Online Branding:
As businesses and a business owner, whether you are running an Etsy shop out of your basement you have a restaurant or are running a large national company you need to have an online branding presence. Your brand needs to be visible online. That is where the eyeballs in today’s world are and as a business, you need to be where the people are looking.
A survey done recently by Yelp reveals that 85% of consumers are using online searches to find a local business shows that there are over 3.5 billion google searches daily worldwide with about 50% of those being on smartphones or mobile devices. So, your brand needs to be where people are putting their attention. Your brand needs to be where your customers are doing their research, socializing, and spending their time. If they are not finding your brand online they are simply not finding you.
According to Inc. magazine, about 60% of all small businesses in the U.S. (1-5 employees) don’t have a website and of that only, 12% have a Facebook page for their business. So what this says is that the millions of people that are doing their shopping, socializing, and business online every day are doing business with those brands that have websites, social media pages and an online brand presence.
What makes up your brand? Branding, put simply is your mission as a company. It shows who you are and what your company is about. This is done mostly through your logo, your tag line, mission statement and the messaging your company puts out daily on social media and other marketing platforms both new and traditional.
So let’s breakdown the two main components that drive your online brand and their individual importance.
Website Branding
Every business large and small needs a website as part of their online brand presence. A website needs to be a part of the overall online brand protection strategy for a business. There are currently over 200 million active websites and as a business you need to have your brand visible in this way. A website design doesn’t have to be complex, fancy or overly complicated but most consumers that are doing business or shopping online look at companies that have a website as a sort of validation that the business or product they are looking at is legitimate.
If your brand doesn’t have a website and your competition does the chances of you earning the customers trust and ultimately their business goes down.
Social Media
No matter what business you are in your current customers and your target market or ideal customer is on social media. Your brand needs to have presence on the main social media platforms. You need access to those eyeballs to those customers. They need to see your company name, your message, your logo, your brand, and your branding. The major social media platforms that your brand needs to be visible on are, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. These are all opportunities for your brand to reach new potential customers and drive them to your website or get them in the door of your local business or get them to reach out and make a purchase from your business.
Additionally your branding on your website and social media needs to be cohesive. The logos needs to match, the mission statement and tag line need to be the same. The color scheme and fonts need to be similar so that no matter what platform someone looks at, they see the same brand and get the message.
So take a look at what your online brand protection, your company is doing with its online strategy. Take a self-assessment and look to see if there are areas that your business needs to work on, develop or put into action and start building up your online brand protection presence today.
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