Brand Strategy – Where Creativity Comes Together
If you’re the owner of a website, proper branding can reinforce your relationship with your current visitors. It can also help expand your site’s reach by making an effective impression on your unaffiliated, online prospects. But to make sure that your “brand” expresses who you are in the best possible way, you’ve got to define a creative strategy, and make sure this strategy is reflected in every move you make.
The Three “Know-Knows” of Branding
If your creative brand strategy is to be a success, there are three things you’ve got to know: your target market, the specific benefit you offer site visitors, and your online personality.
Target Market: Everything you upload to your site – whether it’s a text or a media element – has a mission. The mission is to grab a certain kind of person, and hold his attention.
Benefit: Once they’re listening, you have to convince your target audience that your site offers meaningful benefits. Substantiate your claims by citing competitors, listing awards, or splashing your credentials front and center.
Personality: Define the tone and look of all your promotional efforts, and stick to it. People like to know what to expect (especially if it involves doing business online!). If you’re careful about consistency, your targeted prospects will soon view your website as an old, reliable friend.
Website Brand Marketing in the Off-Line World
Once you’ve established a strategy for creative branding, make sure that you toe the line 100% of the time – not just online, but also in your non-virtual communications such as brochures, business letters, and even the wares and “attitude” on display in your physical store. Check out your existing materials, and don’t be afraid to say goodbye to things that made sense years ago, but contradict your current strategy.
Be Creative – But Check Results
Even if you establish a solid branding strategy, your results might not be up to your expectations. That’s the bad news. The good news is this – in the online world, it’s relatively simple to get an accurate, timely picture of how your marketing efforts are faring. By tracking click-throughs, online sales and the growth of your market share, you’ll be able to determine if you’re approaching your goals. If not, you can adjust your strategy until you get it right.
Conduit – a Creative Strategy for Online Success
By offering your site visitors a custom-designed Conduit toolbar as a free download, you enhance your creative branding power.
Conduit’s easy-to-use toolbar creation engine puts a world of style and content at your fingertips, allowing you to fashion a dynamic statement that’s in sync with your core marketing strategy. With branded features including radio stations, newsfeeds, video channels, games and applications – in addition to third-party syndicated content – you’ll command the attention of your current subscribers, and attract new ones. And the more eyeballs focus on your toolbar, the more impressions prospects get, and the more successful your strategy becomes.
Lastly, Conduit toolbars are a powerful diagnostic tool for branding bloopers. If the message you’re projecting isn’t affecting your bottom line, you’ll know it. On the other hand, if your creative branding campaign hits a bulls-eye with your target audience, you can expect your Conduit toolbar to do a brisk business in downloads, click-throughs and shares. And that can only affect your business for the better.