Today, most businesses rely on the internet to find a larger audience and project their products/services further than ever before. This has led to digital branding, which takes into account the unique channels that businesses use when operating over the internet. By understanding digital branding, companies can put their best foot forward and potentially beat competitors by appearing more professional and relatable.
Digital VS Traditional Branding
To best understand digital branding, it helps to differentiate it from older, more traditional ways of branding a business. Traditional branding encompasses TV ads, billboards and other real-world methods designed to grab people’s attention. Digital branding is more concerned with a business’ conduct online, including social media posts, site design and use of online videos.
Naturally, digital branding works best for companies that primarily do business online, like streaming services, e-commerce stores and iGaming platforms, which all offer a different kind of experience. These businesses are typically run from a website that is designed to stand out and usually adheres to a consistent brand aesthetic. For example, a game site like Paddy Power Bingo uses dark green colouring with pink accents as part of its web design.
Those colours are kept consistent across the companies’ presence online, from their home site to social media accounts and everything in between. Also, since they have a library of games, they have branded games that further push the brand to customers, plus licenced brands including some based on British TV shows like Deal or No Deal. In this case, digital branding follows conventional branding wisdom by keeping colours, fonts and other iconography consistent across the whole website.
Digital branding is often just a small part of a broader digital marketing strategy, which can include planned social media posts, videos posted online and support through SEO. SEO has many benefits, some explained here in this Forbes Leadership column, but it’s more technical and tries to appeal to Google’s search algorithms. Digital branding, on the other hand, appeals to people through memorable aesthetics, a relatable tone and a brand story that customers can get behind. If you’re new to digital branding, we have some tips below.
Digital Branding Tips
There are a lot of digital branding strategies out there, with more still being invented thanks to the ever-changing nature of the internet. Besides consistency being key, we’ve narrowed down some tips that can help any entrepreneur get started in 2024 and beyond.
Have a Brand Narrative
In all types of branding, superficial aesthetic choices will only get you so far. The biggest and best brands tend to have a brand narrative that helps customers relate with the company and its goals besides profit. For established brands, this narrative is usually the brand’s history and the values they picked up along the way. For newer brands, companies should state those values, how they wish to improve their industry and what they hope to achieve in the future.
Don’t Neglect Video Content
Social media is instrumental to how most modern businesses market themselves. Most successful companies have accounts on X, Facebook and other popular sites. However, a noticeable change has taken place with social media content throughout the 2010s. Gradually, users gravitated toward video content over written posts. While there’s room for both, releasing video content allows a brand’s personality to shine by nominating a face and voice that customers can get to know.
Claim a Spot on Google My Business
Google provides a way for businesses to broadcast themselves to their local community and the internet at large. By creating a business profile on Google My Business, companies can list videos, images, social media links, business hours and more pertinent information at the top of search results pages related to the business. Alongside this SEO boost, it makes the brand appear more legitimate and professional.
With these tips in mind, you should have a much better understanding of digital branding and why so many businesses rely on it.