthead, the brand was able to generate intense exposure to over 23M YouTube users in 24 hours.
Other results that the engagement ads achieved include:
- Achieved an engagement rate of 3.65%
- Engaged users an average of 23 seconds with the ad
- Received 11M impressions and achieved 228k engagements
The takeaway: Digital marketing has what it takes to build engagement and create a unique identity for a business.
Evergreen content
In the internet era, you shouldn’t market to your customers. Instead, you have to educate them. The reasons are plain simple. Your customers should be able to make an informed decision. Such decisions have a multiplier effect. To begin with, the customers feel under control and more empowered to take the right buying decision that they are sure of. That reduces the number of product returns or negative sentiments that customers would possibly develop about the product.
How does digital marketing help in educating customers? Content marketing is a critical part of digital marketing. It deals with creating evergreen content on topics that customers are researching before making a buying decision. Such evergreen content could help the business generate leads without having to incur serious expenditures for paid advertising. Also, such content would remain valid for a long time to come, giving it the status of evergreen content.
In a nutshell
If you were to ask Don Draper on how to build a brand, he would probably give a timeline for half a decade. But, if you were to ask the same question to a digital marketer, it could one-fifth or even less. Digital marketing is the strongest weapon you can have in your marketing arsenal. It offers several benefits that you cannot turn a blind eye towards. Brand building being the top of all the benefits.
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