The Year Of Online Branding
With all the buzz of social media last year, its sure to be part of marketers plans for 2010, if not already. But social media might just be a piece of the pie to a much larger picture. Online branding hasn't received all that much acknowledgement just yet, but I suspect that's about to change.
If offline branding is about creating top of mind and becoming synonymous for a product, service, or category, then marketers will want to pay particular attention to what the web holds for them. The conventional branding process is about building a consumer relationship and can often take a decade to build that kind of rapport. But online branding provides the potential to shave years off your strategy.
Using social media, search marketing, and social media, marketers now have the ability to reach larger more targeted markets, often for less money, and be able to track and measure their success in a fraction of the time of offline marketing and branding strategies. Appearing within the top 10 for your preferred phrases, coupled with engaging in online conversations, sharing, using social media tools, and of course advertising, can have a powerful effect. When using a triple threat such as this approach, the repetition begins to build the brand online and creates perceived value. And much like its offline counterpart, Internet branding is a process that isn't turned on like and advertising campaign. But once you've invested 6-8 months in social media or search engine optimization, the value begins to be self-evident.
Online marketing budgets continue to receive greater attention, primarily in Internet advertising. And as more marketers adopt social media within their plans, there still seems to be the matter of utilizing natural search results. This is one of the larger slices of the proverbial pie mentioned earlier. With Internet advertising, you have more control over tracking and creative. You can even split test and measure results the same day in many cases. The verdict is still out on social media, although there are numerous arguments made regarding its effectiveness. But it seems still early to measure. Not things like followers or how many joined your fan page, but real metrics that show value. In a recent study by Gartner, it said that over 75% of the Fortune 1000 companies are using social media, and over 50% of them will be classified as failures. This probably goes back to how successes are measured, but its likely that the one size fits all approach doesn’t work for everyone when developing a social media campaign.
For the year ahead, consider the value your online marketing offers. Social media is still debatable. Internet advertising is more measureable, but still a challenge to work with as the web is so fragmented that a big campaign can eat profits with a media buyer coordinating the entire buy.
Did you know that typical click rates on banners are under 2% and contextual ads in search results are less than 20%? That leaves the large slice of pie, to appear in natural search results when searching for a given topic or phrase. The bad name seo has received with its infiltration of snake oil salesmen has left a bad taste in the mouths of many, but passing it over is like leaving money on the table. In fact, it’s the most likely source of traffic and stands to be one of the biggest contributors to your online branding efforts. Borrowing from the old adage of using a three-pronged attack, the big 3 described above are your path to diversifying and capitalizing online.
Engage!
By Mark Nicholson, president, reactorr online branding
