Digital Branding

A Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Strategy, Tactics, Tools and Measurement

Daniel Rowles

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781398603196
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Every decision and action you make contributes to your brand, so it makes sense that everything you do digitally also contributes to your digital brand. Use this bestselling guide to strengthen your brand's online presence and explore core marketing avenues. Digital Branding is ideal for marketers and brand strategists who want to enhance their brand's online presence. It provides step-by-step, practical guidance on how to build a brand online and quantify it through tangible results. Written by a respected Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) fellow, course leader and industry thought leader, it examines core marketing areas such as content marketing, social media, search engine optimization and web analytics.The book delivers a robust framework for planning, brand identity, channel selection and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns, and includes lessons from the BBC, Imperial College London and Hootsuite. Now fully updated, this third edition features new content on brand authenticity, ethics and meaning, as well as updates on social media regulations and social media platforms such as TikTok.

Part One

Digital branding in perspective

Introduction

Let’s start by saying what digital branding isn’t. It isn’t about logos or visual identity and it certainly isn’t about celebrity endorsements and big sports team sponsorships. What digital branding is really about is the sum of our online experiences. These online experiences may be influenced and impacted by logos and sponsorship, but we need to understand branding to be something much more than visual identity.

Branding has fundamentally changed because of digital media. Digital has led to two-way communications between brands and consumers – social media means that we can now talk directly with the brands that we use every day. In fact, most communications via digital media don’t even involve the brand anymore and are now directly between consumers. We only need to look at review websites such as TripAdvisor to realize that what consumers are saying about us is more important than what we are saying about ourselves.

A traditional view of branding

When I say that branding isn’t about visual identity or logos many people will be shocked. I’m not saying that these things are not important, but what I am saying is that they are an increasingly small part of a much more complicated picture. Your logo and the visual aspects of your website design will certainly impact on a consumer’s perceptions of your organization, and they mustn’t be overlooked, but the reality is that we now experience things in our connected world in a much more complicated way than previously.

The number of different online touchpoints (points at which we are interacting with a topic, product or organization either directly via something such as a website or app, or indirectly via a search engine results page or a social media discussion) we make before making a purchase are increasing. We are seeking more sources of information and are assigning trust differently. Gone are the days when marketing consisted of putting your product into the hand of a celebrity in a shiny 30-second TV commercial and thinking your efforts were complete.

This shift to dialogue rather than broadcast means that the traditional approach to branding is no longer sufficient. We need to understand how search, social media and mobile are impacting our target audience’s perceptions of us and how it is impacting their likelihood of buying our products. We also need to do this in a measurable way.

It’s all digital

Although this book is about digital branding, it is not only digital that creates your brand. It is every experience that your target audience has of you. From your call centre employees’ tone of voice through to the type of paper you print your business cards on. The fundamental shift, however, is that all of these things are tied together by an online experience.

What do you do while you are watching TV? Well, according to Nielsen more than 85 per cent of us will be second-screening on our mobile devices (Nielsen, 2021).

The reality is that our mobile devices are bridging the gap between our online and offline experiences, so that even broadcast media needs to carefully consider the online interaction it will cause.

Brand awareness as an excuse

I started this book by saying that brand awareness is a phrase that is often used as an excuse to justify digital activity that doesn’t have clear objectives. Let’s take an example. Many organizations have Facebook pages. Yet most organizations have no idea as to why they have a Facebook page.

There is a body of research called the Social Media Benchmark, a series of studies carried out by the Chartered Institute of Marketing looking at how organizations of all types are using and being impacted by social media. What is abundantly clear from each stage of this research, however, is that the majority of organizations are not using social media effectively, but they are doing more of it!

We will look at this in more detail in Part Two, Chapter 5. In this part we will explore what digital branding really is and how it means that branding has fundamentally changed.

Business to business

When we talk about brands and consumers it is easy to assume we are talking about a business to consumer (B2C) situation. In fact, all of the principles we are discussing equally apply in a business to business (B2B) environment as well. As the potential customer in a B2B scenario, we are still an individual going through a decision-making process. Although the buying cycle may be different and the decision-making process motivated by different factors, we can still map out and understand how digital branding is having an impact.

In reality, the process of mapping the impact and value of what we do online in B2B is even more apparent because the majority of B2B purchases are actually made offline and we need to understand what role digital is playing in making that sale.

01

What digital branding really means

A traditional view of branding says that a brand is: ‘Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers’ (AMA, 2017). In fact, the word brand is derived from the Old Norse word brandr, meaning ‘to burn’, and was used in reference to marking cattle by burning the owner’s brand onto them.

This idea of branding has been developed over the years to factor in a far more extensive set of considerations. As well as this idea of visual identity we may also consider the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, attitudes and so on that are associated with a brand. This set of considerations builds up our brand image, and we may also talk about our experience of a brand as our brand experience. The best way of thinking about it, in my opinion, is that brand is the personality of something.

How digital has changed branding

If you could only get a feel for someone’s personality by them telling you things about themselves, we may end up with a very shallow understanding of them. We may also have difficulty believing in the personality that has been constructed – and we may start to question the motivations behind what they are telling us about themselves. That is exactly the situation of commercial branding that uses broadcast channels such as TV. A personality is sculpted and then we are told what the personality is. We don’t get to discuss, engage with and really understand the true personality.

Digital media now means, however, that the conversation is no longer one way. I can challenge, ask questions and develop a truer picture of the brand. I can see through a sculpted brand and start to see it for what it truly is. This can be a scary thing for many traditional brands. It can also be a huge opportunity.

Brand democracy

I was originally switched on to the idea of brand democracy by a good friend of mine and renowned inspirational speaker, Jonathan MacDonald. Brand democracy is the idea that your brand isn’t what you say it is, but rather the sum of what everyone else says it is. This has huge implications for not only how we manage our brands, but also on how we need to change the very nature of our organizations.

You can read Jonathan’s original, and often challenging thinking at www.jonathanmacdonald.com.

Global soapbox

If brand is essentially the personality of something, digital media gives us the ability and opportunity to understand the true personality of something. We can then use that understanding to help guide us in our decision-making processes.

This is a great opportunity from a customer point of view. For example, it means that instead of being put on hold for an hour when phoning a call centre and having little choice but to tolerate it, I can now go straight to one of many social media channels and make my frustrations very clear and very visible. I now have a global soapbox with access to all of the other potential customers out there, and I can impact a global organization’s brand in a way that was not possible before (or, at least, was incredibly difficult). That highly visible complaint then becomes part of other people’s brand perception (fairly or not) and suddenly the years of building a brand can be tumbled very quickly. This is a very much changed environment for businesses to operate in – if they ignore this change then it can lead to problems.

This ability to engage with and research into a brand can also be looked at from an even simpler point of view. Perhaps I am researching buying a car or a B2B service. I can now do a lot of research and inform my decision before I speak to the car dealership or service vendor. When I do make this final step I am far more informed and have developed a fairly in-depth perception of the brand before I engage directly with them. In fact, from information I glean online I may have opted out from even considering certain brands. That information may have been on a third-party website in the form of a review or comment from someone I have never met, but I may trust it over the voice of the brand itself.

Brand perception

If I search for you or your brand in Google or YouTube, what will I see? These search results, governed by the algorithms of these respective websites, represent what your potential customers will see when they search for you. Is it great branded content and satisfied customer reviews, or bad news stories on third-party websites and negative reviews? Essentially you have control over what shows up, and a combination of creating great content, building advocacy, creating the right environment for gaining positive reviews and understanding and working with the platform algorithms is key to seeing the results that you want.

Social media fail

This fast-changing environment and the slow pace of businesses to adapt to it is leading the social media disaster stories that we see on a daily basis on the internet. Some of those stories will be highlighted later in the book in order to see what we can learn from them, but they generally have a number of things in common. Most social media disasters demonstrate a lack of knowledge of how to practically use a particular social media channel, or show a belief that the brand can manipulate the channel in some way and get away from this need for authenticity and transparency. The other common theme is that of failing to understand the changed role of the brand in this two-way conversation. All of these themes will be explored in Part Two when we look at social media.

Traditional brand metrics

Traditionally, brand has been measured by asking questio...