3 Key Guidelines to Online Branding in 2020

Effective outreach into the public and private spheres for increased brand awareness on the part of the current customer base and the prospective customer requires more sophisticated and thoughtful approaches than in the past. However, many consistent guidelines exist in 2020 compared to other years as to the best manner in which to appropriately brand one’s company to the needs of a 2020 digital environment. Let’s cover 3 keys to online branding, in brief.

Gauge Brand Awareness

The importance of the knowledge of the general public about the brand cannot be understated. The other salient demographic are consistent and devoted customers to the particular brand. Think of the most popular and prominent companies in the world today, for example, Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and the like, most people in most contexts have some awareness about these companies, these brands. This didn’t happen by accident.

They focused in a dual-demographic market strategy with a consistency of their brand via their products, what they’re selling, to the home base of people. Then they gave some outreach in their work to the demographic who are not buying their products or not buying their products as much. This dual-demographic strategy works to keep the customers as customers and to make non-customers become customers: simple.

No doubt, these international companies understand the level and the degree to which they have penetrated various markets, age demographics, ethnic demographics, sex and gender demographics, and so on. This awareness is fundamental to provide a pressure gauge or temperature reading about the areas of coverage and areas lacking it in regard to the company brand.

To your particular enterprise, whether a solo venture or a larger company, you will want to work within the skill and knowledge sets of the team to find and utilize analytics tools and techniques available, even simple social media metrics, to gauge brand awareness in the general non-customer public and in the public who already purchase from you.

Craft Brand Messages

Quite naturally, once a reasonable reading of the factual state of affairs about the individuals who do have an interest in the brand and those may have an interest in it is established, the next steps are the crafting of messages depending on the form of outreach. Some forms of outreach that will work for some mediums will not work in others. Similarly, some demographics cue in to different channels, e.g., Facebook versus Instagram, more often than others.

With the brand awareness gauged, the crafting of brand messages to specific demographics will be important on two levels related to the dual-demographic analysis. On the one hand, the customers will expect a particular kind of consistency in the messaging and in the things deemed attractive to them. Think about the style and ergonomic appeal of the iPhone year-after-year or the slight modifications to the Coca-Cola pops, their branding is consistent to meet the (reasonable) expectations of customers.

If they didn’t please their base, then they’d begin to lose their base who would expect to find their needs met elsewhere, of course. Why wouldn’t they? On the other hand, there are the individuals who have never know about the brand or haven’t fully bought into it. This can be extremely widespread, as in some of the cases with the Chinese tea traditions and the attempts at penetration via the pop industry.

In fact, this was a battle. How would one brand a pop message to a culture bound in many ways to a long perennial tradition of tea drinking? That’s partly on the branding in terms of the outreach along the lines mentioned before regarding age demographics, ethnic demographics, sex and gender demographics, and so on.

Measure Message Efficacy

Let’s say your team has built a killer brand awareness program and a series of drop-dead gorgeous and genius-level on-the-point crafted brand messages, the next questions revolve around the efficacy of the efforts in the same framework. All of this moving forward becomes part of the easier parts of the process.

Basically, in intervals or stages, depending on the required or desired timelines of the company, the ranges of the checkups can be initiated. These checkups would be seeing the effects of various brand messages on the intended audiences, good and bad. This further data can help inform the future forms of targeted, or crafted, branding for the relevant demographics of one’s company.