It’s important to have an online and offline brand. Each interaction that your customers and clients have with your organisation contributes to their perception of your brand. Here are some tips to consider, whether you are primarily an online business or whether your online presence simply compliments your real-life image.

Your brand, offline.

If your business has a primarily offline presence, perhaps you have an office location or a storefront, and you recognize that it is important to have an online presence. A website should be simple and should be purpose driven. If customers visit your website for information, it should be clearly and simply available. It should also reflect your brand personality.

Although the website will act as many people’s first impression of your business, the customer service, client relations and physical image of the location of your business will form many of the core aspects of your organisations’ brand.

Each interaction that a customer or client has with your company impacts their perception of your brand. Each interaction must represent your values, personality and must be clear and simple for the audience.

Please read on to discover tips to consider when moving your brand online, or having an online presence.

Your brand, online.

If you only have an online presence as many businesses currently do, you have to use the limited virtual space that you have available to you- whether a website, social network, e-mail or all three, in the best possible way to not only attract customers but to communicate with them as well.

When communicating with clients and customers, brand personality is extremely important. Online this must be done through appropriate use of tone and writing as a personality. Each contact must represent the organisation since there will be few business meetings, no smiling Saturday afternoon faces- the personal touch must be created through online contact.

Having a primary presence online also means that the website and any search engine optimisation initiatives need to be simple and clear. Fortunately, a complex and technically varied online presence will not necessarily impress your audience, simplicity in design has proven successful online. I only need one word to convince you: Google. With simple design, the content must represent the brand personality and must be simple, clear and easy for the audience to interact with.

One of the largest challenges living primarily online is developing effective brand positioning. Without spending a lot of money on online advertising, it is critical that if your product or service is typically found through web searches, that your website is optimised for search engines to find (our previous blog post on writing for search engines).

If you exist primarily online, being accessible to current and potential clients and customers is important. Google offers a useful keyword suggestion tool in their AdWords platform where you can explore keywords without purchasing advertising (as shown in the picture below). Using this platform, Google will recommend keywords that people will search for based on the content of your website. This will provide valuable insight to see if your website actually reflects the words that you thought it would, and it might give you new ideas of words that your customers are using to find you, that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of.

This tool will also tell you how much different suggested keywords will cost, giving you an idea of how popular they are (the more expensive = the more popular, supply and demand!) and will give you an idea of how big your competition is for those search terms.

When you’re based online, location is important. Location is important because physically, you could be sitting on your couch running your vast empire, or you could be in a hotel room. If you have a (really) small business, you could be the person responding to info@yoursmallbusiness.com, sales@yoursmallbusiness.com, support@yoursmallbusiness.com and opportunities@yoursmallbusiness.com. Your virtual location should equally reflect your brand image.

Whether you are primarily based online or offline, how are you going to leverage your brand’s emotional appeal. Although branding does not easily lend itself to one-size fits all solutions that you can read on a blog, emotional appeal for your brand is even more complicated. One of the largest branding challenges you will encounter is how to develop an emotional appeal with customers. What will that emotional appeal be? The emotional appeal will be closely linked to the values that your brand holds and finding consumers who also share those values.

For more on competitive advantage and finding customers who share similar values, visit our post on competitive advantage.  Stay tuned for the more blog posts in our branding series!

Tags: branding, Google, online brand

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 10:41 am and is filed under Brand, Online Services, Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.