Your FIRST Step to Building a Leading Digital Brand

^{Reading Time: 6 min.}

The two most crucial practices your business can execute to build a solid digital brand are consistently making genuine connections with your audience and building trust. Overall, creating a reliable company brand takes serious time and effort. And the businesses that are willing to invest in that time and effort ultimately yield massive returns in generated leads, conversions, and customer loyalty!

Our three comprehensive steps to building a leading digital brand consist of the following key actions—KNOW, GO, and GROW!

However, in this first 3-part article, we’ll elaborate on STEP 1 of building your digital brand— KNOWING how to establish a brand. So, let’s get into the actions businesses must take during the first step that eventually leads to providing customers with a positive brand experience!

Jump to the digital brand section that interests you the most!

• What is Your Company’s ‘WHY?’
• What’s Your Value Proposition?
• Who is Your Target Audience?
• Do You Know Your Competitors?
• What’s Your Capacity?
• Step 1 Help is Available!

Before your dive, watch this quick video about the online marketing success every business needs to support a leading digital brand!

STEP 1: KNOW and establish the following digital marketing criteria to take the first step in building your business brand.

When you know and establish the following five principles, you’re well on your way to successfully building your brand.

1.  Know Your Digital Brand Purpose

As a business owner, your first step is establishing your company’s purpose by knowing and answering the ‘WHY’ of its existence. And as you already realize, people connect with brands for emotional reasons. So, those they support will typically support and confirm their personal values and beliefs. Therefore, knowing why your business exists and explaining that in your digital marketing campaigns helps people understand the value your product or service brings.¹

And once you’ve defined its purpose— values, mission, guiding principles, and company philosophy, you can begin building from there. In addition, it’s important that you consistently share your ‘WHY’ to establish an initial connection with your target audience.

2.  Know Your Value Proposition

You must also address three fundamental brand-building questions after ensuring your brand has a well-defined purpose with its set values and guiding principles. For example, those questions are:

1. 1. ‘How is our brand different or unique compared to others in the marketplace?’
   2. ‘Why should customers care about our brand?’
   3. ‘What valued solution does our business provide to its customers that no other company provides?’

Answering those questions helps establish your unique value proposition. In other words, you learn what makes your business solution stand out from the rest, for without a distinct differentiator, you have no brand. And once you’re aware of the value you bring to your customers, you can begin developing a brand around that foundation to deliver service excellence to your targeted audience consistently.

An additional element to digital brand development is establishing your positioning statement, which addresses how you want your business to be perceived in the marketplace. In essence, brand building ultimately matches customer expectations to how business owners prefer to be perceived. Then, the positioning statement describes this balance so your brand can bring the business to life for ideal consumers.

3.  Know Your Target Audience Needs & Challenges

After establishing company purpose and value proposition, the next crucial step in building a leading digital brand is knowing who your customers are and what they need. This research consists of the following.

• • Developing ideal customer personas or profiles
  • Understanding their current life pain points
  • Knowing their purchasing behaviors and online search motivations
  • Identifying their current values or what’s most important to them.

Unfortunately, most businesses today focus highly on their ‘WHAT’ and ‘WHO,’ making it strictly about them and what they offer. For them, marketing is about minimal investment and high-end return. Although we understand the significance of yielding a substantial ROI, there is an entirely different focus we must have for brand building.

This focus involves learning how to differentiate our solution and discovering how that difference attracts the right customers². In essence, brand building goes beyond merely having a difference of opinion, like the fun Twix commercials— Left or Right, Choose a Side.

Branding also goes beyond having a greater product supply or a lower price. For instance, once you understand what people need and desire, your brand messaging should eventually equate to the experience they have with your business during an interaction. And a leading brand draws customers into conversion based on the matched value your offering brings to help improve their lives. In other words, your company knows the audience who will buy into your ‘WHY.’

4.    Know Your Competitors

Just as vital as it is to know your customers, you also need to know your competition. Understanding who your industry competitors are and what marketing activities they’re doing or NOT doing always provides you with a marketplace advantage. So, to build a leading digital brand and maintain a competitive edge, you must also learn how to differentiate your business from its competitors effectively.

One of the best ways to leverage the competition is to understand their product or service weaknesses. For instance, you can research ‘What are their customer pain points?’ And ‘How are they addressing them— if they’re addressing them?’ Then, once you’ve explored your direct-industry competitors’ marketing activities, you can start making the necessary adjustments to your marketing strategy. In doing so, you build your brand messaging to clearly communicate that you have the solutions your customers need.

5.    Know Your Digital Brand’s Capacity to Deliver.

Though your business brand is about ‘WHY’ you do ‘WHAT’ you do to maintain a marketing lead, the last thing you should know is your current capacity to deliver consistency. So, for example, ensure your operation is only biting off what it can chew. In other words, keep your product or service offerings extremely focused because, as the old saying goes— “A Jack of all trades is a Master of none….”

So, be the product or service expert in your industry market that customers can always trust to deliver. And when you learn to fine-tune your services and steadily provide quality assurance, two things happen. First, customers will eventually begin to associate your brand with excellence. And second, they’ll view your company as a reliable resource.

Your business deserves a digital brand that best represents its product and service solutions!

If you need help establishing your brand, refreshing, or further defining what you have, we’re happy to help. Connect with us online, or call 281-203-0529 to kick off the New Year with a fresh start!

^References

1. ^{Starbucks— Brand identity/recognition concept. Photo by David Hurley.}
2. ^{Bruce Mars Photo Image—Know Your Customers.}