CHAPTER 4

How Can I Build My Digital Brand?

In this chapter, you will read:

Introduction

Every day, it seems that the world is getting smaller. This is particularly evident in the digital marketing realm. Gone are the days when businesses could only hang up posters, send flyers, or purchase ad spots on the radio or television to get their name out in the open. In today’s digital era, reaching your target audience is possible in just a few clicks.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, banner advertisements had been the go-to marketing medium for countless businesses. To this day, these ads remain prominent especially for direct response campaigns. The problem, however, is that this type of display advertising focuses primarily on short-term conversions. Ads urging online users to “click now” could be seen on virtually all websites. This strategy hardly works today, as consumers have become blind to these kinds of advertisements. But as a digital marketer, what you must understand is that the success of display advertising should not only be measured by the number of clicks you receive. Banner advertisements can now be used to formulate effective digital branding strategies.

An excellent digital brand can take any business to new heights. It can be just what you need to fuel business growth, even if you’re a start-up with limited resources. Growing your digital presence enables you to target the right audience instead of shelling out money on various marketing campaigns that might not reward you with long-term gains. How your audience perceives and understands you, form the foundation of your digital branding. It is necessary to provide prospective customers with a consistent experience. This has a lot to do with your content marketing strategy.

Build a Digital Personality

Content allows your brand to develop an identity and increase visibility. There’s an old adage in marketing that says, “Know your audience.” Back in the day, this can prove difficult to do. You can play the guessing game of what TV time slots your target customers are most active. But in the digital era, it has become much easier to glean consumer information and create user profiles to help you develop a content creation strategy. A thorough understanding of your audience and what challenges them can mean a lot in terms of boosting your value proposition. This means going beyond demographic information including name and location. It’s necessary to figure out what obstacles they face when trying to do a certain task or meeting a goal.

The next step is developing content that effectively delivers the real value in your offering. You must make sure that your content highlights how your product or service helps eliminate the challenges faced by your target audience. Consumers form an impression of your digital brand based largely on your content. It is easy to convey the mission and vision of your company, but remember that it’s ultimately about the customers. Instead of simply trying to make your brand look good through a sales-oriented company profile, focus on connecting with your audience.

Content that engages potential customers in a unique and meaningful way can boost authority and credibility. The last thing you want is to look like just another company leveraging digital marketing without thinking about its customers. Place particular emphasis on telling a story that resonates with people while ensuring that your content remains consistent in appearance, feel, scope, and design across all platforms you use. The personality of your digital brand must shine through in your content. Providing consistency makes it possible for your target audience to form a memory structure, immediately thinking about your offering and the value that comes with it every time they see your brand.

The Digital Marketing Toolkit

The scope of digital marketing is wide, but there is no reason to feel overwhelmed. To cover all the bases, you need to equip yourself with useful tools that make the different processes involved much easier to execute and monitor. Of course, it helps to get your hands dirty and do some parts of the strategy manually at first. You do not want to fire up a tool and automate everything without a complete understanding of how things work. Some tools also come with a learning curve, which entails a greater time investment in addition to learning all areas of digital marketing. This shouldn’t deter you, though. And if you’re worried about your limited budget, then you’ll be pleased to know that there are free tools that can get the job done. Most of the tools also offer free trials, and so you can test the waters first and see how much of a difference they make on your day-to-day operations. For easier reading, the tools will be categorized according to the digital marketing strategy they fall under. Note that the list comes in no particular order, as all of them must be weighed equally to develop the optimal strategy.

Social Is Personal

As of January 2017, there are 1.8 billion Facebook users, 600 million Instagram users, and 300 million Twitter users. And these are only three of the most popular social media platforms; countless others are used by your target audience, and so you can’t afford to miss this enormous opportunity to cater to prospective customers.

Online users spend a lot of time on social media, making it an essential marketing channel for brands. What you should keep in mind, however, is that growing your social presence wouldn’t be possible by simply sharing content. You must be proactive and socialize with your followers. Everybody knows how vocal customers can be on social media, and you can take advantage of this by creating social profiles that do not only promote your content but actively communicate with your audience.

For maximum efficiency, it’s necessary to find out what social channels are used by potential customers. It can prove useless to grow your following on a certain social media platform when most of your target audience spends their time elsewhere. In most cases, though, you need to utilize multiple channels to expose your digital brand to a wider range of prospects. With several accounts to keep track of, things can easily get out of hand. But with a social media management tool, you can monitor activity across your accounts and even set up autoresponders and scheduled posts for hands-free digital branding.

Sprout Social

If you need not just a social media management tool but also an engagement platform as well, then Sprout Social should definitely sit high on your list. It’s a powerful tool that makes it easier than ever to connect with current and prospective customers while building brand loyalty at the same time. One of the standout features of Sprout Social is the Smart Inbox. This feature streamlines all the messages from your social profiles into one location. This can be a huge time-saver as it enables you to focus on the messages that require the most attention. It also helps compare trends over time, such as the volume of incoming messages you receive per hour or day.

Social media can also function as an extension of your customer service. This is where Sprout’s social customer relationship management tools enter the picture. You don’t want to sound like a robot when responding to customer feedback. These social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools give access to complete conversation history as well as customer contact information, thus allowing you to respond in a timely and personal manner.

Hootsuite

Many online marketers use Hootsuite for posting regular updates to their social profiles. However, it also serves as a powerful social media management tool. The free plan is perfect for small startups, providing you with several features to manage multiple networks and grow your audience. Hootsuite makes it easier to monitor your social media marketing efforts through a single, intuitive dashboard. From here, you can access tools for managing your social profiles, analyzing follower growth, capturing leads, scheduling posts, and learning from free social media courses. Another fantastic use for Hootsuite is for tracking messages and mentions of your brand. This can positively impact your digital branding as you get alerts for conversations happening in the realm of social media involving your business.

Built-In Advertising Tools

The top social media platforms also come with their own, in-house advertising tools. While you can opt for third-party, multichannel advertising software, it’s worthwhile to look into these built-in tools and try them out yourself before shelling out money. Facebook offers the Power Editor for creating and running ad campaigns on their platform. In just a few simple steps, you can get your ads shown to your target audience. It’s worth noting that Facebook constantly tweaks its targeting features to help publishers get the most out of their advertising campaigns. It also has budgeting features so that you can ensure that you won’t go beyond your budget when engaging in Facebook marketing.

Twitter may not have the staggering user base of Facebook, but it still pays to leverage the platform to grow your digital brand. The Twitter Native Platform offers impressive targeting features. For one, it boasts of a segmentation functionality that allows you to target particular keywords, ensuring that your ads appear for the most relevant terms.

Search Engine Optimization

The biggest sources of inbound web traffic for most websites are search engines. What makes search engine traffic special is that it can drive laser-targeted traffic to your website. That is, of course, if you manage to rank for the most relevant and profitable keywords used by prospective customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves the use of different techniques with the objective of showing up higher in the organic search listings. Note that it is different from search engine marketing, which deals with paid organic results.

Search engines such as Google and Bing use algorithms that take into consideration a multitude of different factors. Nobody knows what all these factors are exactly, but some are well known including keyword usage and links. With the help of SEO tools, you can set up more effective campaigns through competitive analysis, keyword research, and link building.

Google Search Console

First in the list is a free tool straight from Google. The Search Console is your one-stop shop for Google Search results data for all your online properties. With just a single account, you can link multiple domains and keep track of different metrics including rankings, impressions, and CTR (Click-through rate). With an easy-to-understand interface, you should be up and running with this tool in no time. It provides all the necessary information to help maintain your site’s online presence. Aside from how well your web pages perform in terms of traffic, you can also check for web crawl errors, mobile friendliness, and page load speed. You can also submit URLs, which proves particularly useful if you want to index new or updated content on your website. Considering that this is a free service from Google, there’s virtually no reason not to add your website to the Search Console.

SEMRush

It’s always helpful to keep an eye out on what your competitors are doing. If they outrank you in the organic listings, you might want to take a peek into their strategy and adopt what works for your future campaigns. Sound too daunting a task? Not with SEMRush. Priding itself as an all-in-one toolkit for digital marketers, SEMRush offers a wide range of features that should help kick start your strategy. Aside from being able to monitor important site metrics and conduct a technical SEO audit, this tool lets you perform competitive analysis without breaking a sweat. An easy way to leverage the tool is to keep track of the ranking fluctuations of your competitors. You can also take a look at their backlink profile and figure out whether you can acquire links from the same sources. By identifying such opportunities, you can gain an edge and be in a better position to outrank the competition.

Moz

Over the years, Moz has become synonymous to SEO—and for good reason. The company offers products geared toward all kinds of entrepreneurs. For one, the Moz Pro gives you access to a suite of SEO tools such as a rank tracker and backlink checker. It also provides useful ideas for your content marketing needs. Moz Local is also a popular tool, thanks in large part to the increasing demand for local SEO. By simply entering your business information, Moz Local helps you get listed on the most relevant platforms such as online business directories. You might also want to subscribe to the Moz Blog. The experts over at Moz regularly share the latest news and strategies in the world of SEO, and so you can get a head start especially when a new algorithm sets in.

Ahrefs

Every SEO knows how powerful links are in terms of boosting rankings. But you should also remember that the wrong links can hurt your ranking potential. It’s necessary to monitor your link profile to ensure it remains healthy and favorable in the eyes of search engine spiders. Ahrefs is a powerful backlink checker and analysis tool. It boasts of the largest backlink index; so it can return links, which other tools of its kind may miss. Ahrefs has also come up with TrustFlow and CitationFlow, two metrics that give you a quick idea of how powerful your domain is. Aside from checking the number of links pointing to your website, this tool also lets you see your referring domains and anchor text ratio. It’s vital that you analyze these factors as well as they have a huge impact on your search engine rankings.

E-mail Marketing

Promoting your business through sending e-mail messages may seem outdated, but it remains an effective technique to this day. In fact, many brands continue to increase their allotted budget for e-mail marketing every year as it yields excellent returns when implemented correctly. What’s great about sending e-mails is that your target customers can now view them almost instantly, thanks to the ever-growing usage of smartphones and tablets. People no longer need to turn on their desktop or laptop computer just to open their e-mail inbox. Push notifications alert your targets faster than ever.

Effective e-mail marketing can boost your digital branding, as you can send e-mails for a variety of purposes—be it to send a weekly newsletter, share your latest posts on social media, or update subscribers about discounts and promos. Even more compelling, e-mail continues to drive more e-commerce purchases compared to other marketing channels including organic search, display advertising, and social media.

If you have a large e-mail list, it can get pretty difficult to do things by hand. Let’s look at a few e-mail marketing software to make the process easier.

MailChimp

Millions of people use MailChimp every day, and there are plenty of reasons why you should do so as well. It is a robust e-mail marketing platform that gives access to a variety of features to streamline your campaigns. One of the best aspects of MailChimp is its ease-of-use. The freemium plan can do the trick even for complete amateurs. With this tool, you can expect to craft fun and exciting newsletters even with zero experience in design. This makes your marketing messages stand out as you effectively grab the attention of readers with rich media instead of simply sending blocks of text.

Not only does MailChimp make sending e-mails faster and easier, but it also helps you keep track of campaign performance. You can conduct A/B testing, allowing you to send completely different e-mails to your target audience and analyze what produces optimal conversions. Pair this with its seamless integration with some of the most popular web applications and MailChimp proves to be a must-have in your digital branding arsenal.

ConvertKit

While relatively new to the scene, ConvertKit has quickly gained traction, thanks to excellent reviews from bloggers across different industries. What immediately stands out from this e-mail marketing software is its intuitive user-interface. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting started regardless of what feature you want to use. One feature ConvertKit has that other e-mail marketing tools don’t is the ability to determine what pages drive list growth. You can view well-designed charts that tell you how many subscribers you get each day and what blog posts they are in at the point of conversion. And if you’re planning to create web courses, ConvertKit makes the process as easy as making traditional web forms and e-mail blasts. Because it is geared toward bloggers and authors, ConvertKit also integrates with nonconventional applications and plug-ins.

Aweber

Aweber is another widely used e-mail marketing software. It proves to be one of the most cost-effective tools on the market for managing your e-mail marketing campaigns. While it is not loaded with features, it has all the basics that should be enough for most digital marketers. As with other tools of its kind, Aweber has an excellent reporting tool that lets you see what techniques work and what doesn’t. It also has a user-friendly e-mail campaign creator, guiding you through the step-by-step process of creating signup forms and newsletters. Aweber also integrates with a host of third-party applications, perhaps the most notable of which is WordPress. In just a single click, you can set up an e-mail signup form on your website. This tool also allows you to conduct split testing so that you can send out variations of your marketing messages and optimize for better open and engagement rates.

Display Retargeting

Have you ever experienced browsing a product in an online marketplace and not pushing through with the purchase, only to get followed by an ad for that same product no matter where you go on the web? This is display retargeting in action. Imagine how powerful this is for your digital branding efforts. By using the right channels and segmenting your audience carefully, you can create memory structures among your target customers that build your credibility over time.

Audience retargeting has become more powerful over the past few years. Today, it’s easy to segment your audience not only based on demographic information, but also on more specific factors such as gender, interest, employment, and civil status. For instance, it’s entirely possible to target first-time parents in New York through proper audience retargeting.

This technique enables you to reach prospects that have already shown interest in your offering. You can target those who have searched for your brand, visited your website, or opened your e-mail marketing message. Retargeting has the ability to convert somebody with little exposure to your brand into a loyal brand advocate.

This heightened efficiency of audience segmentation can be a driving factor for increasing the reach of your digital brand. But if you’re completely new to the concept, it’s recommended to use tools and enlist the services of experts to get you started in the right direction.

AdRoll

In the retargeting field, AdRoll continues to be one of the most prominent names. More than 30,000 brands use the platform to gain higher visibility on different online marketing platforms. By joining AdRoll, you get access to over 500 ad exchanges. This includes the top social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The real power of AdRoll, however, lies in its ability to display ads in high-converting spots. You can monitor the performance of your ads and tweak your campaigns using their simple platform. They also employ a real-time bidding algorithm called BidIQ, which ensures that you pay the right amount in exchange for the right ad placement.

ReTargeter

ReTargeter promises to provide digital advertising solutions to reach your audience regardless of where they are on the web. Established in 2009, ReTargeter has been at the forefront of the programmatic advertising space ever since. Its primary goal is to help serve your display ads to the right audience at the right time. It’s interesting to note that Sellpoints, a company that specializes in e-commerce, acquired ReTargeter in 2015. This has made the platform even more powerful, with access to consumer behavioral data. Leveraging this data enabled ReTargeter to enhance their predictive analytics capabilities, which translates to higher converting retargeting and prospecting campaigns for your digital brand. If you’re familiar with retargeting techniques, you can use it as a self-service platform. Otherwise, you can let their team of retargeting experts handle everything for you.

Google AdWords Retargeting

Google uses the term remarketing, but it refers to the same concept. This should be your go-to platform if you want to show ads to prospects who have visited your website or accessed your mobile application. It helps you to easily reconnect with someone who didn’t convert the first time, opening new doors for better conversions and higher profits in the long term. What’s amazing about remarketing with Google AdWords is that you get to choose exactly what platforms to utilize for your campaigns. Standard and dynamic marketing shows your ads to visitors surfing Display Network websites. If you want your ads to be shown to users who’ve used your app while they access other apps, then remarketing for mobile apps does just that. You can also use video remarketing, e-mail-list remarketing, and search ads remarketing.

Affiliate Marketing

It is often said that word of mouth is the best form of marketing. In the digital world, however, this can be a little tricky. How can you get other people to recommend your offering to others? One way is through leveraging the power of affiliate marketing. This method revolves around the idea of getting people to become brand advocates while paying them a percentage of every sale they make.

Recent studies show that consumers treat online recommendations the same way as suggestions from people they know in real life. This can enhance your digital branding as the more people talk about and recommend your brand, the more prospective customers learn to trust and value your offering. Some businesses decide to set up their own affiliate marketing program. If you’re a start-up, however, this can be too complicated. Joining affiliate marketing networks serves as an excellent alternative. This gives you access to an enormous network of publishers who are ready and willing to promote your brand to their laser-targeted traffic.

Commission Junction

One of the most popular affiliate marketing platforms for advertisers is Commission Junction. For many years, it has established its reputation in the industry, thanks in large part to its vast network of bloggers. Commission Junction understands full well that the consumer journey has changed over the years. With the increasing popularity of online shopping, consumers have gotten way smarter when it comes to weeding out bad products from their list. Through affiliate marketing, however, it’s possible to influence their purchasing decision by tapping publishers and letting them promote your offering. The platform comes with advertising tools to help optimize your campaigns. From a well-designed dashboard to easy-to-understand graphs and charts, you can expect these tools to be comprehensive enough in providing you with the most crucial performance metrics. With nearly two decades of experience under their belt, you can bet that the experts over at Commission Junction know their stuff. They also use the most advanced techniques to organize advertisers and publishers in their network, ensuring that optimal returns are enjoyed by both parties.

VigLink

VigLink has an interesting take on affiliate marketing. It uses content from publishers and places revenue generating hyperlinks in the most relevant places. With more online users growing blind to banner advertisements, using contextual links can lead to higher conversion rates. Regardless of your digital branding goals, you can certainly find a use for VigLink. It is one of the most reputable content networks today, boasting of more than 60,000 advertisers. Their large network of publishers ensures that there will always be content that’s timely, engaging and relevant for your particular niche. By partnering with VigLink, you can find influential publishers across a variety of industries including travel, fashion, technology, and more.

CAKE

Using multiple affiliate networks can get confusing real quick, and so it’s nice to have a comprehensive management tool to help keep track of everything. CAKE is an excellent tool to help resolve this dilemma. This cloud-based tool proves to be a huge time-saver. Upon accessing the all-in-one dashboard, you’ll immediately realize how easy to use this tool really is. Aside from just monitoring how well your ads perform on different networks, CAKE also has handy features for managing contacts and reviewing metrics in real-time. CAKE can also help you save money on ad spend by effectively targeting ads and gathering insight into the journey of prospective customers. This intelligence data makes it easy to optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns, eliminate nonperforming ads, and boost efforts that best lead to conversions.

Content Marketing

You already know that content can make or break your digital branding campaigns. It doesn’t matter how much traffic your website gets, how many subscribers you have in your e-mail list, or how large of a following you have on social media if you fail to deliver content that engages and connects with potential customers. It’s also worth understanding that online users have become largely visual, meaning they prefer consuming content with incorporated rich media. Posts that only contain blocks of text may no longer work as great as it used to. For this reason, you must learn to look beyond traditional blog posts and consider other content formats to determine what best engages your target audience.

Content Creation

For any shot at succeeding, you must have a steady supply of content to feed all the marketing channels you use. You need written content for your blog, high-quality images for driving engagement rates, and perhaps even videos if your customers would find value in them. You may also want to consider infographics, GIFs, podcasts, and live streaming.

With a variety of formats to choose from, there’s a good chance you do not have enough time to do everything from scratch. To help boost your content creation strategy, here are some useful tools to add to your toolkit.

Canva

This cloud-based design tool is highly popular among brands looking for high-quality images to be shared on blogs, social platforms, and other marketing channels. You can start with their free version, which already gives access to a ton of images across different categories. With Canva, you can create captivating and unique photos even without prior experience. It’s all a matter of picking an image and using its simple editor to make tweaks to the photo.

For instance, adding a caption is as easy as hitting the text box and typing your desired message. There are also premade templates to help you come up with outstanding designs. It doesn’t matter if you’re not the artistic type. Canva does the heavy lifting for you, as you’re left with simple enhancements to make the photos your own.

Visual.ly

If you do not have the time, interest, or skills to produce your own visual content, then you might want to look into Visual.ly. This platform connects advertisers in need of visual content to those who have the skills to produce it. In a few simple steps, you can get your hands on high-quality, custom-designed rich media ready to be shared on your chosen marketing platforms. Visual.ly has a streamlined process to get the job done in the most efficient fashion. You only need to describe your project, explain what you want to achieve with the visual content, and pick what format you need for your campaign. After these steps, you will be given a quote for the project. Upon accepting the quote, Visual.ly will pair you with the best fit according to your particular needs. With more than 1,000 writers, animators, and designers, you can rest assured that their team can do a fantastic job building your digital brand through effective content.

Contently

For an all-in-one content marketing solution, Contently makes a strong case to be your go-to resource. This award-winning content marketing software has everything you need to manage all your campaigns, track performance, and optimize using innovative technology. Contently offers tools that streamline the process of content creation. You will be guided from the ideation process all the way to the distribution of your content. What’s more amazing is that it enables you to transform ordinary blog posts into interactive multimedia projects with which your target audience will surely resonate.

The software also has the ability to match you with the right content creator depending on your content requirements. The platform boasts of a network consisting of over 100,000 freelancers. They can also publish your content on your social profiles, blogs, and e-mail so that you can save precious time. Contently also provides granular content data that allows you to come up with informed decisions regarding your content marketing strategy. Determine what works and eliminate what doesn’t to optimize your campaigns.

Content Curation

This technique basically involves sharing content from other credible sources in your niche. It’s a perfect way to fill your content calendar, especially if you need to keep engagement up while running low on content you create yourself. But why should you even consider sharing content other than your own? Content Curation works because it establishes authority. When your target audience sees that you’re willing to share posts from other authoritative sources, even from businesses that may compete with your offering, it shows that you are not all about making money. You can avoid looking too salesy by exposing your prospects to other kinds of content. This also shows that you are keeping up with the latest news and trends in the industry, boosting your credibility even further.

Google Alerts

It’s unfortunate that Google Alerts do not get as much attention as it deserves. This tool is simple yet very powerful, allowing you to keep track and get notifications for the most relevant keywords to your business. What’s great about Google Alerts is that you can set it up only one time and benefit from it for months or even years to come. You can use keywords related to your business or those to your competitors. That way, you can instantly get notified when new posts are published about the keywords you monitor.

Feedly

If blog content is the primary format you want to share, then Feedly is a must-have tool. This online resource makes it straightforward to curate blog content from a variety of sources. You get to choose from a wide range of blogs and publications, giving you access to the most recent topics that you can share or use as topic inspirations. The well-laid out interface of Feedly makes it a pleasure to use. It’s easy to organize all the blog content you want to monitor. The tool also provides a minimalist reading experience, designed specifically for maximum productivity. Feedly also integrates with third-party applications such as Sprout Social; so you can share your chosen blogs continuously with minimal manual intervention.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it works pretty much the same way as other Content Curation tools on the market, but it sets itself apart with its advanced content marketing automation features. Using this tool, you can grow your digital presence by publishing high-quality content based on your keywords of choice. Simply enter your keyword list and discover an endless amount of content for you to share on your social channels or blog. You also have the option of adding perspective to the curated content before publishing or distributing to your desired platforms.

Scoop.it also highlights its content marketing automation tools. These allow you to create better content by delving into useful customer information. You can also research about what kind of content and keywords resonate best with your target audience using actual content and performance metrics published on the web. There is also a smart calendar that lets you visualize your content marketing plan. You can schedule posts and promote content in just a few clicks. You can also measure ROI (Return on Investment) with its built-in analytics tool.

Quora

For online users seeking answers to their questions, the go-to platform is Quora. This website is where you can glean authoritative answers to and opinions about pretty much anything under the sun. Using Quora allows you to determine what questions potential customers have in mind, ones a keyword research tool will often fail to provide. By knowing these questions and challenges, you can come up with content ideas that thoroughly satisfy the queries of your target audience. You can also explore the hottest topics surrounding your field. Creating content based on authoritative answers can drive more traffic and better engagement to your blog. It’s also possible to get notified about new posts relevant to your niche, and so you always have something to turn to when your content idea tank runs empty.

Website Analytics

One of the primary advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing methods is that it gives you a much clearer picture of the results you get from running your campaigns. Many beginners in digital marketing, however, do not know how to utilize this data to their advantage. While you can be successful without giving the slightest attention to metrics such as time on page, number of pages per visit, and bounce rate, you can set up more effective campaigns by doing so. This is because these site metrics help you piece together a picture of how visitors use your website, consume your content, and follow through with your desired call to action.

The process can sound intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will surely make more data-driven marketing initiatives. Knowing your audience plays a key role in your overall marketing strategy, you must take a proactive approach to ensure that you’re always on top of your site performance and consumer behavior.

The following website analytics tools should help you set up more fine-tuned user profiles by providing insightful customer information.

Google Analytics

Once again, Google has a free offering for webmasters who want to keep track of different site metrics. By simply adding your domain, this tool gives you access to a ton of different features that let you have a better understanding of how visitors navigate your website.

There is a multitude of different metrics you can monitor, each of which helps in knowing your audience better. But if you only have so much time to keep track of a few, be sure they are bounce rate, conversion rate, and channels. A bounce is counted when a visitor lands on your site, visits a single page, and then leaves your website without completing any other action. In general, you do not want to see a high bounce rate on your web pages as this indicates poor content and user experience. The first step to improving bounce rate is to conduct a full site audit, determining what the cause of the problem is. See whether visitors are leaving because of your content, slow page load speed, or terrible user experience.

Conversion rate is an excellent metric for showing how successful you are at compelling users to do what you want them to accomplish. This reflects the number of online visitors who turn into leads after performing a specific action on your page. High traffic proves useless if conversions are low. In such a case, you may want to evaluate whether you have the right content with keywords that come with high commercial intent. Channels tell you where your online visitors are coming from. You’ll get to see how much of your traffic comes from social, organic search, paid search, referral, and direct sources. This gives you an idea about how effective your marketing strategies are. For instance, if you were using SEO to attract more targeted traffic, you’d want to see organic search to generate most of your site traffic.

Kissmetrics

You’ll be hard pressed to find another conversion optimization tool as great as Kissmetrics. The company prides itself on using behavioral analytics to boost conversion rates. This can be just what you need to enter the mind of your target audience and come up with the optimal strategy to make them convert into qualified sales leads. Kissmetrics does its magic by mapping the entire journey of visitors on your website. From the moment visitors land on your page all the way to making a purchase, the platform helps provide useful information that allows you to fine-tune your sales funnel. Other than increasing conversions, Kissmetrics also gives suggestions on how to drive customer retention. You’ll be provided with metrics that help you understand what makes leads trust your brand and what compels them to choose you over the competition. With Kissmetrics, you can align your business objectives with consumer behavior to enjoy optimal conversions.

Mention

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the ability to monitor all mentions of your brand across the web? This is exactly what Mention can do for you. This innovative tool keeps you updated about all mentions of your brand online—be it on blogs or social media. There are plenty of ways to leverage this powerful media-monitoring tool. By staying informed of every instance of your brand name on the web, you can join discussions in real-time and connect with your audience instantly. You can also get notified of relevant topics in your niche, providing even more opportunities to find and interact with prospective customers.

Setting up Mention is as easy as picking what keywords you want to create alerts for. This includes your brand name. Now, the great thing about the tool is that you can rest assured that you won’t get notified of irrelevant instances of your brand name or keywords. When people start talking about and sharing your brand across various online platforms, that’s when you know you’re gaining traction. Mention can say a lot about how well your digital branding efforts are doing.

Website Testing

When building a website, it’s always tempting to take the “set-it-and-forget-it” approach. After all, you might be juggling a lot of other things in your hands, leaving you with no time to introduce changes and see their impact on your site in terms of performance. For promoting digital branding, however, you must realize that even a slight change in a single design element can spell the difference between someone clicking on the “buy now” button, and leaving your site to head elsewhere. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to start completely from scratch every time you want to test something out. You also do not need any coding skills or experience in web design.

With the help of some tools, you can create beautiful landing pages quickly and compare their performance against that of your current design. You might surprise yourself after learning that simply changing the color of your anchor texts, the placement of your buttons, or the copy on your call-to-actions can significantly boost your conversion rates.

Unbounce

If you want to quickly build or tweak landing pages, Unbounce is definitely a must-try. The concept behind the tool is very simple, but it can lead to significant changes to your site especially in terms of conversions. What makes Unbounce such a special tool is that it allows users to easily build beautiful landing pages. Even if you’re starting from scratch and have no web design experience, you shouldn’t have any problem using the tool to come up with amazing landing pages, which you can test right away.

There is also a plethora of premade landing page and overlay templates. This should be of tremendous help especially for people who do not have the time or skills to create one from scratch. You just need to use the editor to make the necessary changes and in just a few minutes, everything’s ready for split testing. After having fun with the drag and drop builder, it’s time to boost conversions by thoroughly experimenting with different landing pages and convertibles. Researching on the psychology behind web design can help you decide what kinds of changes to try on your site, which could help bring in more targeted traffic and convert them into real customers.

Optimizely

The ultimate goal of Optimizely is to help your brand deliver a personalized digital experience for your customers. This is achieved through its content creation and targeting tools. This combination enables you to produce engaging content and deliver it to the right audience while eliminating the guesswork involved. The company highlights the need for digital marketers to keep up with the nonstop shifts in consumer behavior. With Optimizely, you can generate higher returns from your existing traffic without shelling out more for ad spend. It also helps to craft content that connects with customers, providing them with compelling experiences to keep bounce rates to a minimum and increase time on site. Using Optimizely gives you the chance to experiment with different kinds of experiences across all marketing channels and devices. Through this, you can better focus your resources to what areas of your marketing strategy yield the best returns.

Summary

Building your digital brand provides the avenue for increased traffic, better credibility, and higher conversions. It is high time to offer your customers a consistent and personalized digital experience, as this is a strong driving factor for brand lift. Creating such a digital presence, however, can be time-intensive and costly. But by equipping yourself with must-have digital marketing tools, you should be able to meet your business goals faster than you initially thought. You don’t have to play around with all of these tools simultaneously. In fact, it is much better to focus on one area of digital marketing first before moving on to another. Do not be afraid to test things out yourself first without using tools, as this can give you better ideas on how to leverage them when it comes time to fill your marketing toolkit.

Budget constraints can also hinder you from checking out some of the tools. The good news is that most companies offer free trials so that you can test them out and decide later whether to upgrade to a paid plan. Remember to look beyond the upfront cost and factor in the potential long-term gains. If you find that the cost of the tools proves worth it for the amount of time you save, there’s no reason not to push through with this business investment.

Lastly, do not forget that tools are only as effective as how you use them. They cannot magically increase your digital branding after just a few clicks of your mouse. It’s actually possible to damage your branding if you fail to take the time to learn how to use the tools properly.

Given the diverse mix of free and paid tools available, building your digital brand has never been more fun. Start formulating your digital marketing strategy with the aid of these tools to improve your online presence, drive more targeted leads, and ultimately increase your bottom line. Before you know it, you have created a strong digital brand that reflects authority and credibility.

Bibliography

Andersen, S. E., & Johansen, T. S. (2016). Cause-related marketing 2.0: Connection, collaboration and commitment. Journal of Marketing Communications, 22(5), 524-543.

Aufreiter, N., Boudet, J., & Weng, V. (2014). Why marketers should keep sending you e-mails. McKinsey & Company.

Berman, R., & Katona, Z. (2013). The role of search engine optimization in search marketing. Marketing Science, 32(4), 644-651.

Bleier, A., & Eisenbeiss, M. (2015). Personalized online advertising effectiveness: The interplay of what, when, and where. Marketing Science, 34(5), 669-688.

Chang, S., & Morimoto, M. (2011). Electronic marketing communications: an evolving environment, but similar story regarding the perception of unsolicited commercial e-mail and postal direct mail. Journal of Promotion Management, 17(3), 360-376.

Copulsky, J., Bergstrom, A., & Simone, M. (2016). One tweak at a time: How analytics improved our content marketing. Applied Marketing Analytics, 2(3), 201-212.

Gupta, R., Kumar, B., & Banga, G. (2017). Role of affiliate marketing in today’s era: A review. Indian Journal of Economics and Development, 13(2a), 687-690.

Hartemo, M., & Hartemo, M. (2016). Email marketing in the era of the empowered consumer. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 10(3), 212-230.

Hoban, P. R., & Bucklin, R. E. (2015). Effects of internet display advertising in the purchase funnel: Model-based insights from a randomized field experiment. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(3), 375-393.

Järvinen, J., & Taiminen, H. (2016). Harnessing marketing automation for B2B content marketing. Industrial Marketing Management, 54, 164-175.

Ledford, J. L. (2015). Search Engine Optimization Bible (Vol. 584). Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons.

Lewis, R. A., & Rao, J. M. (2015). The unfavorable economics of measuring the returns to advertising. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjv023.

Patil Swati, P., Pawar, B. V., & Patil Ajay, S. (2013). Search engine optimization: A Study. Research Journal of Computer and Information Technology Sciences, 1(1), 10-13.

Shih, B. Y., Chen, C. Y., & Chen, Z. S. (2013). An empirical study of an internet marketing strategy for search engine optimization. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries, 23(6), 528-540.

Yu, S., Hudders, L., & Cauberghe, V. (2017). Tracking the Luxury Consumer Online: An Experimental Study on the Effectiveness of Site and Search Retargeting for Luxury Brands in China and the Netherlands: An Abstract. In Marketing at the Confluence between Entertainment and Analytics (pp. 1541-1541). Cham: Springer.