7 Strategies To Get Your Brand Online

1. Your Brand on Facebook

You might already have your brand on facebook, but are you using it to the maximum capacity? Are you making it work for your brand? Is it getting your brand message across? Here are some tips:

• Represent your brand in your profile picture. Should it have your face? Your logo? Your top-selling product or service?
• Ditto for the cover image! That’s a large amount of space to show your brand. Use and image that emulates the look and feel of your brand.
• Be consistent with good content. Post at least once a week with content that people will want to engage with.
• Design Success Tip: Use apps like Adobe Post and Canva to create professional looking images for your profile and cover images. They already have the sizes and templates within the app for you!

I recently decided to rebrand myself on my facebook business page due to some strategic shift changes and how my company has evolved over the last 7 years. I’ll tell you all about it on my own rebranding journey post here.

2. Facebook Live

The business to consumer game has changed. Consumers want to feel a part of the process and success of your company. Let them. Let them see you with your guard down (but still be professional). Being live allows your followers to get to know you and your company beyond the logo, and beyond the scheduled posts. Encourage them to ask questions, give feedback and start a dialogue!
Success Tip-Create a post that will launch up to 24 hours before you go live to draw in your audience and encourage attendance.
Design Tip-Use a systematic approach for your pre-live posts that will catch your followers eye each time. Looking for more? Download my Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Live here.

3. Use influencers

This is my FAVORITE part! I’m all about collaboration and giving/gaining exposure. How many times has one of your girl friends told you about the best new place to get a pedicure? Or the best martini in town? Influencers are the best referral your friends haven’t given you yet.
1. Find a social influencer whom you admire and respect
2. Check that their audience is following them to learn about products or services like your own.
3. Contact them about pairing up on a post
4. Launch the post and make sure to have a brand mention and a Call to Action.
5. Compare analytics and results of your post.
Want to see this in action? Check out my project analysis here.

4. Email

I’m personally amazed at the turnaround of this marketing strategy over the years. When I first started my business in 2010, it seemed like consumers (including myself) were doing everything in their power to avoid being on email lists and just wanted to unsubscribe from the constant advertising they were receiving in their inboxes.

Then, marketers got smart. They needed to offer great content to keep people interested in their brands. There started to be a shift of more value in these emails. When writing to your lists, and growing them, make sure to offer your list something that they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. For a restaurant that might be a gift certificate or discount for your birthday. For a retail store, this could be access to a sale or promotion that no one else gets. if you’re promoting an event, offer pre sale prices that no one else gets!

5. Instagram

Instagram might seem daunting, and maybe you only just figured out facebook. Well, did you know that Facebook owns Instagram? There’s a reason for that. Facebook realizes that of the millions of people online everyday-those users want to see video and image over anything else.

Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

source: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/visual-content-you-need-to-use-in-your-marketing-campaign/
Instagram allows you to use images and video to relate to your following and build a brand relationship with them.

6. Digital Advertising

Say you want to reach an audience off of social media. If you’re a travel agency that books all in one trips to Ireland, how do you catch your potential customer before they book their flight on a different website?

Targeted ads. I could go on and on about all the different ways to target your potential customers and followers! You can target their interests (celtic music, travel, gaelic) and their demographic (age, gender, location) and more! For all in one trips, I would probably look at the baby-boomer generation and start to map out who my avatar is. My ideal customer might be couples who want to travel in a group and go to Ireland to see Cliffs of Moor. I’d want to build that avatar out more, but even that one sentence gives me a lot to go on when strategizing my campaign.

Design Success Tip: since your ad will be appearing on all sorts of different websites, you’ll want to make sure your brand stands out in your ad image. Add a call to action button somewhere, even though the entire image is clickable. See an example in the ad pictured here for a Brew Fest.

7. Remarketing

If Digital Advertising is the freshman 101 prerequisite, Remarketing is your sophomore course. After you’ve brought traffic to your website for the first time, or for someone’s first time in the last 3 months, you want to get your brand back in front of that person who has already shown a mild interest in what you have to offer. Depending on your product or service it might take 2-3 (or more) impressions before they make the purchase. Remarketing allows you to do that on multiple formats, whether it be an ad through facebook or on another website.

Strategy Success Tip: Remember this person has already shown interest in what you have to offer. Think about what might be holding them back or what else they might have to hear before hitting ‘purchase’.