Note: This is a guest post from Cynthia Young
7 Digital Strategies To Grow Your Online Brand
Online brand presence and reach are extremely important nowadays, especially if you have a visual e-commerce company that largely relies on Internet exposure. Here are seven digital tips that will help you expand your brand presence and reach.
✔️1 Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing will help you achieve several goals at once. It will help you increase brand awareness which will, in turn, attract more customers. But it will also help you get more conversions without having additional marketing expenses. In addition to that, some of your long-term customers might convert into affiliate marketers.
The biggest advantage of having an affiliate program is that you provide an opportunity for affiliate marketers to reach out to you and connect in order to promote your business. They will simply get either a fixed fee or a commission from every sale made with their help.
In order to create your own affiliate program, do some research and see what other brands in your niche are doing. Then, structure your own program in a similar way. This will ensure that affiliate marketers will not be turned off by a strange structure and will instead be more willing to start cooperating with you.
✔️2 Social Media Promotion
Social media is by far one of the most effective channels for digital marketing. Consequently, social media promotion can be extremely effective if done right. Even if you have never used social media before, it is relatively easy to get started and learn the ins and outs of this
channel quickly.
The most important step is to understand where your audience is and choose the right social media platform that you will be launching your campaign on. If you are a visual brand, you will want to start with Instagram and Pinterest. You could also consider YouTube in the long run. Content on these platforms is primarily visual.
Related: Find playful visuals to use in your social media marketing campaigns
Along with managing your business account and regularly posting content you could also launch a Facebook Ads campaign. This will be closer to the “traditional” forms of online marketing, but it is just as effective thanks to being so personalized and customizable.
✔️3 Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is an important part of both content marketing and social media marketing. It can be used apart from them, but it is most effective when used in tandem. Basically, influencers (aka important online personas in your niche) are the ones promoting or advertising your products or services and that is called influencer marketing.
When it comes to influencer marketing that is not done on social media platforms, you could reach out to bloggers who cover the topics related to what your business is about. Who are the most influential people online in your niche? Those are the ones you want to be partnering with.
With influencer marketing on social media, the logic is similar. Find your influencers, reach out to them, and see if they want to advertise your brand. Be prepared for rejection though. There are many others just like you asking for a promotion. But you will eventually come across someone who will accept your proposition.
Check out this current distribution of influencers recently published by Influencer DB.
Micro-influencers, which are those with fewer than 100k followers make up 81 percent of all influencers on Instagram! These are the people small to mid ranged businesses will be reaching out to to cover their aforementioned business niche. They are the closest in your reach to contact for specific product promotion.
✔️4 Going Global
Going global is a broad term, but at its core, the phrase means going onto a global scale, reaching foreign audiences, and selling on international markets. The idea of going global can be quite overwhelming, but with the help of the Internet, this process has become much
easier, especially for online businesses.
First, you will need to determine which markets you want to be selling and which audiences you will be targeting. For example, if you are currently selling only in North America, you might want to expand either to other English-speaking regions or to Spanish-speaking ones (most South American countries speak Spanish).
Once you know who your aim is, you can build your strategy around that and then start creating relevant content to reach them. If you have a tight budget, it might be better to translate and optimize your existing content instead. You can do this with the help of an online translation service like The Word Point which will cost you almost nothing.
✔️5 Long-Term Branding
Long-term branding is a notion not many business owners and marketers consider, but it is actually fundamental for proper business branding. By this point, you have probably done at least something to help build a certain kind of image for your brand, but have you considered how this might play out in the long run?
If you have been marketing your business as something new and revolutionary, such a strategy might not be effective after some time. After all, you will no longer be “new” (but you still might be “revolutionary”). Don’t make such mistakes.
On the other hand, there is still time to rebrand if you feel like you are heading in the wrong direction. Do some market research and consult experts about the matter in order to work out the best strategy for your particular brand. There is nothing that fits every single online business, so your case might even be special and unlike anything else.
✔️6 Content Consistency
Content consistency is yet another aspect of digital marketing that is often overlooked for some reason. It is absolutely essential to have consistent content across all the channels you use in order to actually succeed in your online marketing campaign. Besides, content consistency is an integral part of long-term branding.
In order to be more consistent with your content, consider setting up a posting plan as well as posting guidelines. Think through what kind of content you create for which channels and how often you need to be creating it in order to post with a certain regularity.
Once you work that out, put together a certain framework for how the content should be created. What kind of mediums do you use? What are the standards? What are the technical aspects of your content? Answer all such questions and structure your replies into a coherent
guide that you and your team will be using to create consistent content.
✔️7 Sales Funnels
Last but not least, sales funnels can be used to attract even more potential customers to your business. More often than not, sales funnels will be divided into four main categories:
- Attracting
- Converting
- Closing
- Delighting
These are the stages you guide the users through in order to convert them into clients.
When a potential customer comes online, they will be looking for a solution to a certain problem they have or an answer to their question. Your job is to explain the nuances of the matter to them and then promise them a solution that you have to offer. If you did everything right, the person will convert.
It is hard to explain such complex structures in a few paragraphs, but the main idea is to get your audience engaged and make them convert in the process. Even if they don’t convert, you need to be sure that they are satisfied, because that is essential for a good brand image.
Final Thoughts
All in all, expanding your brand presence and reach will take time and patience, but with dedication, you will definitely see a significant improvement. Follow the advice in this article and combine tips for more effectiveness.
