I'm Ash, a Product designer with an affinity for coffee and design. I've been designing for about 8 years now and had the privilege to work on some great projects. I also love music, food, wine, and a day out.
Digital Branding in 2022 (Definition, Benefits, How-to & Agencies to do it)
by Ashwin Mason
Updated
in Software Review
In today's world, without a digital presence, any brand or business is not going to attain much height. From social media to SEO and reaching out to influencers for the promotion of your brand, digital branding involves a number of important steps.
If you’re the owner of a brand struggling to establish itself in the digital world, you’re surely in dire need of learning the art of digital branding and how to utilize it to make a mark in the digital industry.
In this article, I’ll talk about digital branding, how it works, the benefits it brings to how the brand is perceived, a step-by-step guide as to how you can get started with digital branding, and also provide a list of the best and most innovative digital branding and marketing agencies in recent times.
So, make sure you read this article till the end and boost your brand’s digital journey.
What is Digital Branding?
Digital branding is a branding technique that utilizes different tools and platforms and a combination of internet branding, digital marketing, and online marketing to develop a brand on digital venues such as social media, the worldwide web, and device-based applications.
This form of branding is primarily chosen to create a knowledge base for a brand and bring awareness in the minds of customers and digital resource users to diverge from having a simple physical brand reputation and building a digital one.
If you really want your brand to become bigger, grow more, and be considered ahead of time, then you’re surely going to want to implement digital branding and make sure that the style, colors, logos, strategies, research, and development of your brand are done in accordance to what works digitally nowadays.
Difference between digital branding and digital marketing
A popular question that people from all brand owning backgrounds ask me is, what’s the difference between digital branding and digital marketing? Aren’t they the same things?
Well, to answer you, no.
Digital branding and digital marketing are actually not the same things. However,we can say that digital branding utilizes a bit of digital marketing and internet marketing in its approach. To make things clear, let’s look at the goals of both these strategies and techniques. Let’s consider digital marketing first.
The entire purpose of digital marketing is to grow a brand’s sales, generate more leads, and convert them into customers more effectively.
However, if we take a look at digital branding, our purpose with this technique is to provide our brand name with a digital platform awareness. We want to connect the digital world with our brand’s products and services so that our brand can be established and recognized among others digitally.
In doing that, digital marketing can be used. But still, both the techniques are vastly different. I hope you’ve understood this difference well because it will help your brand very well if you have.
Benefits of Digital Branding
If you’re a brick-and-mortar business, you may be thinking, exactly what benefits makes digital branding offer; Well, lucky for you, I’ve made a list of benefits that you’re going to find incredibly useful for your brand. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Creating relevance
Everything is digital in today’s world, from advertisements to social pages to websites, shops, and everything else. By utilizing digital branding, you can keep your customers afloat and engaged, and they won’t get bored or think that you don’t care for them as you’ll actively be adapting to the changes to reach them.
Beating Competitors
At times, competitors in your field might try to overtake your progress and customer base simply because their strategies are better. Well, if you make your digital branding technique strong, you’ll stay on top of the competitor's food chain without a worry in the world.
Encouraging Interactivity
By building a website for your eCommerce store, a social media page with polls and Q&As, an app with interactive elements, you’re giving your customers and potentially leads a sense of personal control. This control and interactivity drive your brand’s awareness and success if it is well done.
Connect to Larger Audiences
According to research, more than 4.5 billion people are connected to the internet digitally. So by adapting your brand to go digital, you’re going to connect it to larger audiences interested in your particular niche and buying your products and services.
Potential to Grow
A brand is only as good as its potential to grow bigger. If you have a proper digital branding strategy and you’re not simply throwing caution to the wind, your brand won’t only establish itself. Still, it will also grow significantly faster and better with organic results.
10 Steps of Effective Digital Branding
So, you’re ready to use digital branding to bring your brand to heights of recognition and awareness in the digital world; Here are 10 of the most important steps you’re going to take to get started with effective digital branding right off the bat.
1. Identify Your Customer Base
If you take a look at any established digital brand out there in the market, you’re going to see that they have a targeted audience that they aim their products and services towards. So that’s what you need to do with your branding approach as well.
Basically, it would help if you mapped out all the primary target audience, secondary audiences, and all the potential people who would be interested in utilizing your brand’s products and services to give you profit and revenue. Once you’ve identified your customer base, you’ll be able to take the right steps towards bringing your business into their view.
You can use the Hubspot's user persona guide to identify them: Make My Persona
2. Design Your Online Presence
This is a very crucial step in digital branding. If you already have a logo and a physical store, this step won’t be challenging. But if not, you’re going to start with a logo, a theme, and colors that will bring audiences towards your business with an attractive flair.
After creating a logo, you will move on to the other half of this step which involves creating your own website. A fully functional, responsive website is essential for any business that wants to get recognized and known by the population.
Now when people search for you brand name, they can find you here.
You can use Webflow to create your own custom website. P.S I run this website using Webflow
Once these steps have been completed, we can move onto the next ones.
3. Utilize Digital Marketing Avenues
Digital marketing, as I said, is an integral part of the digital branding process actually. There are several marketing avenues, including
Podcast
Email
Pinterest
Paid Adverts
Social Media (Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram, etc)
Word of mouth
and many other platforms where you can market your brand on a large scale.
With the help of these marketing channels, you’ll be able to create your online presence from the ground up. First, make sure you develop a high-quality digital marketing strategy that works well with your business and reaches the people you’re targeting as potential customers. If this step succeeds, continue and repeat because it will generate more conversions over time.
4. Focus on SEO Blogging
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your websites, landing pages, and social media presence optimized in terms of keywords, content, meta descriptions, and links for search engine result pages.
On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks. Source
A huge application of SEO that really brings a lot of value to a business is blogging. You can utilize different tutorials and techniques to raise the SEO game of your blog and bring it onto the first page of the SERP (Search engine page results).
If you’re successful in learning and implementing SEO blogging about your products and services, then you’re surely on the right track to glory on the digital scene.
5. Make Use of Automation
Automation in the digital and internet world is life-changing. But, especially for a growing and thriving business, manually dealing with everything can be quite difficult. So, utilizing automation is surely a part of the digital branding process.
Well, to automate proceedings, you can automate whatever is capable of being automatically done. For example, you can utilize email automation, create e-stores that log purchases, create landing pages that generate leads automatically, and so on. This automation will bring a lot of ease, profit, and efficiency to your business, helping it grow faster.
Like Jarvis for writing your business content online : Jarvis
6. Interact with Customers
A business is only as good as its customers think it is. Customers are known as free advertisers as long as they’re happy. But if you do not involve the customer in your decisions, you won’t keep them very happy with your business ideas.
Recently, Superoffice asked 1920 businesses professionals to share their number one priority for the next 5 years.
The results? Customer experience (or CX) came in first (beating product and pricing).
That’s why, in your digital branding strategy, you need to bring interaction and personal engagement. You can create surveys, take feedback, ask questions, deliver on promises so that the customers feel cared about and feel like they have a say in your business. That’s how businesses and their customers grow as one unit.
7. Utilize Competitor Analysis
In today’s world, no niche is ever unexplored. There are always going to be competitors for your business.However, you must’ve seen many companies rise from the ground and overtake some of the first companies to ever work in a niche.
That’s all with the power of competitor research and analysis. Identify the rights and wrongs your competitor is using, build a better strategy, observe results, and outperform them to sit on top of the competitor's throne.This technique is very widely used in the digital market, and you’re going to have to use it as well.
This step is directly related to competitor research actually. Nowadays, customers and leads often see the same strategies and techniques being repeated and the same business models being applied again and again without any fresh approach.
This can be problematic if you’re looking for brand recognition. So, what you need to do is bring something unique to the table, even if you’re working in an old niche. You need to give the audience something to know you by, something they aren’t being offered by anyone else. That’s when they’ll think of your brand when they think of that feature.
9. Advertise Your Brand
Digital marketing doesn’t just end right away. It is ever-lasting as long as your company is afloat because new customers will always be welcomed and cherished.
Once everything in your brand is established and ready to be recognized by audiences, the actual digital advertisement phase begins. The first step is to utilize paid social media and platform advertisement.
The second and most important step is approaching influencers and celebrities for promotions. And the final step is a digital content advertisement. All of these techniques will bring a lot of people knowing about your business products and services.
10. Change things up to see what works best
Digital brands never stay the same. They keep updating, becoming better, and more well-equipped to the customers' tastes and the changes that occur on the internet and digital side of things. That’s why you need to continuously test different designs and methods for your business's success.
A/B testing is when you test two designs of a single thing parallel to see which performs better.
Only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests to improve conversion rates. (HubSpot, 2020)
Using this and other comparison strategies, you can truly make your mark in the digital world and take your brand to the best level that it can get to.
Top 5 Digital Branding and Marketing Agencies
If you’re not on board with doing all the hefty work in digital branding yourself and you want a proper experienced digital branding agency to cover for you, then that’s a genuine possibility. So let’s take a look at the top 5 digital branding and marketing agencies you can find on the internet and reach out to.
When you’re thinking of achieving your digital branding goals with a minimalistic style and simplistic approach, the first branding agency that comes to mind is none other than Beyond. Their approach towards digital branding is simple and elegant.
Projects
They utilize web development tools, design elements, and branding services to give you exactly what you’re looking for in terms of the overall look, aesthetic, and target that you want to display to your audiences.That’s why I would definitely go to Beyond if I’m looking for a digital branding agency for my own brand if I don't do this myself.
Another digital branding agency that is known for its elegance is Crafted. What Crafted has to offer is a very light and calming design process along with complex tools that create the most miniscule yet important elements of detail for your digital branding service.
Works done
Their website is the representation of their work. It is simple, elegant, get their point across well, and utilizes a motto that targets the audience you would like to, yourself, with your brand. So, you should definitely consider them when looking for a digital branding agency.
FlightPath is a more advanced, technically moving digital branding agency that focuses on delivering unique and flavorful designs for digital branding because they believe that the connection between a brand and humans is based on uniqueness and creativity.
Projects done
A big part of their website is animation. And that’s what you should be expecting from them as well. They’ll utilize a lot of great animations for your projects and build a kind of framework that would entice the audiences to bring your brand to their minds whenever they’re thinking of unique perfection.
If what you’re looking for is a top-rated digital branding and design agency that offers the best choices int erms of themes and the best combinations for designing your website’s UX and UI, then Tangent is going tobe one of your considerations without a doubt.
Works done
Tangent utilizes showreels on their website to give you an idea of what they have to offer. They are clear with their message, yet they forward it relatively simple and still look attractive while doing it. So, they’re surely one of the top 5 digital branding agencies as of now.
Only digital design isn’t all you’re going to need for a better digital business presence. Digital marketing will play a vital role in making your business and brand recognized and successful in front of competitors.
WebFX is arguably one of the top-rated digital marketing agencies that you can contact for SEO, marketing,and analysis services. They know what your digital presence needs to be highlighted among the competitors,and they’ll make sure your brand gets all the spotlight it needs to succeed in its niche.
Summary
What is digital branding?
Digital branding is a branding technique that utilizes different tools and platforms and a combination of internet branding, digital marketing, and online marketing to develop a brand on digital venues such as social media, the worldwide web, and device-based applications.
Difference between digital branding and digital marketing
The entire purpose of digital marketing is to grow a brand’s sales, generate more leads, and convert them into customers more effectively. However, if we take a look at digital branding, our purpose with this technique is to provide our brand name with a digital platform awareness.
How to do effective digital branding?
Identify the customer base
Design your online presence
Utilize in digital marketing avenues
SEO blogging
Make use of automation
Interact with customers
Utilize competitor analysis
Bring something unique to the table
Advertise your brand
AB testing
The benefits of digital branding
Creating Relevance
Beating competitors
Interactivity
Connecting with larger audiences
Potential to grow
Digital branding agency
Beyond
Crafted
FlightPath
Tangent
WebFX
Conclusion
Digital branding is an integral part of your brand’s online presence. Without a proper technique, you won’t bring more awareness to people about your products and services. That’s why you must utilize the aforementioned techniques to get started with digital branding and move your way up the success ladder. Ihope you have a wonderful experience with it.
Article by
Ashwin Mason
I review the best software for freelance designers, photographers, and developers to run their businesses and hire the most appropriate freelancers for your project.
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