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!

“We all have lobbies. We all have nice bathrooms. We all give away shampoo. What makes the difference is the perception of value.” Jonathan Tisch, President and CEO of Loews Hotel

When choosing a hotel, the customer’s perception of the hotel’s value is one of the largest determining factors in their decision-making. Through branding and integrated marketing communications, how can we help customers see the value of our hotels? Google, who facilitate countless number of hotel search queries are becoming increasingly relevant in how customers perceive hotel value.

Here are the top ways that Google is transforming the industry.

1. Inclusion of prices in Google Maps

Currently in a testing phase available only for English search results within the US, Google Maps now includes hotel price listings in their search results. This service will also grow to include prices listed on the maps themselves both in the inlayed map on the page, and in both traditional Google and Google Map searches.

With Google also pulling customer review information from leading third party travel sites, customers must make a quick value judgment based on hotel name, price, location, number of stars, and the one review included (as demonstrated in the picture below). Paid advertising on Google, also gives the Holiday Inn presence on the first search page, whereas they would normally only be found on the fourth page of the organic search results.

When this service expands worldwide, how will your hotel or hotel chain’s value be perceived?

2. Google’s purchase of ITA Software

Earlier in July of this year, Google purchased ITA, a leading provider of flight and airline data, for $700 million. Recognizing that information is power, ITA provides leading software solutions including a passenger reservation management system, an airfare pricing and shopping solution, an online travel booking engine and an advanced airline shopping mobile application. Google, the proud owner of these highly coveted services, is clearly preparing to move into online travel business. It seems as though its first interest will be in helping consumers find cheaper flights and better schedules, but rest assured hotel booking and pricing will be next.

In preparation for this shift, how do Google’s algorithms currently value your websites?

3. Google Maps- Not just for directions anymore

According to a case study released by Google and InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG), one of the world’s largest hotel companies, the hotel chain’s conversion rates increased 35% immediately following the implementation of Google Maps’ API onto their websites. This integration allowed customers to not only locate the properties on an interactive map, but to search nearby, search directions, and it gave potential customers access to any additional information they needed. Not only do customers spend one minute longer on search engine pages with maps, but visitors are 10% more likely to book a hotel stay if they are able to interact with a map on the hotel’s page.

Adding interactive maps to your website (à la Google) greatly increases the customers’ ease of booking, increasing the perceived value of your hotels to potential and current customers.

4. ExpediaHotelView

Expedia has teamed up with Google Maps and Google Street View to offer web browsers a new online search experience. ExpediaHotelView is currently being tested in the UK, and allows customers to search for a location or hotel, and view all the results on a map. The map provides information including Google street view, pictures, and results from Google’s organic search. This new online service will also allow potential customers to view hotel availability.

How will your audience find you on ExpediaHotelView?

As Google further develops these products and services, it is important to understand how potential and current customers will perceive your brand’s value as they search to find the perfect mix of amenities, location, price and familiarity.

Well, it’s finally here. Google is now integrating real-time results from Twitter, Facebook and Myspace into it’s search, giving users the most update information on any given subject. This is sure to give social media a real awareness boost amongst those yet to embrace them, especially Twitter.

Watch this short video about Google real-time search:

What does this mean for brands and marketers?

Although in constant use by the technorati and celebrities galore, Twitter has yet to fully enter the mainstream. As marketers we know the potential of Twitter to reach out and engage, but for most people, its still an unknown. At MTD, we look to create innovative ways of integrating Twitter into our campaigns. Our recent Christmas campaign for Jarlsberg allows anyone to post a message about their best bit of Christmas on the Jarlsberg Sweet and Nutty Season website via Twitter. This encourages a deeper interaction with the brand and keeps the website fresh and interesting.

Real-time search will also encourage brands to start using Twitter more as a channel in its own right to promote products and services. Twitter, of course, knows this. It’s soon to launch a set of paid for business services which should hopefully make it a more professional tool for marketers.

Follow MTD on Twitter >>

For those of you who remember our old website, you’ll remember that it needed revamping for various reasons. Our new site is fresher, more dynamic, feature laden, and content managed. But perhaps more important than any of those, it’s much more findable in Google.

When we compare the old and new site, we find a dramatic increase in search engine traffic. For example, in the four weeks from November 5th to 30th 2007, the old site attracted 174 hits via key-phrase searches. In a similar four-week period between November 3rd and 28th 2008, the new site welcomed 729 hits. That reveals a whopping 419% increase in organic search traffic.

The old and new websites both benefit from a strong bank of inbound links, so how have we achieved this large traffic increase? The answer is very straightforward, it’s down to great content and best practice SEO. Our case studies, news items, industry news, articles, blog and general pages all contain content which is relevant to a very wide range of marketing related search phrases.

Of course this all takes hard work, intelligence and know-how to get right, but the fundamental principles are simple. If you want the same success for your business, why not get in touch?