As much as 81% of customers want to purchase from brands whom they trust. This just shows that appearing reliable and trustworthy is one of the essential methods of overall marketing. With the latest technology, branding strategies have significantly changed.
In this article, we will cover the essential tips for creating a digital brand strategy in the year 2024. Some of the methods from this list have been the golden standard, while others are innovative approaches that can get you ahead of your competition.
Current trends in marketing
With the launch of ChatGPT, the internet has been constantly buzzing about the latest services that were powered by artificial intelligence. While much of this news was exaggerated, AI can be truly helpful in creating your digital brand.
We can certainly expect AI to continue growing and finding new uses in marketing and branding. While SEO and video marketing are quite helpful for executing proper branding strategies, they have been around for a couple of years, and we can’t exactly call them trending.
On the other hand, interactive content has become more present. Quizzes, polls, and numerous metaverse-related platforms have seen their rise in popularity. Influencer marketing is also just as popular as it was in the last couple of years.
However, an interesting and emerging trend is certainly voice search optimization. Virtual assistants and platforms that allow for voice search are becoming more popular lately, and this will be an important part of branding in the future.
1. Assessing your brand
Before you decide which of the methods you will apply as a part of your branding strategy, it's important to assess your brand’s values and purpose. Understanding your goals and values can help you make better decisions in the future.
Furthermore, ideas such as mission and vision are still important to define and lay out in front of your audience. Through the understanding of your core values and your brand identity, goal-setting will be much easier and more effective.
Brand assessment can sometimes require outside help. Don’t be afraid to invest in marketing research, which will help you move in the right direction. The sooner you start making the proper decisions, the sooner you can expect results.
As a part of the brand assessment, it’s also important to understand the industry and your competitors. Sometimes, standing out can mean that you aren’t speaking adequately to your audience, while in other cases, it can be a sign of authenticity.
2. Understanding your audience
Just like with brand assessment, understanding your audience is a key step in devising your overall brand strategy. Some differences between brands and platforms can be quite obvious. For example, if you’re attracting younger individuals, a TikTok marketing campaign can be a much better choice than conducting a Twitter campaign.
Gathering information about your audience can be done through surveys that users complete voluntarily. Creating customer personas and segmenting your audience can be the next steps in devising a better brand strategy in the long run.
Understanding your audience is essential for creating content and conducting campaigns that speak directly to your consumers. Keep in mind that poor analysis can result in poor results.
3. Video marketing
One of the branding trends that’s constantly growing is certainly video marketing. Even after years of delivering results, many marketers still swear by video content as their most important method.
An advantage of developing your brand through video marketing is that you’re able to give your brand a face and a voice. You can also create short-form videos that tackle some ambiguities in the industry and attract new people through informational content.
As a part of the video marketing method, you can also choose to collaborate with influencers who have large platforms and can help you with expanding your audience.
4. Focusing on SEO
Optimising your website for search engines is an important method of attracting new visitors through content. At this point, the vast majority of industries and websites have a blog that they user to attract new people.
For example, companies that operate in the software development industry often have a blog where they talk about various tech topics. The same goes for companies that work with cryptocurrencies, healthcare, and basically anything you can think of.
However, a problem with SEO is that it requires experts to conduct it properly. If your business is stationed in Europe, an SEO agency in Cardiff can help you with improving your chances at ranking on Google.
On the other hand, if you’re operating in Asia and looking for local customers, you should conduct SEO in the language that targets your average customer. Again, understanding your audience is quite important for a number of processes.
5. Social Media marketing campaigns
Social media is still one of the most important aspects of a digital brand. People spend hours of their days on various social media platforms. In the context of audience segmentation, it’s important to choose wisely the social media where you will conduct your marketing.
People of different age groups and backgrounds are using different social media platforms. Once you understand this aspect of your audience, you will be able to automate and conduct marketing on the platforms of your choice.
Paid ads and influencer marketing are also complementary methods to social media marketing campaigns. It’s also important to be consistent with your brand’s voice and identity on all of the platforms that you’re using.
6. Utilise data transparency
In the past few years, we’ve seen a number of different regulations emerge. These regulations have brought a lot of benefits for individuals whose information is protected better. However, many businesses had to make changes in their operations to adhere to these regulations.
Properly handling user data and being transparent with how you’re using it can be quite important in presenting your company. Depending on the location of your business and where your customers are coming from, you need to ensure that you’re satisfying the compliance requirements.
If you’re based in California, you should go through a CCPA compliance checklist and ensure compliance. The same process should be done with GDPR if you have European customers or PIPEDA if you’re operating in Canada.
Failing to adhere to these regulations can lead to significant fines and blows to your reputation. It’s best to use a transparent approach from the ground up rather than exposing your business.
7. Impact of AI on digital brand
One of the greatest improvements that AI brought to the world of digital brands is the ability to analyse vast amounts of data. However, it’s important that you understand what type of data is useful for your brand, and to gather it in a transparent and compliant way.
AI can help marketers and decision-makers understand their business and brand better and devise better campaigns.
What’s interesting is that AI can be used in multiple fields. For example, there are influencers that are actually AI. Textual content can be generated with AI and then repurposed for multiple campaigns.
However, it’s worth mentioning that AI-generated content can often lack personality, and one should be careful with using this.
8. Protecting your website
While cybersecurity doesn’t have a direct impact on expanding your digital brand, it sure has a lot to do with protecting your brand. If your website has a flaw that can be exploited
There are a number of tools, such as AWS security scanner, which ensure that your website doesn’t have vulnerabilities. Hiring an agency or an individual to conduct a cybersecurity audit is also quite helpful in protecting your business.
Of course, you can also look for cybersecurity plugins or find developers who will implement adequate cybersecurity rules while developing your website.
Get ahead of your competitors with a proper digital brand strategy
There isn’t a perfect brand strategy. Each company and brand consists of a number of different characteristics, and you will have to do a lot of analysis before you find the most effective method for your situation.
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the essential methods of creating a digital brand. While trends such as AI and AI-powered tools have become more present in the strategies of many businesses, be careful before you make widespread changes to your operations.
New trends also require a trained workforce that will make proper use of the technology. On the other hand, methods such as SEO and video marketing can be more or less useful depending on your industry.
