We’re often asked, “Where do I start to be successful online?” The answer is always the same: “Start by creating your digital brand.” Make sure your company name, identity, and brand can be found, understood, differentiated from the competition, identified as excellent in something, and symbolize seriousness and trust.
Creating Your Digital Brand: An Option or a Requirement?
When we start an online business or want to take our physical business online, we usually focus on sales. Of course, using the internet to sell a lot or sell more is a common goal. And then we say with enthusiasm: “I’ll create a good website, invest a little in advertising, and start receiving green bills, lots of dollars…” until the harsh reality wakes us up, hopefully before we’ve lost all our investment and valuable time.
Why does this happen? Because you’re skipping a crucial step. And not just any step, but the most important one in the process: creating your digital brand. In today’s business world, people want to do business with entities (companies or individuals) they know and trust.
Our website has a constant theme: the famous Three-Step Ladder to Success Online: You Know Me; You Recognize Me (as good at something); and You Trust Me. Only after you’ve gone through this process will they buy from you.
Your potential customers need to know who you are, how you got where you are, what attributes identify you, what you’re good at or better than others, and how you express your loyalty to those who buy from you. If the whole package leaves a positive impression, they’ll trust you and buy your products and services.
And “the whole package” starts with your willingness and ability to create your digital brand. Let’s see why creating your brand is so important in the digital world:
• Your brand is the first introduction to your business and summarizes everything you and your business represent.
• Your brand sows, cements, and promotes your credibility, showing you as a real person and someone with a purpose and specific skills.
• Your brand tells a story: the story of your relationships (with customers, employees, collaborators, suppliers, and entities in your environment) and your ability to meet the needs of your target market. • Your brand extends and transfers its attributes to the quality of your products, your post-sales service, and the perception that remains in the minds of your prospects and customers after each interaction.
And that, dear friends, is something entrepreneurs should engrave in their hearts: perception counts. Then, all your efforts to create your digital brand should be focused on solidifying and increasing the positive side of that perception.
Creating Your Digital Brand is, Above All, Creating Brand Awareness
According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is “a name, term, symbol, or any other characteristic that identifies the goods and services of a seller as distinct from those of other sellers.” But this definition is missing a crucial part:
| A brand is people’s idea, concept, or image when they think of certain products, services, or activities of a particular company or business. There are emotions involved in this equation, and it’s precisely this combination of physical and emotional factors that trigger the reaction that precedes the GREAT DECISION your audience faces: to buy or not to buy, to buy from you or someone else, to buy now or later; to buy YOUR product or something similar that replaces it. |
So, if we continue with the logic we’ve been developing so far, creating your digital brand starts by making people aware of your existence and what you do exactly, making them identify and recognize the attributes of your brand and, above all, the benefits that your products or services can provide.
If they know, identify, and recognize the purpose for which your products or services serve, you’ll create brand awareness, one of the most important steps in the sales process.
However, for your business to survive and develop, it’s not enough for people to know your brand. You need to make them remember it.
Creating Your Digital Brand is Also Creating Brand Recall
“The people have a long tongue but a short memory,” said the ancient Greeks. So, it’s not enough for people to identify you today and associate you with the benefits you provide. It’s essential to make them remember you, to make them identify you today and tomorrow, to transform “knowledge” into “positioning“.
True brand awareness is achieved when people’s knowledge of what you do and for what purpose is positioned in their minds in such a way that when they’re presented with a certain need, a “hidden” trigger will fire a memory, a feeling, a piece of knowledge, and a desire to use your product or service at that precise moment, in that situation, and to solve that need.
Everything else they tell you is “empty theory.” If your efforts to create your digital brand don’t lead to an “action” – a purchase or at least a request for more information, then you’ve achieved very little.
I hope you understand me well so far, but I know you’re thinking it’s too complicated, that it’s better to stick with what you’re doing and not get tangled up in all this because you won’t be able to achieve it… I felt the same way once. We all do. But it’s necessary, viable, and possible. And I’ll show you how to break it down into 5 Essential Steps.
The 5 Essential Steps to Create Your Digital Brand
Building a brand doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time—sometimes a lot of time—but there’s always a “day zero” to start, and that should happen as soon as possible.
Phase I: We’ll call this the “conceptual stage” of creating a brand, the part that maybe least likes everyone. Most of the requests for help I receive are related to this step. It’s tedious, I know, and if your strong suit isn’t a verbal or written expression, then it will be challenging, but you can’t avoid it, and it consists of 5 steps:
- You must determine the “target market” for creating your digital brand and be as specific as your business allows. In other words, who are your products or services directed towards? For example, experienced entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs, young people about to enter the University, seniors, single mothers, etc.
- You must define your “brand statement,” which in some cases is divided into “vision” and “mission,” and in others, is reduced to simply answering the question of how you want to be known and remembered.
- You must research the “leading brands” in your sector, your geographic area, etc., and determine how to differentiate yourself. You’ll be intimidated by how big and strong some of them are, but believe me, there’s always something you can do differently, even better.
- Therefore, you must identify, structure, and highlight those attributes that make you different, better, or at least competitive in certain aspects: perhaps the materials you use, the finish, the presentation, your return policy, your post-sales service, and many others, depending on the case. Sometimes, being different in just one aspect is enough.
- Give your brand its initial personality: in other words, its graphic identity and even its voice. Just don’t forget that it’s not enough to have something; you must communicate what you have or can do, so the design of your “messages” is just as important as your logo and slogan.
Of course, each of the previous steps must be carefully considered before being exposed to the physical world and inserted into the digital world.
Step II: Now it’s time to design your Digital Presence, which means your website and all the platforms where your brand will appear. The first impression counts, so the design of your website, your social media pages, and even your emails, memes, and other forms of expression must be very careful: aesthetically acceptable and functionally operable.
But second impressions also count. And fifth impressions. And all of them. Therefore, the adjective “memorable” should not be exclusive to the initial design of everything but to everything you do to build and create your digital brand. And memorable doesn’t mean you have to replicate the Sistine Chapel or the Eiffel Tower. It means being good enough to generate a positive impression in the memory of your target audience.
This is when you take the 5th step of Step I and design, redesign, test, and re-design your logo, main slogan, corporate identity in general, and the essence of the messages you transmit from the perspective of the perception they generate.
Step III: Now comes the “acid test.” It’s about exposing your logo, website, social media pages, memes, emails, etc. to the eyes of friends (children are very helpful in these cases) and colleagues, not to hear praise, but to have them “try to destroy everything you’ve created,” criticize you, incinerate, and propose ideas and alternatives that will help you perfect what you’ve done.
The key is to listen to everyone and then draw your conclusions. You must be very humble to recognize that you might have made a mistake and that many things could have been done better, but you must also be as arrogant as to insist on what is truly part of your idea. Remember that the vision of some creators who opposed the “wisdom” of others has accelerated global progress.
Step IV: And now comes the “chicken and rice” moment: creating content on a larger scale. Without content, there is no brand, and even less a digital brand. To create your digital brand, you’ll need to produce content with some frequency and consistency: articles
