7 Tips to boost your digital brand in 2021

The concepts ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ are commonly used in marketing. As building your business’ brand is extremely important for giving the product (& indirect the organization) a voice, identity and a reason for customers to interact. Today, let’s take a look at some useful tips to boost your brand in the digital area of 2021. At 4P square we are on a constant watch out for possible changes and learnings, so feel free to share your opinion with us directly!

Before jumping in the list of tips & tricks, it is important to mention that when improving or (re-)building your digital brand you should always keep the end-user in the back of your mind. Ask yourself the question(s): Are we targeting the right audience? Should we reformulate the message to support our product/service?

As mentioned above, a great way to start building or improving your brand image to understand your audience. Therefor, start building a buyer persona or in other words: your ideal customer. If you have more than one product and/or service, set-up multiple personas. The more details the persona has the more you will be able to target them using different angles.

Understanding the goals, motivation & living-space of your personas helps you to target them using the right media channel and messages across.

Once the buyer personas are identified your brand will start to take shape. The brand identity (what makes your brand, your brand) and the voice (the way you communicate across channels in every copy) are up next.

Here we will be focusing on bringing across the company’s values inside out, reflecting the brand’s image. Think of the questions; how would you like to be represented? And what would you like people to think of you?

Make sure to decide the brand identity and voice upfront and communicate consistently! Brands that get thrown at the public with the idea of ‘now, let’s see what happens’ often do not last long. This brings us to the next step: consistent social media presence.

At this point we know our brand’s persona and we have come up with our brand identity (& ideally, we have our brand bible ready by now). As part of our persona we have mapped out where (on which media channel) our audience is active. Make sure to check what the competition is doing and where they’re heavily communicating.

A/B testing might give you a good idea what sort of posts work best for your specific target audience. If you find to prioritize one platform make sure not to lose sight of the other ones, even if this just means maintaining a decent professional standard. Post regularly while using a consistent house style. Preferably, you can search for social planning tools to help you spread tasks.

Having a blog and sharing your use-cases, industry insights or new releases will become the core of your inbound marketing strategy in most cases. Blogging will consistently generate traffic which turns strangers to new visitors.

Blogging is in most cases a very inexpensive way of keeping your audience interested and generating traffic to the website. But do keep in mind: it takes time. Dedicated time. Not everyone is willing to invest his/her time in writing on a weekly basis.

Pro Tip: make sure the writing blocks are SEO friendly and optimized for search engines.

Prioritizing customer service will particularly be important in an e-commerce environment. The first thing people will do is read the reviews or search for approval elsewhere. If your service is at high levels potential new customers will be more likely to buy as well. Think about the values that you want your audience to experience, like excellent service. Those values are what shape the brand’s culture, and that influence the voice you project to an audience.

When starting or rebranding co-branding is typically not the first thing that comes up. You can take the steps to build it, but that takes time. Until then, one way to get your name in front of a broader audience is to partner with a brand that does have that reach. But don’t just pick any brand for a partnership. Make sure it’s one that’s aligned with yours so it makes sense in the minds of your audience. Here’s what we recommend in seeking a co-brand:

1. Will your partner’s audience be interested in your brand? Is this audience difficult for you to reach without this partnership?
2. Will your audience trust your co-brand. That’s crucial to getting them to listen to you, so make sure your partner reaches the audience in a way that instills confidence.

Do not forget to make sure you have something to offer to your co-brand! It should always be a win-win situation for both parties.

Last but not least webinars are a great digital tool, let’s list some of the main advantages:

• Raise awareness of your business, as well as your products and/your services.
• Reach your target audience with highly relevant and value-filled content.
• Generate more targeted and higher-quality leads for your business.
• Build more trust with your target audience by showcasing your value and knowledge.

Using these steps to (re)brand your product or service will take time and testing, but do not forget to keep it light. Learn from mistakes, follow practices that work best for your specific needs.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts and please share your ideas! Happy branding!

This article was written by Alexander Adams, a marketing consultant at 4P Square. He has a particular interest in (digital) branding and he brings expertise to the overall product marketing strategy.  He’s been active in various industries, ranging from tech to automotive, where he connected dots between digital marketing & sales. You can find him on LinkedIn or reach out to him directly via the 4P Square contact form.