Digital brand management is more important than ever before, this process of managing the perceptions of consumers who encounter your brand online can make or break your business. That sounds simple enough, but with so many different digital avenues used to get a brand out there and increase customer engagement, and any number of different relationships to look after, it can become a bit of a juggling act.
A modern brand will have a large number of channels it uses to effectively market the company online. That can include everything from a blog, content produced for third-party publishers, Facebook and Instagram accounts, Twitter, a pay-per-click campaign and potentially even more. With so much going on, it’s essential you have a strategy to effectively manage these channels and steer them all in the same direction of boosting your brand’s presence online and ultimately increase conversions.
In this instalment of ‘lessons from the pros’, courtesy of James Williams, the Digital Marketing Manager for Wonga South Africa, we’re going to focus on three simple strategies you can put in place to better manage your brand online.
Analytics, Analytics, Analytics
So important it’s worth the repetition. Correctly establishing your analytics is essential for any campaign. The basics of this will entail ensuring you have the correct goals set up in your Google Analytics account to effectively capture not only conversions, but other key customer dynamics that can inform you of where leads are lost in your sales funnel for example. If you’re conducting a paid search campaign it’s recommended to have your code snippets in place on target landing pages before you even write an ad. If you’re focused on organic search results, then keyword rank tracking will be essential. There’s plenty of pay to use softwares out there that will do this for you, but it’s worthwhile setting up Google Search Console. Using their ‘search analytics section’ and a little bit of excel gymnastics you can create easy to maintain ranking data.
Less can be more
Posting fresh content on your onsite blog and contributing to other third-party publishers is a great way to keep the audience engaged and drive new and repeat traffic to your website. But NEVER should you post new content simply for the sake of posting. More and more online users are shunning weak content and seeing it for exactly what it is, which is usually a flimsy piece of clickbait.
Producing lots and lots of content is fine, and actually very good, but only if it is relevant, of a high-quality and helps your customers in some way. Everything you publish should be quality checked to ensure it is well-written, error-free, unique, well researched and most important of all, relevant to your target market. Anything that ticks all those boxes will enhance the customer’s perception of your brand.
Engage and interact
There’s nothing less rewarding than a one-way conversation, certainly not for the person on the receiving end of the monologue anyway. But that’s exactly how some brands use social media. Rather than looking to engage in a conversation with their customers, they simply pelt them with endless brand messages, which will certainly not win you any friends.
Instead, focus on inviting discussion, joining conversations and sharing other people’s content that you think could be valuable for your audience. Think of the type of businesses you like to interact with online and emulate their strategy. The truth is there is no foolproof recipe for social media success, but with the use of social analytics, you can tweak your approach until you find a strategy that works for you.
Give your customers a voice
Allowing your customers to share their grievances or sing your praises online can seem like a risky approach because you never know what they’re going to say. However, if you stand by the quality of your offering, and have customer services in place to deal with any complaints/inquiries, making your brand visible and contactable via social media can only be a good thing.
By opening themselves up in this way, some brands fear a social media backlash or a campaign of ‘Twitter bashing’, but giving your customers a voice and legitimately trying to serve them in the best way can only reflect well on your brand.
What are your best digital brand management tips? Please share your thoughts with other readers in the comments section below.
