Creating Your Online Identity and Brand

If you are in the internet marketing business, the retail business, manufacturing or nearly any other type of enterprise, then it's critical to be familiar with, and up to date with your online identity and branding. This should be the number one priority of any business that relies on the general population of consumers to buy their products and services. But if you are new to business or even new to marketing, then it's a pretty safe bet that you do not know how to build your online identity and brand.

In this article, I am going to give you the run down on the stuff you need to know to build your own brand.

What is an Online Identity & Brand?

The first question that needs to be answered before you can learn anything about the how's and why's of branding is: "What exactly is an online identity, and what is a brand?"

Your online identity is the overall big picture of your business online. It's important to realise that people do not buy from businesses, they buy from brands. As a business, you are just an entity with no face that, as far as consumers are concerned, has a sole purpose of taking their money. But as a brand, you are a familiar presence and a trusted partner in their value proposition. As such, your online identity includes absolutely everything that you are online; everything that people see, hear or feel about your business. Your brand includes both physical aspects like your logo and slogan, as well as less tangible aspects such as your reputation, reviews, and your tone just to name a few. Major corporations spend millions of dollars building their brand. However, for people like you and I, this is completely unrealistic. Despite this, even if you are just a small business with a small marketing budget, you can still build a brand that is going to give you the relationship that you need with the consumers you want to target, to turn a visitor into a buyer and then into a loyal customer.

Why is it Important?

So, why is your online identity so important? There are several reasons.

The most important ones have already been mentioned above, namely that your business success and bottom line ultimately depend upon the success of your identity and brand. An identity is especially important online because you need some kind of digital persona in order to interact with the consumers that come to your business. You need to create a brand that they will recognise and trust and then come back time and time again. Your online identity is the most important thing that you will ever do for your online business.

Setting Up Your Brand

Here we are going to discuss the different ways you can go about setting up your online identity and brand.

Creating Your Physical Identity

The first thing to discuss is creating your physical identity. These are the tangible things that people are able to look at or listen to. Of course, as this is mostly digital content, it isn't actually tangible, but what I mean is that they are physically there to see or listen to.

First and foremost, you need to create an amazing logo. If you are just starting out in business, you are probably going to be on a pretty tight budget, and as such you may try to design a logo yourself or find a discount graphic designer to create one. Consider this though, the logo is the most important part of your physical identity because it has to be instantly recognisable and easily remembered by anyone who has seen it. This means that it needs to have the correct balance between simple and well-designed, with the right colours, shapes and fonts.

Your physical identity also includes your website. If your online identity is the face of your business, then your website is your business address. When people want to find out more about your business, in addition to when they want to buy your products and services, they will visit your website. Your website needs to display your branding, logo, description and to tell people what your business is about when they come across you online.

Physical branding also includes various other applications of that same logo such as social media profiles, business cards, letterheads and anywhere that your business is present. Your logo is just the outermost image of your business. You can also have pictures of you and your team, descriptions, origin stories and various other elements making up your physical identity online.

Creating Your Intangible Identity

Your non-physical, or intangible identity is what people believe about your business, what sense they get from reading your "About Us", and what philosophy and values you present to the consumer. None of these things are accidental. Each one of these intangibles is carefully crafted by you and your staff. Your reputation, your philosophy and your values are all things that you create and then ensure gets into the hands of your target audience. Before we get into how to spread the word with these things, we have to cover how they are created in the first place. Some of these elements are published to your website, or at least, the information published to your website should infer these elements. For example, suppose that you published a blog, and you spent a great deal of time on your blog writing about the families of people who work for you, and what kind of policies your business has to benefit those families. It is logical then that someone would rightly deduce that families are important to you.

It is important that you also build the impression that you are an expert in your field. That means that you will have to spend time actually promoting that image. Some of the best ways to do that is by answering questions on websites like Quora, visiting the relevant forums in LinkedIn and maintaining a membership on bulletin boards and other sites within your industry. Social media also plays a big role here, as there will be a plethora of groups you can join and contribute to in order to demonstrate you are the expert in your field. However, you do need to make sure that you have all of your physical identity components in place, because when someone comes across your expert advice, you want them to associate it with your business and remember you in the future.

Branding & Propagation

Once you have built a brand identity, you then have to figure out some way to get the information out there to the world. Your logo, "About Us", philosophy and values can all exist on your website, but unless someone has a reason or incentive to go there, you aren't going to spread your message very far. If you want your online identity to have a positive affect your bottom line, you are going to have to do some marketing. We have already discussed a few ways that you can do this, such as answering questions on “expert answer” websites like Quora.

Keep in mind that you have to complete the set up of your online identity before you do any marketing. This includes uploading your logo and business information to all relevant social media profiles, registering with the appropriate forums, and adding visual aids and signature links as well as any other activity online that will place your brand in front of consumers.

Maintaining Your Brand

The next step after ensuring that you have a online and social media presence is marketing and maintaining that brand. Most or all of the steps listed here are done for both purposes simultaneously – both to market your businesses identity and also to maintain it so that you have a good reputation as a strong, trustworthy brand.

The Importance of Googling Yourself

If you want to find out what the current state of your identity is, there is no better way to do so than by googling yourself regularly. Type your business name into any search engine and see what results you get. You might come across some positive customer reviews from sites you didn't even know existed, or similarly you might find that there are some negative reviews out there that you can address. Finding out what is going on with your business online is quite easy with internet search engines, especially if your business name is something unique that isn't going to bring up a lot of irrelevant results.

Blogging

Blogging is one of the best ways to market your business online and any internet marketing guru will tell you this. Blogging has several advantages for your business all working at the same time.

First, it presents you as a human being or group of human beings. When people read your blog posts, as long as they are well written and personable, they will see a person behind the words.

In addition to this, blogging helps establish your credibility. People will see you as an expert if they come across your blog post and it answers some relevant question they had about your niche.

Finally, blogging is a great way to continually add content with well researched keywords that the search engines will rank you for, meaning that your website will appear in more search engine results pages, and subsequently you’ll get more visitors to your website.

Professional Associations

Professional associations can also give you a great deal of credibility. If you belong to a professional organization that is recognized by others in your particular industry or niche, then you will be seen as more of an expert in the field, and more people will want to buy from you because of that recognition.

Google Alerts

You should set up Google alerts so that you can get notified whenever you business name comes across the Google news service or the other locations that the Google Alerts will monitor. This will allow you to stay in the know and respond quickly should a negative piece be published, and will allow you to maximise the benefits when a positive piece is published.

Domain & Social Media Names

You also want to claim domain and social media names as much, and as quickly as possible. This includes variations of your business name with your .coms and social media profiles, as well as your actual business name with all of the standard extensions out there. This will help you build brand dominance with your name.

Signatures & Descriptions

Use email signatures, forum signatures and any other listing online to your advantage as much as possible. Maintaining these can take more time than you feel is of value, but it can actually be worth it. For example, when you change your forum signature to reflect a new product or any other changes to your business, the changes are reflected across the entire site, on every post that you have ever made. This means potentially thousands of eyeballs just for changing a single forum signature. That's also another reason why being active on forums is such a good idea.

Forums and Q & A Websites

We have already discussed why forums are a fantastic place to market your business and build your online profile. What forums you choose will depend upon the industry or niche that you are in, and what level of expertise you want to build.

There are other websites that you should focus on too; the question-and-answer format sites. The most popular one currently is definitely Quora. Quora has questions on every topic you could possibly think of, and the number of unanswered questions likely number in the millions, giving you an enormous avenue of opportunity. Quora is a great place to build your expertise, because you can put your business information in every single question you answer.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that you cannot run a business today without creating an online identity if you want to make it in the world of retail or internet marketing. People don't just visit the internet anymore; they actually live on it, doing most of their shopping online, using the web for entertainment or an information source, and in many cases, working online. Your identity needs to meet them where they are because they aren't going to magically come to you.