It is essential for companies to properly manage and maintain their brands online. Consumers interact with brands constantly in digital environments, so it’s important to take your digital brand just as seriously as your in-store branding.
What is Digital Brand Management?
Digital brand management is the process of maintaining your company brand in digital spaces. Your digital brand management choices will determine how consumers perceive and interact with your brand online. Companies craft their digital brands by using any or all of the following tools:
- A company website
- Social media accounts
- In-app experiences
- Search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Verified reviews about your services
Each of these components is part of your digital brand. By leveraging them effectively, you can construct an impressive digital brand that will draw in interested customers.
Craft Consistent Experiences
In order for consumers to get to know and understand your brand, consistency is key in your digital brand management. Without a consistent image online, customers may become confused or less inclined to trust your services.
Companies can achieve consistency in their visual identity by creating and regularly updating brand guidelines. Brand guidelines, or a brand book, is a place were all relevant stylistic decisions and brand strategy materials are kept.
Brand guideline components can include:
- Fonts and typography
- Logos
- Color palettes
- Additional branded graphics or patterns
Brand guidelines are a great opportunity to get specific with precise font standards and hex codes to ensure that your team represents the brand uniformly across all digital platforms. For instance, Airbnb includes details like kerning requirements within its guidelines.
Source: Andrea McCulloch
The company defines and visualizes kerning to help current and future team members fully understand the intricacies of the brand.
Brand guidelines aid companies in uniting all aspects of digital brand management under the same rules and guidelines. That will encourage a consistent digital look and feel.
Find Your Brand Voice & Stick To It
Brand voice is a key component of your digital brand. A unique, authentic voice enables companies to establish connections with their intended customers.
Brand voice includes anything that supports your company’s style of communication. It’s critical to examine the effectiveness of your brand voice when engaging in digital brand management efforts. When evaluating the strength of your brand voice, look into the following:
- Current slogans
- Copy on your website
- Social media captions
- Use of emojis, if relevant
- Meta descriptions for website pages
Your team can adjust each of these brand components to achieve your desired brand voice. For instance, if you’re aiming to build an irreverent brand, consider light, quirky copy on your website.
Remember to be strategic when selecting the type of brand voice you’re working toward. Part of digital brand management is making sure that your branding materials align with the audience groups you wish to target. When crafting your brand voice, make sure to consider and appeal to your target audiences.
After strategically selecting and executing your brand voice, make sure to stick to the voice you committed to. Just like other aspects of digital brand mangement, consistency is essential for a strong brand voice.
A well thought our brand voice will give you the chance to engage meaningfully with your audience on digital platforms, elevating your digital brand’s performance.
Reflect Your Mission & Core Values Within Brand Materials
One of the most important things about a brand is that it communicates what your company stands for. When managing your digital brand, ensure that you prominently reflect your digital materials’ mission and core company values.
Of course, digital brand management is a lot about appealing to porentail customers. However, your company branding materials should also authentically represent you as a company. An effective way to communicate authentically with consumers about your brand is to turn to the values your business already abides by.
Use these values to guide your actions and visual presentation of your brand in the market. So long as you’re working within your brand guidelines, this genuine digital presentation will help customers learn more about the company and begin to develop trust.
Showcasing your core values contributes to the strategic positioning of your products and services. Take Airbnb’s logo, for example. They created their updated logo by abstracting symbols that are important to the core of their business.
Source: Entrepreneur
The logo combines symbols of people, places, and love into a single image. Through its logo alone, Airbnb effectively demonstrated its values to consumers.
During your digital brand management exercises, consider how you may be able to display your values in a simple, straightforward way.
Devote Time & Energy To Digital Brand Management
Given how often consumers engage with brands online, digital brand management is an essential aspect of creating a company identity that attracts customers.
When evaluating the status and strength of your current digital presence, be sure to closely examine your brand’s voice, visual consistency, and ability to communicate your mission and values.
With these elements working together, you’ll be able to keep your brand up-to-date and engaging.