We often see that brands and their branding efforts are not aligned with their digital marketing strategy or efforts. In this blog we will go through the benefits of aligning these effects for maximum effectiveness and results. We’ll also go over the differences between digital marketing and branding and how they work together and how to tune these efforts into a unified branding and marketing strategy that will help you achieve your desired outcomes.
What are digital marketing and digital branding?
Digital Marketing:
Digital marketing refers to the online digital strategy and implementation to market your product or service online through paid and organic efforts. This means mapping out who your target audiences are, what are the most effective mediums both free and paid and what those are and developing into an integrated strategy to drive and generate leads that turn into sales and revenue.
Digital Branding:
This is where you package your brand and its brand elements, headlines, taglines, imagery, CTA’s(call to action), content/brand messaging into an online presence, ads that help to define your brand, online ads, social media posts, etc. This digital brand should mirror your overall brand and has the same look and feel, reads and looks like your desired brand and what you want it to be.
What Exactly is the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Digital Branding?
Digital Marketing, even if you are working with your branding agency for small business is much more tactical and an ongoing effort to drive leads that turn into sales and revenue. Digital marketing usually has a coordinated plan that integrates all the different marketing activities into what is called an omni-channel approach.
Digital branding is more of a design and content creation process or developing what your brand is going to look and read like. The majority of your digital branding efforts are up front or before the campaign begins, there is on-going content creation for items such a s social media posts as you begin to implement your digital marketing campaign.
How Do Digital Branding and Digital Marketing Work Together?
This is one of the areas where strong strategic brands shine. They develop an integrated brand from the start of the digital brand development all the way through a brand’s activation or digital marketing into the marketplace. They have mapped out their target audience’s, discussed the messaging and positioning that will appeal to them and the best mediums to reach them. The digital branding has to be consistent throughout the strategy, creative and marketing tools, ads, posts, videos to convey a strong brand with appeal. The creative and content branding and marketing elements stay consistent with the digital marketing campaign throughout the customer/prospect journey and experience.
How to track and measure the effectiveness of your digital brand and digital marketing:
It really helps to be able to quantify just how your digital brand and digital marketing are performing and helping you to succeed. Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to track and measure your success:
Know what you want to track:
It really helps to lay out what you want to know about both your digital brand as well as your digital marketing efforts. For your digital brand, I like to understand things like is the name unique and memorable? Does the logo represent your company well, the brand look and feel position you properly? Etc. As far as your digital marketing, are you getting an ROI on your investment, getting enough leads, traffic to your website, how does your conversions look as well as closing percentages?
Know who you’s opinion your want to hear from:
We like to get our customers to tell us what they like about our digital brand, and digital marketing efforts as well as a small group of friends and prospects to give us a dead honest opinion about our brand and marketing efforts, what they like as well as what they don’t like.
Tracking tools:
CRM/MAS: We love to utilize our marketing automation platform(MAS) to help us track the entire marketing and sales process, from the top of the marketing funnel all the way through the sales funnel and are we getting enough leads and opportunities to achieve our desired outcomes? A good MAS/CRM system will help you track all these efforts, tactics and results.
Google: Google has so much tracking info on both organic and paid SEM(search engine marketing) efforts; things like search volume, key words, key phases, website volume, ranking, optimization, etc., etc. Vast amount of info we all need to be utilizing.
Social Media: Tracking your social media as well as the marketplace and competitors is key, even for business to business brands(Think LinkedIn, Facebook groups, etc.) Know the number of likes, followers, engagement, shares, reach, leads, etc.
Here are a few that we like to track and measure: Meta(Facebook, Instagram), Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.
Survey’s: You can easily use surveys to track and measure your digital branding and digital marketing efforts, how well they are resonating with your target audience, customers and partners.
Takeaways: Through tracking and measuring of your digital brand and marketing efforts, you are able to craft, develop, revise and pivot with the data that can help you achieve your desired goals and objectives.
Examples of Digital Branding Fueling Digital Marketing:
Now that the elections are over and we can finally breathe a sigh of relief, but no matter party affiliation, you go on-line and you see digital branding and marketing for local, regional and national candidates, ballet issue front and center in every imaginable form possible. Everything from email marketing to social media ads to online advertising campaigns, social media posts, press releases, you can go a few minutes without seeing some sort of digital branding and marketing to the point we get sick and tired of getting bombarded.
How to blend digital marketing and branding for your clients:
The best way to blend your digital branding and marketing together is to have them be part of a much larger integrated strategy. To do that they would be under a larger business/brand strategy that spells out the goals and objectives you are trying to achieve. That’s when you tie together your branding and marketing strategies and efforts that are going to help get you to achieving these goals and objectives.
Why is digital branding important for your business?
Let’s take a look at why digital branding is so important to your company and brand and helping you to achieve your goals and objectives:
Defined goals, objectives and outcomes:
A well developed brand doesn’t just look at creative elements, but it also looks at how you can utilize your brand and position to help you achieve your goals and objectives. Great branding not only helps you develop what your brand looks like but also brings into focus your bigger picture goals and objectives.
Clear and concise positioning and messaging:
A quality branding process helps you bring crystal clarity as to how and why your company, brand, product and service, is better than the competition. We also get into how you package and communicate that in a nice tight and efficient manner, that is put into a messaging platform that is the foundation of your consumable content that goes into your website, marketing materials, social media, etc. Another marketing tool we love to utilize and refine your digital brand and marketing is putting it into a pitch deck to hone your message. You may want to consider utilizing a pitch deck experts with this endeavor for the best outcome.
Having a well defined and crafted brand is key to your success:
Branding is also creating an image, impression about your brand in your target customers mind, as well portraying yourselves apart from the competition as well as a leader in your space. This is where you can use your well developed brand to be an expert in something, forward thinking, forward fashionable, innovative, the best technology, the best experience, most utilitarian, etc, etc.
A strong digital brand makes an impression:
A strong digital brand and branded marketing efforts make a lasting impression that connects, engages and compels customers and prospects alike to take notice of your brand and marketing efforts and want to do business with you. If your digital brand isn’t quite up to snuff, you may want to consider hiring a Rebranding agency to turn your brand into a powerful tool to help your company achieve your desired outcomes.
Reduces your cost of customer acquisition:
One of the best outcomes from investing and building your digital brand and digital marketing efforts is the increased brand awareness that significantly helps reduce your customer acquisition costs.
Increase in your brand value:
And the big net effort of putting in the time, energy and resources is that you will have built up your company’s brand value that is a significant component of your company’s overall value and worth.
Conclusion:
Now that you understand the difference between your digital brand and digital marketing, it’s time to get going and create or refine these to drive that awareness, value and real lasting results for your company and brand. If you need any help with these items, you can reach out to Brand Iron with any questions or assistance.
