Edward Boatman • May 8th
Your brand is what makes your business and its products and services stand out from the crowd.
Think about iconic brands like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. You can probably most of the branding details off the top of your head — the colors and logos, slogans, and even popular products. That’s how branding can transform your business and put your brand at the forefront.
Branding isn’t as simple as choosing a catchy name and designing a slick logo. Every decision you make shapes your brand, from the colors you use to how you communicate with your customers.
Learn more about digital branding and how you can showcase your brand with Lingo.
For centuries, print advertising was a key part of branding. The growing popularity of radio and television marked the beginning of a major transition. By the turn of the century, the rapid growth of the internet gave rise to digital branding and marketing.
Digital branding encompasses your brand’s online presence, including your voice, tone, and how customers perceive you. You can use digital branding to share your mission statement and values and educate your target audience about your products or services.
Source: LinkedIn
With the constantly growing number of digital brands, a strong digital branding strategy is more important than ever. The right digital branding and asset management strategy can help your brand stand out among the crowd.
A digital-first branding strategy acknowledges that digital platforms are more important than traditional marketing methods in the modern world. People from all over the world connect with your brand through phones, computers, and smart TVs, and digital-first branding allows you to offer a better customer experience and journey.
Digital-first branding allows you to target a specific audience, create a better customer experience, and take advantage of flexible digital platforms.
Digital branding takes time and money, so you might be wondering how it can benefit your business. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of branding and how a digital-first branding strategy helps with that.
Every brand wants to be a household name. Major brands like Nike and Apple are immediately recognizable to almost everyone, and that kind of recognition is a key part of building a loyal customer base.
Digital branding can help you build a strong online presence that leads to increased brand recognition. In recent years, several brands have grown significantly through social media and other digital marketing platforms.
Source: LinkedIn
Not only can digital branding help increase brand recognition, but it also helps educate your target audience about your brand. When people connect with your brand mission and values, they’re more likely to be loyal to your brand.
Today, billions of people use the internet each day. Smartphones give consumers the power of the internet in a pocket-sized device, which means people are constantly engaged with social media and other digital channels.
A digital-first branding strategy allows you to advertise more effectively by connecting with consumers through the channels they regularly use. Plus, you can use digital marketing tools to segment your audience and create targeted ads that are more relevant to certain parts of your target audience.
But, alongside adopting a digital strategy, you need to stand out to cut through the noise. The average person sees over 5,000 ads per day — is your ad one of them? Creative often can help drive good advertising, which helps build brand awareness.
Building customer loyalty starts with sharing your mission and values as a brand. You can have a great product, but some people simply won’t connect with your brand if they don’t understand it.
Your digital branding strategy gives you an opportunity to shape the narrative around your brand. You can tell your brand’s story and show your target audience what you’re trying to accomplish through the products and services you offer.
Source: CleverTap
Customer loyalty is also about how you treat your customers. Part of your digital branding strategy should focus on the customer experience and journey.
When people aren’t familiar with your brand and its products, they’re going to be upset when your prices increase. Price sensitivity refers to how sensitive your customers are to increasing prices.
Let’s take a fast food brand like McDonald’s. While McDonald’s prices have increased with inflation in recent years, loyal customers keep going back. These customers aren’t solely focused on low prices — they keep coming back because they enjoy the food and customer experience.
The same principle applies to any brand. If your brand doesn’t connect with its target audience, your customers won’t be as understanding if you decide to raise your prices to match rising production costs.
Branding isn’t just about building a strong customer base. A good digital branding strategy can also help you make your brand a more desirable destination for top talent.
Brands that are known for compassion and care are often seen as better work environments. When you’re trying to attract top talent in your industry, your reputation as a brand is one of the biggest factors.
Branding isn’t as simple as choosing the right colors, fonts, and logos — various strategies can benefit your brand in different ways. Let’s take a look at some of the popular branding strategies and how they work in basic terms.
Product branding is when you create a recognizable brand by centering your branding strategy around a popular product. The iPhone is synonymous with the Apple brand, but Apple makes a wide range of products for both consumers and pros.
Beverage brands like Coca-Cola and Red Bull also use product branding. This branding strategy makes your products more recognizable to consumers, setting you apart from the competition. As your brand grows and your product becomes more recognizable, it may even become a go-to product for consumers.
Instead of focusing on a product, service branding focuses on a service and the unique benefits it provides to customers. Think about advertising you see from banks and insurance companies — they’re usually focused on how a service can help you.
Service branding allows you to convey the value of a particular service to your customers. It’s not just about explaining how a service works, but also explaining how that service can benefit your target audience.
Take for example LinkedIn personal branding expert Mark P. Jung of AuthorityB2B. He is aware that his B2B-saturated audience has a distinct preference for TikTok over Microsoft Teams. Marrying his professional services (LinkedIn ghostwriting) alongside the opportunistic TikTok outage, he capitalized with a visual that resonates with his audience.
Source: LinkedIn
Separating your service from the competition is key. Don’t just explain what makes your service great, explain what your service offers that your competitors don’t.
Retail branding is about creating a specific customer experience through physical elements like displays and signage. This is the strategy most grocery stores and other retailers use.
While retail branding was traditionally used by brick-and-mortar retailers, it can also be part of your digital branding strategy. Offering a consistent customer experience through your brick-and-mortar store and digital storefront creates a seamless experience.
Retail branding works well with other branding strategies.
Corporate branding focuses on your brand name instead of your products or services. For brands that offer several products or services designed for different target audiences, corporate branding can be an effective way to build brand recognition and loyalty.
Corporate branding is all the stuff you think of when you think of building a brand with a corporate identity. Instead of focusing on your products and services, you’re focusing on your brand logo, how you’re conveying your message, your target audience, and more.
If your business offers a product or service in a very specific geographical area, geographic branding is an effective strategy. Some businesses that commonly use geographic branding include:
People living in New York probably don’t want to hear about a restaurant that’s only in Los Angeles. If you focus on marketing your New York restaurants to consumers in the area, your message immediately becomes more effective.
With cultural branding, the focus is on connecting with your target audience using a culture or lifestyle. Think about brands that go beyond the products they offer to create a culture among their audience.
Harley-Davidson is a great example of cultural branding. Instead of focusing on each individual bike and its specs, Harley-Davidson commercials are designed to make the target audience feel like they’re part of a culture of riders.
If you’re trying to build your individual brand, personal branding can be an effective strategy. With personal branding, you’re your own brand and your goal is to sell yourself to your target audience.
Personal branding is more common among people who use their names for branding purposes. Doctors, accountants, celebrities, politicians, and influencers use personal branding to connect with their target audiences on a more personal level.
With so many major brands across so many industries, co-branding has become an increasingly popular branding strategy over the years.
Co-branding is when two brands come together to create a collaborative product and combine their customer bases. Co-branding is extremely common in the fashion industry, where designers work with popular brands to create exclusive clothing lines. Celebrity fast food meals are another recent example of effective co-branding.
The key to co-branding is bringing together two large, separate customer bases. When a popular artist collaborates with McDonald’s to offer a special meal, fans of that artist and McDonald’s patrons will be interested.
Finding the right branding strategy starts with understanding your brand. Is your brand centered around one product? Do you represent your brand as an individual? Are your customers local, or do you receive orders from all over the country or world?
Certain branding strategies are a better fit for certain types of brands. If you’re a lawyer, personal branding can help you position yourself as a friendly, authoritative figure in your industry. You might also want to use geographic branding to target people in your area.
Developing a branding strategy that works for your brand can take time, so don’t worry if you don’t get it figured out right away. You can even tweak your branding strategy after you get a chance to see how it’s received by your target audience.
The biggest thing to remember is that consistency is key. Keeping everyone on the same page keeps your brand consistent, which is how you build brand recognition and loyalty. Lingo can help you keep branding consistent across teams.
Branding isn’t rocket science, but it’s not as simple as picking a catchy name and a good logo. You have to follow the right path to reach your destination. We’ll take a look at the step-by-step process of branding below.
Before you choose a branding strategy or create your digital brand guidelines, you need to understand your target audience. Look at the people who are buying your product or service and figure out who your typical customer is. The better you understand your target audience, the more you can tailor your branding efforts to them.
There are several analytics tools you can use to learn more about your target audience and your average customer, including Google Analytics and analytics provided by web hosting services.
Your mission statement is a clear way of conveying what you want to accomplish as a brand and how you plan to benefit your target audience.
A clear mission statement helps guide your branding strategy. When you know how you want to be perceived as a brand and how you want to serve your customers, you can tweak your branding strategy to accomplish your goals. Your mission statement also lets your customers know what you’re about as a brand, which helps build brand recognition and loyalty.
Every brand has a story, and customers connect with brands through those stories. Apple is a brand built on innovation, and the story of its founder Steve Jobs is carefully woven into everything Apple does as a brand. Apple premieres products through Apple events, telling the audience the unique story of how and why each feature was developed and how it’s going to help the average user.
Your brand should have a unique voice that sets it apart from other brands. Some brands are serious and professional, while others have a more friendly, light-hearted voice.
For example, Duolingo’s brand mascot has a wacky, but current, brand voice, often taking a direct shot at current events. The playfulness of the green owl mascot often conveys what its audience wants to say out loud, but can’t, or inserts their brand into everyday headlines.
When it comes to finding your brand’s voice, be authentic. Consumers today are smarter than ever, so they know when a brand is trying to sound hip or cool to target a specific audience. Your brand voice isn’t something you should force — it’s something you should discover.
Now that you’ve got all the key stuff out of the way, choose a branding strategy that fits your brand. Product and service branding are great if your brand is largely defined by a product or service.
Local brands can use geographic branding to target locals. If you use your personal name as your brand, personal branding can help you connect with your target audience.
Figure out which strategy works for you and stick with it.
Once you’ve picked a branding strategy, it’s time to put your strategy into action and see how it works. It takes time to build a digital brand, so don’t worry if you don’t see immediate results. Over time, your target audience will become more familiar with your brand and what it’s all about.
Keeping branding consistent is one of the biggest keys to an effective branding strategy. From the customer’s perspective, your brand should appear consistent across every channel and your values as a brand should be integrated into everything you do.
Communicating your branding strategy can be a challenge when it comes to consistency. With Lingo, you can keep everyone on the same page about your branding strategy to make sure you’re using a consistent tone, message, and voice across all teams.
Finding ways to connect your teams is an essential part of consistency in branding, and Lingo brand guidelines offer a simple solution.
Consistency is key when it comes to digital branding. Unfortunately, conveying a consistent message with the same tone across several teams can be a challenge. With Lingo, you can keep every team on the same page and deliver strong, consistent branding.
Lingo makes it easy to create a brand style guide, so you can keep every team and third party on the same page. With custom branding and automatic file conversion, Lingo makes it easy to centralize your brand assets. Contact us to learn more about how Lingo can help you take your digital branding strategy to the next level.