One can use the Internet to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Reinforce the brand’s unique value proposition
- Tell the brand’s story
- Identify customers and build lists
- Create a dialog with customers and potential customers
Here are the top 15 actions to take to build your brand online:
- Create and actively maintain a blog to significantly increase search visibility, establish expertise and build a community, brand trust, and subscriber lists.
- Close to 60% of the people seeking out a branded product online use a search engine to do so.
- Make sure you include the most important search phrases in your posts. (Google keywords can help you with this.)
- You must carefully think through how you will add meaningful content to the blog on a regular basis. Blogs need to be fed constantly or else they die.
- As you build subscriber lists, send the subscribers email with meaningful content and links.
- Develop a regular distribution schedule and stick to it.
- Make sure to include your brand’s signature and web link in each email.
- On the Internet, visuals/images matter. Make sure you use appropriate and powerful visuals to reinforce each blog post.
- People watch 4 billion YouTube videos every day. 68% of video watchers share links to the videos. Create highly compelling videos that tell your brand’s story and post them on YouTube.
- Use RSS feeds to distribute headlines, new content and notifications more broadly.
- Include a “Link to This Page” button on every page that you believe has worthwhile content to increase your site traffic through incoming links. Also add Facebook Like, Tweet, inShare, g + 1, pin it and other similar buttons to all worthwhile content.
- Conduct periodic webinars and teleseminars.
- Consider Facebook advertising as a way to achieve unparalleled targeting.
- Create an affiliate program to extend your reach.
- There are more than 5 billion mobile phone users worldwide and 1.1 billion smartphone subscribers. Develop smartphone/mobile apps for your brand.
- Integrate online messaging with traditional media messaging for greater impact.
- Consider using paid search campaigns using Google AdWords.
- Share links with and advertise on those websites that rank highest against the search terms most important to your brand and business.
- Monitor what people are saying about your brand in social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and on websites such as Epinions.com and Amazon.com.
- Use SurveyMonkey.com or similar online research platforms to research how people perceive your brand and its competitors.
We wish you great success in building your brand online.
By: Brad VanAuken
Source: brandingstrategyinsider.com
