Branding is the key for an organization that caries its vision, voice and personality. It is the core of Marketing, and it helps you to define everything your business stands for and what it represents. With branding, a business defines its market and its product or services, and what they want their consumers and public to know about them. Effective branding enables businesses to stand out from the competition and develop a devoted consumer base.

Branding is your business strategy, while Digital Marketing is how you want to achieve these goals and strategies.

Digital Marketing helps to get new customers and keep your existing customers wanting more, while good branding includes attributes like quality, commitment, communication, and convenience, for it to be objective and provide the best services. Branding is a continuous activity that must be done as long as the business exists, as long as there are customers, and as long as the business is making a profit.

"Digital branding" is a set of activities for establishing the company’s presence on the Internet and to draw customers’ attention. The goal of digital branding is to make contact between consumers and the business and provide feedback to the company for improving its products or services for more desirability. Online branding influences the company’s recognition, increases brand awareness and enhances the brand’s image. However, alongside driving sales, digital branding drives the long-term loyalty of your customers.

The concept of “digital branding” includes three components:

Identity — Created through social media platforms and content marketing

Visibility — Spread through digital advertising, SEO and SEM, social media, company’s website, Facebook groups and review sites

Credibility — mantained and grown through customer ratings and reviews.

With digital branding techniques, the company not only tells their story but also creates a community around the brand. Your posts go viral, and you have the opportunity to interact with the customers and get their opinion about the product or service. Thus, strong digital branding is about interaction with your target audience. Marketing, whether done by professional agencies, freelancers, or by the business itself, yields good results when done properly.

Author

Animesh Tikariha 

Who are Social media marketer/influencers? These are basically the content creators on the social media whose content is liked by many people and who are followed by their fans (not to their homes :)) but on their social media pages or youtube channel.

Influencer marketing is a new-age marketing technique to propogate a brand message on digital platforms. It is a medium to create a brand’s social media presence. This is very important that we create the right brand story (through content creators) in the right place (their social media handles) to the right people (consumers).

Today’s consumers have multiple choices on the content they want to see or listen to on digital channels. So, new-age marketing focuses on seeking the right audience and retaining their attention through continuous engagement.

Brands can gain customer loyalty by creating appealing and entertaining content. Brand marketing roles have switched too. Earlier, brands would talk to consumers; but today, consumers talk to other consumers about brands in peer-to-peer networks in the digital ecosystem. This marketing strategy rests on the psychology of trust and authenticity.

A great factor for the trust and authenticity is now built through the social media influencers. Suppose you like the reels of a dance artist, you may like his/her performance or the way they dress or the locations they shoot or any specific genre they use. Over a period of time you may start developing a sense of trust and affirmation to their choices. It is very likely that if the influencer tommorow promotes an 'online dancing course' you are likely to join that OR at least give it a try OR may recommend to someone else. This is the power of Influencer marketing and brands are already realizing the benefits in terms of ROI. The role that earlier only on-screen celebrities used to do in advertising is now also done by many new social media celebrities as "the stage is now open for all.

Author

Animesh Tikariha 

As early at 1991, Regis McKenna, the “P.R. Guru of Silicon Valley,” said in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) that the traditional image of marketing as a “distinct… separate function… subordinate to the core functions” is “totally unsupportable and obsolete.” Famously, he argued that all critical drivers that define how companies do business are “ultimately the functions of marketing”—which means that “marketing is everything and everything is marketing.

With such democratization of the digital platforms the consumer has now got much more powers in terms of making choices and buying. The competition for businesses to gain consumer trust and increase sales has become the highest as ever it was before.

How likely are you to do these activities if you want to buy a 72 inch LED TV ?

1. Short list 4 different brands from 3 different ecommerce sites based on the specifications and price
2. See the actual products at one physical store atleast,
3. Read all of their reviews on 2 review sites,
4. Check on social media what people are saying about each of the brands
5. Post a question on your friends group to get their opinion Well, for a high priced product it will be very likely.
6. You will strike-off some of the above activites for cheaper products but you might remember having seeing one of the brand of those products on any of the social media or internet site.That will influence your decision making sub-consiously if not consciously.

This consumer behaviour analysis and engagement at all touch points is what you will need to get a good understanding of the direction in which your marketing should focus. With so much of consumer data spread across various channels it is now very important to gather and analyze that data in order to build your perfect customer persona who will be your target audience for the marketing and re-marketing activities.