8 Digital Brand Management Best Practices For 2022
Purchasing services and goods online have become a common practice among people all over the globe. In fact, statistics show that there were over 2.14 billion digital buyers worldwide in 2021. In the UK, almost 90% of consumers are making their purchases over the internet.
With such a huge online market that businesses in various industries can take advantage of, having a solid digital brand management strategy should be a priority.
Defining Digital Brand Management
Digital brand management takes traditional brand management principles and applies them to your audience experience across numerous digital media.
Your digital brand dictates how your audience experiences your business online, and effective digital brand management allows you to take charge of such experience and shape it to your benefit. Unfortunately, most companies don’t even care about how their brands appear online. Poor brand management can result in major issues in your business.
If it’s not that bad, it can only cause inconsistent messaging on various digital channels. At its worst, however, a poorly managed brand will struggle to retain or even attract new customers with expensive campaigns that don’t work out and will eventually fail as a business.
The Best Practices For Digital Brand Management
As you can see, ignoring your digital brand management is a mistake. If you want to stay ahead of the curve or remain competitive in the years to come, you need to know and implement these fundamental digital brand management practices:
1. Define Your Core Values
If you wish to build a strong and lasting brand, you will need a strong and lasting strategy. And any powerful branding strategy starts with understanding your brand’s core values.
How do you want to be perceived by your digital audience? Are you the best? The cheapest or most luxurious? The speediest or the most reliable?
How you want to represent your business and the principles you abide by will determine your image and relationship with prospective and current customers alike. It allows you to state what’s most important to you and influence the audience on what and how to feel and think about your business.
With a clear brand value, you can gain greater credibility, make better decisions, and foster stronger relationships with customers. Also, it helps reduce sales cycles since your prospects and customers can easily relate to your values.
2. Invest In Technology
The advent of technology-enabled solutions has essentially changed the practice of digital brand management. Forward-thinking businesses have identified the scalability and benefits of technology in digital brand management and have quickly adopted various solutions—from customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to marketing software.
One of the most important technologies for digital brand management is digital asset management (DAM) software. As your business grows and you explore more digital marketing channels, it can be difficult to keep all branding initiatives aligned. DAM software can simplify this challenge and allow you to store and organise your brand assets. With this centralised solution, it’s easier for every employee or team to access information, assets, and guidelines needed to create content that reflects your brand’s aesthetics and ethos. As a result, it contributes to the growth of your brand.
There are numerous things you need to consider when choosing the best DAM software, depending on your industry and business size. However, here are the key factors you have to take into account:
- Method of storage
- File specifics
- Distribution and sharing
- Database compatibility
- Automation
- Intuitive search
- User count
- Permissions and security
3. Be Consistent
Strong brands are consistent. If you want people to recognise your brand instantly, you need to keep your messaging and style consistent across all channels, whether you’re doing digital or offline branding.
When creating content for your business, you need to make sure that you emphasise your brand’s core values, messages, and image repeatedly. Your style, which includes the fonts and colours you use, the tone of voice and choice of words in your content, and even your logo—basically everything that defines your brand—should also be consistent.
A brand that maintains consistency across all marketing channels will create easy recognition and credibility among prospects, customers, and competitors. This credibility means more profits and sales over time. In fact, a study shows that consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by at least 33%.
4. Be Comprehensible
Understanding your core values and being consistent won’t do anything if people don’t understand who you are and what exactly it is you do. And it’s not just about your tagline but about your brand communication as well.
Don’t bother playing clever word games that can be complicated. Don’t even use highfalutin words or big phrases that have no real meaning. Those will only confuse your customers.
Your message should always be closely associated with your brand’s values. And it’s best to condense it into one to two sentences defining who you are, what you offer, and why people should care.
Think about this: you don’t have 30 minutes to explain to your customers what your brand does. In most situations, particularly with digital branding, you barely even have a minute to explain. So make sure that your brand definition is instantly understandable while also striking a strong emotional chord.
5. Create Brand Guidelines
As mentioned before, it’s important for your brand to stay consistent throughout all marketing channels. But what happens if you go through a rebrand or if your brand team welcomes someone new? How do you make sure that your brand maintains its core values and style?
Easy. Develop a comprehensive guideline.
A brand guide is like a rulebook, outlining how your business presents itself to prospects and customers through its colour selections, logo, fonts, photos, content style, and more. This serves as a reference tool to ensure that your brand can maintain a consistent feel and look, even when you have different teams working on design, sales, customer service, and marketing.
To develop your brand guideline, you can start by collecting brand guide inspiration providing you with good ideas and pointing you in the right direction in defining your brand. Next, you want to define the elements of your brand. Here, you need to be specific, noting everything from the brand colour palette, font, and typography to the brand story and voice to the logo and image guidelines.
Also, you want to consider all other channels that your brand uses for promotion and communication and discuss the guidelines for each one of them. Make sure to update your brand guidelines regularly. Revisit older directives periodically, and create new guidelines as necessary to ensure that you’re maintaining consistency.
6. Utilise Brand Templates
Even if you develop a well-explained brand guideline, some of the new recruits in your team or even third-party associates (for instance, a freelance web designer) may find it difficult to follow.
To minimise errors and ensure that your team, including non-creatives, stays consistent, you need to develop brand templates that are in line with your brand’s aesthetics and ethos.
The use of brand templates ensures that no one in your company or partner agencies has to take matters into their own hands since they can draw on templates that reflect your brand. It also improves efficiency by allowing a fast turnaround when your team needs to scale or make quick changes in their content output. It helps save time by removing repetitive processes, enhancing your teams’ productivity while eliminating consistency mistakes.
7. Pick The Right Digital Channels
Choosing the right digital channels can ensure brand growth and success. Research on the specific channel that your target audience frequents. Ideally, you should pick channels that allow you to reach as many customers as possible, including social media, websites, and pay-per-click (PPC).
Regardless of what you choose, keep in mind that each digital channel will have its own content requirements. For instance, if you focus on Pinterest and Instagram, you’ll need visual assets with specific filters and dimensions. Meanwhile, if you’re an expert in audio and video production, you can consider working on podcasting or YouTube.
Be clear about the digital channels you’ll use as well as the content you want to create since this will help determine the resources needed to manage your business communications.
8. Streamline Your Review And Approval Process
Brand management is quick and straightforward in the offline world where the approval of print ads, brochures, and flyers are all conducted by, a centralised authority. With digital brand management, however, several key components of business such as PPC ads, web design, and social media marketing are outsourced to third-party agencies.
Thus, any effective digital brand management should involve outlining a review and approval process and hiring a reliable digital brand manager. It also has to be about investing in essential tools to streamline the approval process of your brand’s message before it’s shared with customers and stakeholders.
A digital brand manager will ensure that every brand content for distribution aligns with your core values. Outlining a review and approval process while implementing collaboration tools allows for a straightforward workflow, making it easy for stakeholders to provide feedback and ensuring prompt revisions.
With a smooth review and approval process, you can allow your team to deliver new content quickly and see to it that everything stays consistent.
Conclusion
Businesses shouldn’t ignore digital brand management. If you want to develop and maintain a brand identity that people recognise and trust, stands out among competitors, and achieves sustainable growth, start implementing the above best practices for better brand management.
Doing so will help you enhance your brand experience, increase value, attract and retain customers, and build an overall successful business in the years to come.