Guest post by Tara Dwyer.
A digital product brand is a recognizable symbol that distinguishes an organization from its competitors. A company can use its brand to differentiate itself from the competition to build customer loyalty, generate greater demand for its products or services, and attract new audiences.
Image credit: Olya Kobruseva on Pexels
To build a lasting digital product brand, start with understanding how to create an effective brand strategy. The foundation of your success begins with defining your product and the problem you’re solving for people. Brands that create a simple, compelling brand promise—and then live up to that promise—will stand out in the marketplace over time.
Here are 11 different ways you can build a digital product brand that lasts.
Keep Your Website Updated
Your website is the foundation for digital product branding and the core of your online brand visibility. Your site should serve as a digital pre-sales engineer, making it easy for visitors to find the information they need about your products or services in order to decide to do business with you.
Make updating your site part of your routine to keep clients engaged and informed. Hanging onto outdated blog posts and announcements of events long past make your site harder to navigate and make it appear neglected.
Ensure you include CTAs so site visitors know what you’d like them to do next, and detailed contact information (how to reach sales, service, finance, etc.) to make it easy for potential clients to get in touch with you.
The look and feel of your website and other marketing materials help establish your brand identity in customers’ minds. Use a similar look and feel across all marketing materials to reinforce your brand’s value and create consistency among products, services, and communications.
Customers will likely provide positive feedback if they feel their interaction with your product or service was enjoyable and valuable. Posting customer success stories on your website and other digital channels is one type of social proof that can help convince prospects to give your product a try.
Improve Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, of course, a set of techniques that improve the visibility of your website and other digital assets in search results. SEO helps generate traffic created from people who come to your site from organic search results, which often has one of the highest conversion rates.
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By using SEO correctly, people will see your website among the top results when searching for either descriptive phrases (what your company, product, or service does) or topical terms (problems you solve). Success depends on getting the combination of backlinks, on-page SEO, and technical factors right.
Alternatively, you can hire an SEO manager or SEO services consultant who can work on your site regularly, allowing you to update your website for greater visibility and attract more clients to purchase your product or service.
Use Social Media Platforms to Your Advantage
Despite splintering across networks, social media platforms remain a powerful communication channel with customers and prospective clients. Use social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn (B2B), and Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest (B2C) to provide news about your company and products, engage with prospects and customers on these sites, and answer their questions.
Posting updates and photos on your company’s social media accounts regularly helps build visibility for your organization. Being active, responsive, and sharing engaging content from your product or other areas of the business helps promote your brand online. Avoid being spammy by only posting high-quality content relevant to your audience and responding promptly to questions, advocacy, and complaints.
Build an Opt-in Email List
Developing an opt-in email list is vital for nurturing prospects and keeping them interested in your product or service, as well as maintaining relationships and driving ongoing sales from existing customers. Providing value to your audience in the form of informative blogs posts and compelling downloadable assets makes website visitors more likely to share their contact information with you.
Segmenting your list and sending targeted messages keeps you in touch with your audiences, which helps you develop a relationship and better understand their needs and preferences. If you have an opt-in policy (and why wouldn’t you?), when customers make a purchase, they can be automatically added to your customer email list, which is a great way to build customer loyalty.
Your email marketing strategy should include a welcome campaign on the launch date and periodic reminder emails to those who signed up but haven’t purchased yet. Avoid common mistakes like buying lists of subscribers, sending unsolicited messages, or sending your opt-in subscribers an excessive number of emails.
Partner With Influencers
An influencer is an individual with a large social media following (or a small but highly targeted and engaged following) who shares original content with their audience for financial or other compensation. The content influencers may share will depend on their area of expertise, audience characteristics, and commitment to promoting brands.
B2B or B2C influencers can help build your brand by sharing content about your product or service on social channels or blogging about your brand.
To find influencers interested in your product or service, one approach is to share content related to your brand and offer special deals to those who partner with you. Another is to use influencer marketing tools to identify and reach out to bloggers or other influential content creators with a large following.
Create Value for Your Audience
Creating useful content for your audience is vital because they’ll be more likely to share it with others. In addition, branded content is valuable to your audience because it can help them address their needs and pains.
Use sponsored posts on your blog and other media outlets that educate prospects about how your product or service can help them solve problems and get things done. Help people who ask for advice on social channels by offering shareable content, such as a guide to specific situations, so that people can learn from you.
Choosing to sell eBooks (or offer them to B2B prospects in exchange for their contact details) is one great way to build your digital product brand and create value for your audience. Publish and sell eBooks to provide information and content to help customers and prospects solve problems and gain knowledge through your content.
Brands that create and sell eBooks for their audiences are more likely to be shared with others, which helps build a digital product brand that lasts.
Stay Competitive
Although your business strategy should always be market driven, it’s also critical to keep an eye on your competitors. The most impactful element of your brand positioning is how your offerings are different from and better than what your competition sells.
To create a competitive advantage in the market, consider giving your customers special deals or offering free trials of your product or service in addition to offering unique products and service, more advanced technology, and/or superior customer service.
Be current and relevant to the latest product releases and industry trends. Your social media accounts help you stay competitive if you constantly add new information about your upcoming events, customer stories, new content, product updates, and other news.
Additionally, being knowledgeable about cutting-edge technology can help you stay competitive because you’ll be better positioned to be first-to-market with a product or service incorporating the new technology.
Track and Analyze Your Metrics
After launching a new product, service, or marketing campaign and evaluating its performance, track the results to determine what to do more of, less of, or differently. Monitor your analytics, tracking business metrics that can help you determine how well your product and service are performing.
Data analytics will show you the amount of traffic your site receives so you can track the performance and effectiveness of marketing efforts. Monitor conversion rates to determine how customers respond to your CTAs.
Create an action plan for what actions you need to take based on your analytics results and make progress from previous attempts at launching a digital product brand that lasts.
Incorporate Online Advertising
Online advertising can be one of the most effective methods for promoting your brand. It also helps you track the results of your marketing efforts because it’s easy to measure with precision.
Advertising through affiliate networks, banner ads on forums, newsletter sponsorships, search advertising, content syndication, and other popular online channels can help promote your digital product brand.
Ensure the ads you run are relevant and compelling to gain a competitive advantage over other brands with similar products or services. Test different advertising campaigns to a small audience or for a limited time before launching them out broadly, so you can adjust them accordingly.
Advertising through channels like Google Ads allow you to target people who are searching for information about exactly the products or services you offer. The ads promote your brand and lead to a landing page where people take a conversion action, such as downloading an eBook, scheduling a demo, or making a purchase.
Monitor your PPC ad campaign results closely to understand which keywords and search terms bring the most relevant traffic.
Utilize Automation
To save time and resources, you can use business process automation to help accomplish repetitive tasks. For example, you can use social media management software that allows scheduled posts to get posted at reasonable intervals.
Additionally, you can use marketing automation tools for email campaigns by setting up your welcome and sales emails to be automatically sent in a specific sequence to build interest in your brand among prospects.
Automation helps keep your brand visible and can help increase its reach by sending emails at the perfect time for each customer or prospect.
Leverage Referral Programs
Use referral programs to encourage people to share your product or service. To increase sales, offer incentives to your customers who refer others to your business.
You can offer a reward for someone’s first purchase, such as a discount on their next purchase. Encourage customers to refer people through social media by offering incentives for business referrals.
Wrapping Up
Every business must find ways to stay ahead of competitors in providing valuable solutions to prospects and customers. Your digital product brand is your online presence, one that will continue to grow if you can keep customers satisfied and prospects intrigued.
You can achieve this through customer service, building trust with your audience, and providing valuable information or content that helps your buyers solve their problems or get things done faster.
The post How to Build a Digital Product Brand That Lasts appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.
