6 Tips on How to Build a Brand Online That Sells & Thrives

Nowadays, every CEO, entrepreneur, or even hobbyist, need to know how to build a brand online.

Online, for most industries, services, and products, can make or break a brand. If done correctly, it can grow them to new highs or completely ruin them. 

That’s why you need to do it right. 

But how? Well, you could focus on millions of different things. Or, simply focus on these 6 tips with concentration. 

1) Understand the “Building Blocks” of Branding 

Building a brand online isn’t only about a logo, some cheesy slogan, and using a matching colour palette. It’s much more than that. 

Therefore, before you do anything, you need to understand the “Building Blocks” that make a brand resonate, captivate, and sell. 

Block 1: Target Audience 

Everything, we repeat, everything stems from your target audience. These are the people your product or service serves. They’re the people you want to speak directly to and involve your brand around. 

Block 2: Brand Identity 

This is your brand's name and visual elements. Think logos and colours. It’s what makes your brand visually pleasing. Your marketing message, so to speak. Not only this, but it can include your brand’s story as well as its competitive advantage. 

Block 3: Brand Voice 

Brand identity is how your brand is visually represented. Brand voice is how it’s verbally represented. This “voice” needs to be consistent on social media, on your website, and on any other types of promotional content. 

Block 4: Missions and Values 

This is the goal and promise you have to your customers. It’s a set of values that flows throughout the entire brand, from its brand identity to its brand voice and also its future trajectory. 

Reference: Action Coach’s Missions and Values 

2) Get a Full Understanding of Your Target Audience 

Your audience is the backbone of your brand. Therefore, create a detailed customer persona. This is who your ideal consumer is down to the absolute “t”. 

What Information Should You Collect About Your Audience?

A study performed by Hubspot shows what information marketers collect when building customer personas: 

Example of Creating a Customer Persona

Based on the research performed by Hubspot, the best information you can research and collect regarding your target customer is the following: 

3) Establish Brand Guidelines from the Beginning 

Brand guidelines help establish consistency in your branding. It’s how your brand will look, feel, and sound. 

These guidelines ensure that your branding is narrowed down on your goals, mission, and target audience. It also helps when you want to scale or sell your business. 

When you build a brand strategy, it’s important to do this in the beginning. Changing your guidelines in the future could make your brand unrecognisable by current customers. 

Main Elements of Brand Guidelines

• Logo Usage: How your logo should be used, including size, colours, and placement. 

• Typography & Colour Schemes: Fonts and colours palettes that you use on your website, social media, marketing materials, etc. 

• Tone of Voice & Messaging: How you communicate your brand from website copy all the way to customer support. 

• Social Media Branding: Rules on how your brand is managed on social media, including imagery and video guidelines. 

4) Get Online, Like Everywhere 

The first three tips are the “Foundations” on how to build a brand online. Once you’ve covered this, it’s time to get everywhere online. 

We recommend you literally get everywhere. Simply, the more places you are, the higher likelihood you’ll reach your target audience. 

Once you have data, though, you can then delegate your time better. For instance, let’s say search engine optimisation (SEO) brings in a higher return on investment than social media, though still important, it’ll be more beneficial to spend more time and money on SEO. 

Search Engines 

Search engines are platforms like Google and Bing. You can perform paid (PPC) or organic search (SEO) on these platforms. 

Generally speaking, paid search can provide somewhat instant results. However, once you stop paying for the traffic, the traffic stops coming. 

In contrast, with SEO, it’s a slow burner, however, once it’s performing well, even if you don’t invest in it for a while, it’ll continue to generate traffic. 

Research from First Page Sage demonstrates this perfectly. Based on their research, those in the Real Estate industry will take 10 months to break even with an SEO investment, but over 3 years, they’ll have an ROI of 1,389%. 

Social Media Platforms 

Like with search engines, with social media platforms, you can perform paid and organic advertising. 

Typically, if you can build a cult-like following through organic, it’ll always be more beneficial. Paid advertising has its use cases, such as retargeting, but it’s hard to get right. 

Video Platforms 

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn Video, Facebook Watch, there’s a lot of video-sharing platforms now—both long and short-form. 

The nice thing about these video-sharing platforms is their virality. And, even better, it might not even be your brand that makes the viral moment, it could be a customer through user-generated content (UGC). 

Think about Stanley a few years ago. Remember that short TikTok that demonstrated its insulation? Their cup was in a car fire, a day later, it still had ice in it. The result? 97.3 million organic views and their cup was sold out everywhere. 

Source: TikTok

Marketplaces 

If you’re an ecommerce store, regardless if you sell physical or digital goods, marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Facebook & Instagram Shop, etc., are all go-to places. Some will perform better than others depending on your branding and the type of products or services you sell. 

Content Platforms & Communities 

Content and community-based platforms like Reddit, Quora, Medium, and forums or niche communities, are where you go to build trust. Some industries perform really well in this, especially those that require specialised knowledge, like woodworking.

5) Measure Success and Continuously Improve

Branding strategies are great. However, if you’re not measuring or optimising your branding strategy, it doesn’t mean a lot. 

Because of this, you need to ensure tracking, measuring, and reporting are set up correctly for your online presence. 

How you set this up will depend on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your business. 

Key KPIs to Measure for Online Brands

• Website Traffic: The number of people visiting your website. You should also track their origin as well as their session duration, bounce rates, etc. 

• Engagement Rates: This can be social media interactions like views, shares, comments, and likes, or for a website, click through rates, on-page time, etc. 

• Conversion Rates: Who is converting into customers, from what traffic source, etc. 

• Brand Mentions: How often your brand is being discussed online via social media, blogs, new articles, etc. 

Making Decisions Based on Data

All of the mentioned KPIs can tell us a lot about our online digital marketing strategy. 

For example, with website traffic. You may see a spike in traffic after appearing on a podcast. This can indicate that for your industry, product, or service, podcasting is a good way to generate traffic. 

Let’s say you come out with a new product, which is different to the rest, but gets high conversions. You may want to pivot your brand identity to this product, narrowing your focus and improving targeting. 

Again, imagine you create a unique piece of social media content, something you don’t usually do, and it goes viral. Maybe, based on data, it’s something you should try to mimic again. 

The examples can go on and on forever. It’s all about seeing what works and then doubling down on it. 

When it comes to learning how to build a brand online, there are a million and one things you need to consider. 

We, however, recommend that you focus on these six core areas: 

1. Understand the “Building Blocks” of Branding
2. Get a Full Understanding of Your Target Audience
3. Establish Brand Guidelines from the Beginning
4. Get Online, Like Everywhere
5. Measure Success and Continuously Improve
6. Make Decisions Based on Data

By focusing on these areas, you’ll be able to slowly but surely build a solid brand online.

Did you know that building a strong online brand can also help grow your business faster? Click here to watch our free webinar to learn the smart way to scale your business using digital marketing.