7 Powerful Tips to Build a Brand That Sells—And Never Looks Back

No matter how good your product is, it means nothing to people if they don't know anything about it.

Digital marketing bridges the gap between your idea and people's perception of your idea. That's why any business owner worth their salt knows the importance of digital marketing pertaining to the creation of a brand.

So, how exactly do you use digital marketing to improve your business? From email marketing to SEO to social media, this whole business of digital marketing can seem horribly confusing to the uninitiated.

But what is digital marketing? Do not forget, dear readers, because this article will help you understand everything you need to know to use digital marketing to bolster your business.

What Is Digital Marketing? 

At its core, digital marketing refers to any form of marketing that relies on electronic mediums. These days, that usually means marketing on various online platforms, but digital marketing predates the internet. For example, telemarketing is a form of digital marketing too, though it's a relic of a simpler time.

For practical purposes, digital marketing in the 21^st century is mostly centred around the internet and the broader online landscape. Websites, blogs, emails, social media, advertisements, and any other content that can make your business reach other people in an engaging way are part of digital marketing.

Digital or Online marketing brings in a significantly higher return on investment than traditional offline marketing. The internet offers excellent avenues for reaching people. The perpetually online netizens are uniquely suited to being the perfect consumer demographic for many businesses.

Digital marketing works exactly the same way as offline marketing. There are just much broader and more creative methods available in the digital landscape. Ones that are much more streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective. 

Why is A Digital Marketing Strategy Important for Making Your Brand?

Digital marketing is the lifeblood of the modern advertisement industry. Pretty much any business or startup uses it to broaden its client base. There are certain reasons why digital marketing is uniquely suited for mass marketing, such as:

Global Presence: The greatest advantage of digital marketing is the fact that it remains unbound by geopolitical boundaries, for the most part. You can advertise your business to a larger audience and even facilitate sales in remote locations.

Precise Targeting: Digital marketing is a tremendously powerful tool because it gives you a vast amount of target demographic data to work with. With this data, you can target select groups of people, which is far more effective than marketing to everyone indiscriminately.

Cost-effective: Precisely targeting select demographics also helps you reduce costs because you don't have to waste resources by marketing to an unreceptive consumer base. The low entry cost for digital marketing is also a great boon for most startup business owners.

Adaptability: Unlike traditional marketing strategies that involve physical props, digital marketing has almost no tangible element to it. Meaning you can change things on a whim. This lets you adapt to changing market conditions significantly faster than traditional marketing systems. Adaptability is almost a necessity in the current dynamic economic landscape.

Fast ROI: Digital marketing offers the highest return on investment because of its streamlined efficiency. Advertising online is one of the fastest ways of generating leads for any business and is accessible to any startup. Digital marketing also offers a measurable output, so you can easily keep track of your business growth.

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing strategy can be divided into three broad categories. Paid, Earned, and Owned Media. Here’s a short breakdown of these categories:

1. Owned Media

Owned media refers to channels and assets you own in the digital space that you can use for marketing purposes. Company websites, blogs, social media pages, and dedicated apps fall within this category.

Most new business owners won't have most of these assets because some of these are somewhat expensive and hard to maintain. But these should remain a priority for most because a dedicated stake in the digital space makes your business look legitimate and reliable to your clients and consumers.

These types of media help you build credibility and renown while also giving your target audience a place to engage with your product. Audience engagement is an extremely valuable commodity in digital marketing. Just the very fact that you have your own website projects the message to people that you are serious about your product. 

2. Paid Media

Paid media refers to advertising avenues where you can pay to show your content to your target audience. It's a bit more intrusive and less engaging than owned media, but still effective.

Paid media includes things like pay-per-click ads like Google or YouTube Ads. Social media like Facebook and Instagram also host paid ads. Sponsored content you see in well-known content creators' videos also counts as paid media. 

Paid media is often annoying, but they do indeed drive traffic quite effectively. Most of these advertising systems are also on the affordable side so it's great for new businesses. These ads can target specific demographics and make your niche products reach potential clients fast.

Paid media is good for when you're just starting and need a steady stream of traffic. But it won't help you build a recognisable brand if it is the only form of marketing you focus on. Balancing paid and organic marketing is a delicate endeavour, but it is by no means impossible. You simply need to think strategically. 

3. Earned Media

Earned media is perhaps the hardest type of digital marketing category to get into. Earned media refers to the organic engagement and exposure your marketing apparatus gets without you spending any money.

Earned includes things like organic user traffic, shares, news articles, mentions, and customer reviews. These are usually not things you can buy with money, and ideally, you won't have to. You'll naturally get these once your product or business starts gaining traction.

Earned Media is arguably the most authoritative form of digital marketing because it has an undertone of competency. People know that you can buy ads and pay to have a good website or social media page. But getting a callout from impartial sources like independent reviewers and winning awards requires at least some level of quality. That's what people want.

Ultimately, people just want reliability. But reliability is hard to find on the internet where you can take nothing at face value. Earned media acts as an independent neutral zone where only high-quality things can get validation. 

7 Powerful Tips to Build Your Own Brand

Digital marketing is a methodical process. You cannot engage in random digital marketing avenues without a clear plan or purpose. Here are a few tips to optimize your digital marketing endeavours: 

1. Devise A Marketing Strategy

You need to be strategic to build a strong brand image. But what is a digital marketing strategy? A marketing strategy is no less important than your business competency or product quality. Think of it this way: if your product is a 10, but your marketing is a 2, then to the people, your product will also be a 2.

It doesn’t matter how good or how amazing your services are; if you can’t let people know about them effectively, then all of that means nothing. That’s why you have to start your marketing journey by making a proper blueprint of your plan.

The first step in making a marketing strategy is research. You need to research your demographic and target audience. Then, you must alter your marketing content to appeal to their sensibilities. It is a complicated task, so you'll most likely need to learn through trial and error what works and what does not.

2. Invest In Social Media

The power of social media is undeniable in the current times. A significant portion of the global population has some sort of connection to at least one social media platform. Social media is a crucial tool for reaching out to people. Most businesses can leverage the vast amount of user traffic on social media to advertise their product.

Building a social media page is also extremely good for brand building. It gives added credibility and legitimacy to a brand because people associate having a well-managed social media page with reliability. 

The best part is that you don’t really need to spend too much money to maintain a functioning social media page. For starters, you just need to be creative with your content and post regularly. Posting a few times a week is usually enough. You can manage the page yourself, but as your business grows, you should consider hiring a dedicated manager at some point later down the line.

3. Incorporate AI Tools

With the recent prolific growth of AI technology, it's worth incorporating it into a digital marketing strategy. There are several very neat AI applications that can help with various aspects of digital marketing by streamlining several things.

You have AI tools for analysing market conditions, traffic and so on. There are also tools for creating professional graphic templates like Canva. You can even add AI chatbots to your website to boost visitor engagement and answer simple queries.

That being said, it's worth being a bit subtle with AI tools. Overusing them can be detrimental for marketing purposes. For example, don't use AI image generators to make graphic ads, it's very easy to spot AI-generated images, and people generally think a brand is cheap when they see that. 

4. Acquire A Website

Building a website is a crucial milestone for a brand in digital marketing. A website gives immense authority and freedom in the internet landscape that you simply cannot get with a social media page or channel. Those platforms always have some restrictions that are precarious to navigate.

A website, however, is your own domain. You can customise it and use it in any way you want. These are fantastic for product listings, customer support, and reviews. You can draw organic traffic to your website using blog articles, videos, and events.

There are some things you should keep in mind when building a website though. The visual aspect is incredibly important, and so are the interactive features. People despise nothing more than clunky websites. Websites that take too long to load are also known for discouraging organic traffic.

5. Use SEM and SEO

Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation are two very important elements for increasing your visibility online. Having a good SEM and SEO will boost your website up the search engine rankings, which will allow people to find your website faster.

So, what is SEO in digital marketing? Creating content with well-used search queries, for instance, is a form of SEO. Having consistent, quality content also gives your website a high SEO ranking. Both are incredibly important for generating organic traffic.

While SEO focuses more on adjusting your website's content to make it more synergistic with the algorithm, SEM focuses more on paid advertisements to rank higher in the search results. So, as a small business, you can start with just SEO and then introduce SEM once you have the budget for it.

6. Aim for Organic Growth

Paid ad campaigns, SEM, and other content-churning marketing schemes are well and good. But solely relying on them for your brand's image can be somewhat unsustainable. Digital marketing is a tricky game; too little and you risk fading into obscurity, too much and you risk appearing gaudy. Neither are positions you want for a brand.

So, ideally, you want to have a sustainable system that balances paid campaigns with organic traffic. You want to make a brand image that people willingly share with their friends and family through word of mouth and recommendations. It can be a tough road, but once you learn to balance marketing and your product quality, things will become more achievable. 

Ultimately, what you need is to offer your consumers a memorable experience rather than just a soulless product. Customer service, product quality, and subtle marketing are the main things you want to combine to get a loyal customer base.

7. Monitor Your Performance

Digital marketing doesn't really have a cookie-cutter formula that works for every business. Yes, there are tried and tested methods that generally work. However, to get the most out of digital marketing, you need to craft a unique strategy that suits your business.

That means some marketing campaigns will work, and some will flop. You just need to learn from your mistakes and try again. Thankfully, you can keep track of your digital marketing performance using easily accessible KPIs. Click-through rates, website traffic, and many other indicators will help you achieve that.

You can find most of these in Google Analytics or other easily available monitoring systems. These indicators will give you a good idea about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You can adjust your efforts according to your target audience’s reception.

Digital Marketing Cost

Digital marketing isn't exactly a cost-heavy project, at least not for a small business. The biggest selling point of digital marketing lies in its scalability. You can start digital marketing completely free and scale that to a more expensive model once you have the funds for it.

Digital marketing strategy can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. The digital market industry is quite streamlined and optimized for every budget range. You can categorize digital marketing costs into three major tiers:

Low-Range: Low-range digital marketing involves the most rudimentary aspects of it. Inexpensive social media pages, websites, and other avenues fall within this category. Most of the digital marketing done in this range is practically free. 

The only thing you need to do is spend the time and create engaging content. You can also delegate some of those tasks to various AI tools, which will further streamline your process.

Mid-Range: Mid-range digital marketing involves paid ads, SEO content, and even email marketing. The cost of mid-range digital marketing can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to up to several thousand dollars per month.

High-Range: High-range digital marketing is usually reserved for mid to large business enterprises. These businesses have dedicated digital marketing strategies across multiple platforms, with a massive range of content.

Sometimes, they even have separate marketing content for different geo-political regions. These digital marketing campaigns burn through tens of thousands to millions of dollars in total budget. Definitely not something a small business or a startup can shoulder.

In short, digital marketing is a valuable asset for growing your business and creating a recognisable brand. There are certain nuances in how you must use certain types of digital marketing strategies to see optimal results, and there are marketing strategies for every price range. 

But digital marketing strategy is a complicated subject and it’s growing more rapidly with the introduction of new technology and platforms. Discover how you can leverage your digital marketing to increase your profits and scale your business faster by watching our webinar.