7 Ways to Build a Successful Digital Brand Strategy

digital brand strategy

A Brand gets its identity through an effective digital brand strategy. It allows a brand to connect with a specific and larger audience much easier than other traditional strategies. Brand strategies are aimed at boosting the presence of the brand in the global market and creating a brand image. It plays a pivotal role in achieving the vision and mission of the brand.

digital brand strategy

The 7Cs for Digital Brand Strategy

A digital brand strategy should be based on the 7Cs namely, customers, content, context, community, convenience, cohesion and conversion for a successful branding strategy:

Customer- Maintaining a loyal customer base decides the future of the brand, without loyal customers the brand’s long-term goals can never be achieved.

Content- Content is what travels across the world and reaches people on behalf of the world. It is through the content that people get to know everything about the brand.

Context- Matching customers’ intent is important. To give out messages that help and fits exactly with people’s need is required to develop people’s interest in the brand.

Community- Community building helps in the growth of the brand and brand promotion. Corporate social responsibility can be incorporated for ensuring goodwill behind the brand and promoting it on various digital platforms can target a specific audience.

Convenience- The first reason for people to choose a brand is the convenience it offers, the convenience of buying the products about it makes it easy for people to decide and choose the brand.

Cohesion- The information on the brand website should match the information on various digital platforms. This ensures that the brand’s digital presence comes under one roof of the brand name.

Conversion- This decides the potential customer base and generates sales, which is the main aim of a brand. It measures how successful the digital brand strategy was.

7 Ways to Implement Brand Strategy

Implementation is the key in achieving the desired goals of the brand, this can be achieved by the following strategies:

1. Website building

A unique logo with a well-structured website will help in brand identification. The website should be designed in a way to shows how unique the brand is among other competitors in the market. A readable website will increase the time a person spends on it which helps in website ranking.

2. Brand message

Before planning a digital brand strategy, one should be sure of the goals and visions of the brand. The brand message should be built step wise:

Positional strategies lay the foundation on which the brand message is built. For developing a solid positioning strategy the following three things need to be well understood:

a) Analyzing the competitors

b) Understanding the unique value of the brand

c) Knowing the area of expertise 

d) Determining the audience.

Build the framework- After developing a positional strategy, the next step is building the message framework. This includes developing a positional statement.

Positional statement– it acts as a declaration of the uniqueness of the brand and explains how it stands out from the alternatives in the market. It should answer the common questions of people including: 

a) Unique features of the brand

b) How will people benefit from it?

c) What value it adds to the people and society?

Messaging document– Once the statement is formulated, the next step is to put it up on the main document which can be of various types:

a) Tagline that grabs the viewer’s attention at an instant.

b) One liners telling the best feature of the brand to the people.

3. Social media brand strategy

Social media marketing is extensively used as a digital brand strategy for promotion and brand exposure, however, different social media services offer different ways to implement the brand strategy:

Facebook offers customer engagement through conversations, addressing grievances, and building a community through taking part in the conversations on a page or post.

Instagram is the best when it comes to branding. Taking influencers or choosing affiliated marketing through Instagram increases brand value. Ongoing trends can be used to make people interact more through participation in various contests.

WhatsApp serves the purpose of one to one communication through a call to action tone or an update on the new products launched. This is much like email marketing in that it communicates personally to the customers.

YouTube is helpful in educating people about the brand, it makes people know the work behind the brand which establishes brand authenticity.

4. Third-party websites

Posting on third-party websites brings a new set of audiences which increases brand mentions. By backlinking, the viewers can be navigated to the brand’s website, increasing traffic. Here is how to do it:

Trending topics- In today’s fast-paced digital world, it’s crucial to engage with your audience quickly and effectively. This is especially important when you’re trying to reach a wider audience within a specific time frame. Fortunately, there are several content writing services that can help you create engaging and relevant content that resonates with your target audience.

Establishing correlation with the third party- Through the content, try to establish how the brand can be related to the topics on the third-party website for increasing brand mention in the process.

Choosing the third-party website- Choosing the appropriate third-party website and leveraging what they offer is important for brand promotion.

For example, Quora can be used for brands that can solve various issues people face. Being a question answer platform, it helps brands to offer solutions to problems people post and in turn promotes themselves as the best solution.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is both a digital brand strategy and a direct marketing strategy. Emailing newsletters is more common than updates about discounts on occasion and updates about new product ranges.

It is regarded as the most effective digital brand strategy among others in terms of return on investment (ROI). The following are a few tips for email marketing:

Setting goals- Fix the goals for email marketing, it can be for promotion, increasing traffic on the website, increasing customers, requesting donations, newsletters and updates about new launches.
Provide convenience- Most people opt out due to complicated signup processes, providing convenience while signing up is an effective way to get more people engaged with the brand.

Build the list- The list is the target audience. A few sources are company data, customer relationship management (CRM) software and existing emails.

Segment the list- This helps to send specific emails to the audience based on their choices and other demographics. It includes considering a customer’s past buys and reviews, a customer’s interest and problems or even a customer’s behaviour.

6. Search engine advertisement (SEA)

Pay per click (PPC) is a digital brand strategy where the advertiser pays every time their ads are clicked. Search engine advertising is one such form of PPC where the brand marketers can place the ads on sponsored links matching the searcher’s intent. Below are a few suggestions to improve the SEA:

Choose the right keywords- keywords are central to SEA where the marketer pays for the keywords to be used in pay-per-click. Understanding the exact match type is necessary so that the ad becomes exactly what people are searching for.

Seasonal ads- In seasonal ads, the time limit should be given which in turn makes the ads more effective, call to action tone should specify the time limit to the viewers, and this will boost the traffic and also generate sales in huge numbers.

Compact ad copy- Apart from keywords, the most important thing is the ad copy, the entire ad comprising the body, headline, call to action and other necessary information can attract viewers more than Pay per Click ads.

7. Content marketing

The brands speak to the people through the content. Content is therefore essential for building a bond with the people and increasing the brand visibility.

After analyzing the competitors in the market, structuring SEO-optimized content will rank the content higher on SERP increasing the visibility with bringing the traffic. Following are the tips for using it as a digital brand strategy:

Choosing the site- Choosing the right platform is integral in content marketing, as various sites offer various ways the brand can leverage to its advantage.

For example, in Instagram, the appropriate use of hashtags, trending reels, reel contests and influencer marketing always proves to be effective.

Understand the ongoing trends- Aligning the content marketing strategies with the ongoing trend can reduce the time taken to reach out to a larger mass of audience. Marketing on specific occasions and highlighting various trends in the content can get consistent traffic over a period of time.

Choose the type- Choosing the type of content depends on the target audience and the message that the brand conveys.

For some video content will be more beneficial, while for other brands infographics can be more helpful to the audience, hence brand type should decide the content type.

Final thoughts

Digital brand strategy is not digital marketing. The former focuses on increasing brand image and building brand identity while the latter focuses on generating leads. The primary step is to match the strategies with the people’s requirements and to align itself with the ongoing digital trends.