Create your digital brand
When it comes to your various social channels, it’s one thing to post the occasional article and funny meme - and you may get decent engagement that way - but it’s much more impactful if you do a little bit of work upfront and determine who YOU are as a brand.
What is a digital brand?
Who are you online? On your social channels? Are you formal? Playful? What are your colors? What’s your font?
Digital branding allows you to answer these questions by using a mix of traditional branding (fonts, colors, tone of voice) and digital marketing (online advertising, social media, search engine marketing) to develop a brand over a range of digital spaces.
A few perks of creating an online brand
Whether for a personal page, your business, a website, or digital ad, creating a cohesive look, feel and voice for your digital spaces is essential. A few perks to having a successful online brand include:
Creates awareness of what you stand for
Gives you opportunities to create likeability
Elevates your credibility
Gains trust from your audience
Gains you loyal followers and supporters
That’s LOYAL followers and supporters.
Hard to come by in digital spaces, with so many posts, videos, and advertisements clamoring for attention.
So, where to start? A few steps you can take when thinking about building your online brand is first to determine your goals for your social and digital channels and business as a whole.
Determine your brand voice and personality. How do you want to sound online? Professional? More informal? What’s your vibe? You need to think about that and put it into practice in all of your posts and content you share.
Once you know your voice, choose your look and feel. If you have a professional voice, your designs and look should follow. Same if you’re more casual and fun.
Know what you stand for and represent. What are your values? What types of messages are you trying to convey to your audience?
And speaking of audience, who are these people? Where do they live? What do they do? I’m sure you have an idea of who your current customers or followers are, and that should translate to your online audience as well. But you can also build out from there and think about who your “ideal” audience and customers might be, too.
Do you have competitors in your space? Who are they? What are they doing differently from you? Can you “steal” any of their ideas? Do it better? Keep your friends close and your competitors closer.
Choose a budget. Budgets are more for if you need design help, or want to run a digital campaign, but you want to be sure you at least have some sort of budget in place for those items should the need arise.
And then just apply all of this across your social channels, in your emails, in any other form of communication to your audience, so that it’s all cohesive.
Now, put it all into practice!
Use the new brand you've created in your social and digital content, from videos to graphics and from questions to quotes. With your newly-crafted digital brand, you'll have the foundation you need to build a successful, loyal follower-base and boost your digital presence.