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Building Your Brand Online
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Building your brand online is an important way to generate awareness, increase sales and use the global reach of the Internet. As a small and medium size business, you rely on channels to communicate and work with customers and build your business. That is why it is important to build your brand presence on the Internet ... the fastest growing medium ever.
How do I get started? - Building your brand online
- Define Your Customer
- Define Your Brand
- Promote Your Brand Online
- Secure Strategic Alliances and Partnerships
Define Your Customer
- Determine your target market. Who will use your service/product?
- Research the demographic of those who will use service/product: age, sex, etc.
- Explore the trends currently affecting your demographic. How can you best target this group?
How are other businesses targetting this group?
Define Your Brand
- Determine your business identity (who are you?)
- Define your core-competency
- Build your top three key messages
- Say them again and again and again
- Draft your boilerplate (or business plan) and design a logo that captures the identity of your business
Promote your brand online:
Drive traffic to your site
Brand your site
Fish where the fish swim
There are seven key elements for Online Promotions:
Meta-tagging and registration of sites
- Use meta-tags:
Include Title, Description, and Keywords
in the <HEAD></HEAD> of your pages to describe the content of your site.
title: appears in the viewer's task bar.
description: often used as descriptive subtext beneath your site listing in search results.
keyword: relates to/describes your business. Keywords can include products, services, descriptions,
location, etc. Also consider adding misspelled words (see example below) to target people who
may not know the exact spelling of your business name. Note: do not repeat keywords over and over in attempts to maximize
your site's placement. Some search engines respond negatively to this practice.
- Register your site with search engines (i.e. Lycos):
Ensure the best exposure for your site.
To register your site with search engines you must visit each search engine site individually and enter your site's details.
Ensure that you have used meta-tags in your HTML; search engines often base their search criteria on meta-tags and use this information to
categorize your site for search engine users.
Meta-tagging example:
For example, here are the meta-tags for www.sympatico.ca. Note that meta-tags must be coded into the <HEAD>/</HEAD> of the actual HTML of the web page.
<HEAD><TITLE>Sympatico</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Canada's most popular Canadian Internet online service provider and Web site featuring news, weather, Canada411 phone directory, HealthyWay health information, entertainment, sports, computers and travel information for families">
<META name="keywords" content="Sympatico sympatico simpatico Simpatico Canada canada canadian Canadian Internet internet online service provider French ISP Web web site website news weather health guide entertainment sports computers travel information family">
</HEAD>
Submissions for Online Awards
There are thousands of online awards on the Web -- and by securing awards you
can drive traffic to your site and show support for your online presence. Note: some online awards are just online tools
being used by various sites to drive traffic themselves, so be selective when choosing which awards you seek for your site.
Banner Ad Creation
Banner ads are used widely throughout the Web and are one of the best ways to both advertise and drive traffic
to your site and to establish your brand online.
Top Ten Banner Tips
- Interactivity with your audience is key. Consider animated banners with a "call to action" or question.
- Ensure your banners ads are under 10k and 468 x 60 pixels in size. Be creative and experiment with 3 or 4 different ads.
- Always anchor your brand at one end of the banner.
- Always include your URL in the banner.
- Target and test your creative
- Target the banner (affinity groups, keywords)
- Use bright and bold colours.
- Use rich media (difficult in Canada) and animation
- Always have a "click here" tag line at the end of the banner
- Mentally engage the viewer
Banner Ad Placement
- Think branding, not just clicks. Many people on the Internet do not click through -- however, they do notice the banner. If the brand
name and URL are in the banner your chances are better for a user to remember your business name and/or visit your
site when they have time to surf.
- Use a single URL for each campaign salutations.sympatico.ca
- Strategically place banners based on keywords or to target affinity groups.
- Examples: two great American sites for advertising ideas -- www.in2.com and www.channelseven.com.
Online Media Relations
- Draft and distribute a monthly news update about your site via email to a compiled media list.
- In the update, focus on partnerships, promotions, contests or content-related stories. Be sure to offer hyperlinks to areas in your site other than the home page
- Cultivate and maintain these online media relationships
Content-Focused Email
- Most successful US sites have an option to subscribe to a useful content-related email.
- These emails have hyperlinks which drive traffic into your site, to deeper areas which may be less familiar to the visitor
- Personalize the email with the voice of your spokesperson or a mascot.
Online Contests
- Contests involving advertisers offer another revenue tool and drive traffic.
- Invite visitors to interact with the site and play a game, write a review, or submit feedback. Visitors love to interact on the Internet.
- Offer attractive awards that promote your brand or partnerships.
Encourage Strategic Alliances and Partnerships
- Take advantage of reciprocal links. Consider offering a link on your site to a related business or service that will in turn offer a link to your site.
- Build your brand credibility with partners.
- Consider being part of a portal site. Major portals offer the consumer lots of product and service information via a single port of entry.
Do we still need traditional advertising and media?
- Absolutely! You still want to be able to target potential customers who non-surfers or those who still prefer traditional media.
- Online Promotions will not replace traditional vehicles; instead, hey will enhance current initiatives aimed at branding and driving traffic to your site.
- It adds yet another tier to the marketing communications budget cake.
A Perfect Plan
In an ideal setup with unlimited $$, media relations, print advertising, and online promotions:
- follow the same schedule,
- share the same messaging and creative
- and focus solely on branding and driving traffic to individual Content areas.
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