11

online brand building

Today, having an online presence is mandatory for any brand. If people want to find out more about your brand, it is very likely that their first step is to search for it using Google or another search engine. They may search from their laptops or tablet computers, but increasingly they may perform this search from their smartphones.

Key considerations in online brand building:

• When building brands online, content is king. If your brand is not associated with continuous stream of useful or entertaining content, it will be taken far less seriously.

• The online medium invites feedback and engagement. Build this into your brand’s online experience.

• Visuals (including videos) are becoming increasingly important to any online brand experience.

• An important benefit of the online medium is that it makes it possible for your brand’s messages to go viral. There are specific strategies and tools to help you initiate and accelerate this viral process.

• As with any other brand activity, you must start by defining your target audiences.

• Furthermore, your brand must have a unique value proposition and you must be very clear about your brand’s promise.

In this chapter, I will focus on eleven key components of online brand building:

1. The Brand Website

2. The Importance of Content

3. The Power of Blogs

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

5. Online Advertising

6. Using Social Media

7. Web Analytics

8. E-Mail Marketing

9. Online Public Relations

10. Mobile Apps

11. QR Codes

The Brand Website

Following are important considerations for creating a strong brand building website:

The brand website needs to perfectly reflect your brand’s architecture. This is the one place where the architecture will manifest itself completely.

• The URL should be intuitive. Avoid long URLs. They are more likely to result in keystroke errors. Reserve domain names for the brand name itself and for keywords or phrases that best reflect what the brand delivers to its customers. Also reserve domain names for common misspellings of the brand name. Redirect all of these URLs to the main URL.

• The website must not only mirror brand architecture; it also must be designed around the brand’s target markets. That is, there should be intuitively simple entry points, navigation, and paths for each target audience.

• Always focus on usability over flash.

• The “About Us” section is one of the most viewed sections on a website and is mandatory. You should adapt your brand’s elevator speech for this section. It should include an overview of the category or categories in which your brand operates, what products and services your brand offers, what benefits it delivers to its customers, and how it is unique or superior to its competitors. That is, the “About Us” section should include the brand’s promise or unique value proposition.

• It is critical to include “Contact” navigation on each page.

• Including a website search capability and navigation to a site map on each page helps people find their way around your site.

• A website is a good place to tell the brand story. Some websites do this quite well. Patagonia.com does a great job of communicating its history and values, including its love of the outdoors and its social and environmental responsibility ethic. Bowmore.com also does a great job of telling a story about its history. It even features a webcam of its distillery.

• Designing a home page that allows for frequent updating of content will help search engine optimization.

• Integrating social media into the website will make it more engaging and interactive. It will also help you see what people are thinking about the brand.

• If you are selling products or services on the website, creating an affiliate program will greatly increase its reach. Most shopping cart programs support affiliate programs.

• You should always feature your brand’s URL in your e-mail signature.

• Finally, you should monitor your website’s effectiveness. Websites such as FreeWebsiteScore.com can help you with these metrics.

Amazon.com is perhaps the best example of a website that does most everything right. The site delivers a superior user experience and has addressed each of the five drivers of customer brand insistence—awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility, and emotional connection. Here are just a couple of things that Amazon does right in each of these areas:

• Awareness. Amazon established unprecedented buzz when it was first launched, and an affiliate program creates links throughout the World Wide Web.

• Relevant Differentiation. Millions of products are available, including Partner Count merchandise, with superior search and browse technology.

• Value. Amazon offers low prices and free shipping on orders over a minimum total and helps shoppers find the right product through recommendations based on past purchases, user reviews and ratings, and suggested complementary purchases; it lets customers “look inside” and listen to books.

• Accessibility. There is 24/7 access, with one-click ordering and quick-shipping options.

• Emotional Connection. Customers can personally connect with Amazon.com through user profiles, reviews, ratings, wish lists, and Listmania lists for recommending favorite products.

Here are examples of two other websites that have brand strengths in different ways—Cellartracker.com (delivers substantial functional value) and Patagonia.com (communicates a strong commitment to a set of values).

Cellartracker.com is an interesting example of a website and brand that adds real value. I first found this website by searching for “free online wine management tool,” but it appears near the top of Google’s search results for a large number of relevant search terms. It is an amazing site for people who have wine cellars. You can start using it for free and it is easy to populate with your wines. It allows you to indicate storage location (for multiple locations within a house or for those who have multiple houses), place of purchase, price paid, and much more. You can sort by an unlimited number of criteria, including your own wine ratings, professional ratings, and the average ratings of all CellarTracker users. You can find out almost anything about any bottle of wine from any place. The site’s database features approximately 49 million different wines. It defines each wine on a number of dimensions—vintage, type, producer, varietal, designation, vineyard, country, region, subregion, and appellation. For each wine, it shows “drink by” windows, professional reviews, the community’s tasting notes, related articles, the community’s average price paid, and auction prices. It helps you keep track of what you have already drunk and allows you to enter how you disposed of the wine (drank, used for cooking, gifted, dropped or broke, spoiled, etc.). It indicates the total estimated value of the wines in your cellar and of those you have already drunk (a sobering statistic, to be sure). It allows you to keep a wish list and to order wine from that list. You can print a variety of reports, sorting on almost any set of variables from the relational database. I always keep the latest report in my wine cellar. Here is the best part. For a modest voluntary annual payment (the amount of which is scaled to the size of your cellar), you can see quarterly auction prices for your bottles. It is a soft sell, but one to which I was quick to respond. Once a year, CellarTracker e-mails you a gentle reminder that your voluntary payment is due to continue to provide you access to auction prices.

Patagonia is a company that truly lives by a set of values, and its website is masterful at communicating those values. Consider some of the sections on the website: returns, repairs, and recycling; corporate responsibility; becoming a responsible company; “1% for the planet”; environmental grants and support; the responsible economy; or The Footprint Chronicles, where “the goal is to use transparency about our supply chain to help us reduce our adverse social and environmental impacts—and on an industrial scale.”¹ Or consider the section on its Common Threads Partnership, which focuses on helping people discover ways to reduce, repair, reuse, recycle, and reimagine. Its visuals and videos communicate Patagonia’s love of the wilderness and the activities that can be pursued in the great outdoors. It features surfing, snow-boarding, fly-fishing, and rock climbing, among other sports. And it communicates the meditative and spiritual quality of spending time in the midst of nature and the importance of preserving it. Another section of the site talks about Patagonia’s ambassadors as being more than just athletes. “They are field testers for our gear and storytellers for our tribe.”² I encourage you to take time to poke around Patagonia’s website. It will teach you a lot about effectively communicating a strong commitment to a set of values.

The Importance of Content

Content drives everything on the Internet. All content should be informative, educational, or entertaining. Furthermore, all of your content should have a specific marketing purpose. Every blog post I write is designed to attract a specific type of client that has a specific type of branding problem. You should know what purpose each piece of content is intended to achieve. Strong content can establish your organization or brand as a thought leader in its field.

Following are some of the types of content that you can provide online:

• Social media

• Articles

• Blogs

• Case studies

• E-newsletters

• FAQs

• Webinars

• Tutorials

• Videos

• White papers

• E-books

• Podcasts (rich media distributed through RSS)

• Research reports

• Mobile apps

Following are important considerations in using content to build your brand:

• You must create a content plan.

• It is difficult to provide a continuous flow of fresh content for an extended period of time, so identify and cultivate a variety of content sources.

• Images can increase the power of your content. Consider using photographs and infographics.

• Submit your content to marketing directories.

• Consider creating your own Wikipedia entry.

• Newsjacking is tying into breaking news with a new angle on the story. It is a productive source of ongoing content. It needs to be done as a quick response and is a great source of increased exposure and readership. Twitter is a great way to newsjack, as is a timely blog post. When you are newsjacking, just make sure you have the expertise and authority to back your story angle or it could backfire on you.

The Power of Blogs

Our brand consulting business has grown exponentially through the power of blogs. Our persistence in feeding our blog fresh, useful content five days a week for more than eight years has led to outstanding placement in organic search results against every search phrase people would use to find a firm like ours. In fact, 90 percent of our new clients find us through our blog (www.BrandingStrategyInsider.com).

Blogs provide some advantages. Blogging:

• Demonstrates your expertise

• Creates a personal connection to readers

• Drives traffic

• Builds a subscriber base

• Develops communities

• Is a quick and easy way to announce news

• Is a launching pad for online posts that can go viral

Here are some of the characteristics of successful blogs:

• They are targeted at specific audiences.

• They are updated daily or at least a few times a week.

• They integrate the most popular keywords and phrases throughout the posts, including in the titles.

• They add RSS feeds to the content.

• They automatically send posts to Twitter using Twitterfeed.com.

• They submit the blog to online article and social media directories.

• They provide buttons for readers to submit the blog posts to Digg.com and Reddit.com.

• They have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+ social media widgets.

• They feature an e-mail sign-up widget.

In my opinion, blogs are the most important component to an online brand building effort; however, they require persistence and an enormous amount of fresh content over time. One should not start a blog without full commitment to keeping it going over the long haul.

Search Engine Optimization

Other than going directly to bookmarked, frequently visited websites, people almost always use a search engine to find what they need online. According to Lorrie Thomas, natural search is two and a half times more effective than paid search.³

Search engines look for keywords and phrases in website copy, page titles, meta title tags, page headlines, content headlines, blog posts, and other content. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Ad Preview Tool can help you identify the most powerful words and phrases to use. It helps to repeat these keywords and phrases as many times as possible as seems natural in copy. These words should include your company name, your products and services, your brand, product and service names (including common misspellings), category descriptors, names of key company personnel, and business locations. Any photos or other images should include alt tags, captions, and file names that include appropriate keywords and phrases.

Link building is also very important in search engine optimization. Google uses links as one measure of your website’s popularity. Outbound linking from content establishes expertise. You should also seek inbounding linking and create cross-linking between pages. Linking newer content to older content as appropriate helps the older content with its search engine rankings. Deep linking to internal pages (vs. the home page) is especially helpful.

Businesses should add their listings to free online phone books such as Superpages and Yellow Pages. Your website should also be listed in the Open Directory Project at DMOZ.org. Finally, frequently updating your home page content aids in search engine optimization.

Online Advertising

Online advertising should be a component of the overall brand media plan. That is, online advertising must be integrated/coordinated with offline marketing objectives, strategies, tactics, and campaigns, whether they focus on building brand awareness, changing brand perceptions, creating positive brand associations, encouraging brand trial, increasing brand loyalty, or something else.

Online advertising has evolved quite a bit in the last decade. Google Ads is a good place to start to understand your options. My favorite type of online ad placement is contextual advertising. It shows ads on sites related to the keywords and phrases that you choose. You can also place advertising based on geography, demographics, language, topics, interests, specific websites, and combinations of these. Generally, you can pay per view or per click. Another online advertising vehicle to consider is TrueView in-stream, in-search, and in-display ads on YouTube. Facebook is also a superior venue for targeted advertising. Go here to get started: www.facebook.com/business/products/ads.

Using Social Media

Social media is another way to reach out to brand fans. It helps your brand remain top-of-mind, creates a dialogue with customers, provides useful feedback, and can be the source of brand information and special promotions. At a minimum, you need to be familiar with the following social media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube.

According to Millward Brown, a brand’s social media fans outspend non-fans four to one. Furthermore, Millward Brown indicates that the following are the top four most valued fan page benefits: 1) latest news about the brand, 2) new product information, 3) contests and giveaways, and 4) sales, discounts, coupons, and special offers.⁴

Social media is a useful source of brand feedback. Listen to people where they are most likely to be talking about your brand and its competitors. Among the popular product/service/brand review sites to monitor:

• Epinions.com

• ConsumerSearch.com

• ConsumerReports.com

• Amazon.com

• CNET.com

• AngiesList.com

• TripAdvisor.com

• UrbanSpoon.com

And the following are just a sampling of current social media monitoring tools:

• Google Alerts

• Followerwonk.com for Twitter

• HootSuite.com for Twitter

• Socialbakers.com for Facebook

• SproutSocial.com

• UnifiedSocial.com

Social media marketing tools include:

• Buddy Media (SalesForceMarketingCloud.com)

• Involver.com and Virtrue (both now a part of Oracle social relationship management)

• Shoutlet.com

Web Analytics

To manage something properly, you must measure it. Web analytics help you do just that. Many hosting companies include web analytics as a part of their hosting service. The most popular web analytics source is Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/).

At a minimum, you will want to measure the following:

• The most popular pages and content

• Traffic sources (search engines, paid advertising, links)

• Top keywords and phrases that people use to find your site

• Traffic patterns (day of week, time of day, geographic origin)

E-Mail Marketing

Newsletters are a great way to reach out and stay in touch with brand customers and potential customers. Following are the most important considerations in creating effective newsletters:

• Seriously consider using a third-party e-mail service provider for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to avoid the ISP spam designation.

• Provide an easy way for people to opt out in each newsletter, and promptly honor any opt-out request.

• For more information on compliance requirements for newsletters, search for the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

• To facilitate subscription, put opt-in forms on every page of your blog or website if possible.

• Offer white papers, e-books, and other incentives for people to opt in to your newsletter.

• The newsletter subject line should compel people to want to read further.

• You would do well to use a spam evaluator to ensure that your newsletters will not be identified as spam.

• Use the newsletter to link to your blog posts. Use short paragraphs to interest people in reading further, followed by links to the online blog content.

Online Public Relations

Journalists go online to find expert sources and to get quotes for the articles that they are writing. The more easily your brand’s content can be found online, the more likely it is that a journalist will quote it in an article that they are writing. ProfNet from PRNewswire.com helps journalists find the right experts for their stories. HARO (HelpAReporter.com) solicits sources for specific articles and stories. FlackList.com touts itself as “The Journalist’s Little Black Book,” but is a proprietary website. MediaKitty.com focuses on uniting tourism and lifestyle marketing journalists, PR professionals, and expert sources.

Post press releases to your brand’s website. (It should have a newsroom section that includes a company overview and a file of current and past press releases. The company overview usually includes mission, vision and values, key facts, products and brands, and leadership profiles.) Also, distribute your press releases through several well-known sites: PRWeb.com, PRNewswire.com, PressReleasePoint.com, and PitchEngine.com.

Mobile Apps

By 2016, more than 1.3 billion people are projected to access social media from mobile devices.⁵ Location-based marketing is based on geotargeting technology. Geofencing combines location and timing in presenting marketing messages. ScreenScape.com is one source of location-based media and Mobile Marketing Association (MMAGlobal.com) provides detailed information on this topic.

QR Codes

Marketers use QR codes to drive people to specific online content. When a person scans a QR code with a smartphone it takes him to a webpage specified by the QR code. A person typically lands on a page that offers additional information. Sometimes it presents a deal or promotion. One could use QR codes on business cards, coupons, product packaging, retail shelves, print ads, restaurant menus, real estate signs, movie tickets, and other media. QR code generators convert data into QR codes. There are many available online.

Summary

I wrote the first edition of this book, including this chapter on online brand building, between 1999 and 2001. Since then, blogs (2001), LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), and Pinterest (2010) were introduced to the market. In 2000, 361 million people used the Internet. In 2010, just under 2 billion people used the Internet.⁶ Between 2.5 and 3 billion people—39 percent of the world’s population—were estimated to be using the Internet as of the end of 2013.⁷ Your brand must have an online presence in today’s world. Doing so gives it a global presence and allows it to reach out to customers and potential customers in a myriad of highly targeted ways. Using the Internet to build your brand is cost-effective and typically allows for ROI measurement, something that is much more difficult to do with offline brand building techniques.

The Internet enables customer engagement. It is an ideal place to tell your brand’s story. It is a place to monitor customer perceptions of your brand. A fresh stream of highly useful and entertaining content is critical to online brand success, as are blogs, search engine optimization, the use of social media, and creating mobile apps so that people can interact with your brand from their smartphones.

Use the checklist in Figure 11–1 to assess the efficacy of your brand management practices in the area covered by this chapter. The more questions to which you can answer “yes,” the better you are doing. The checklist also provides a brief summary of the material covered in the chapter.