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Building Your Online Brand The Internet brings an awful lot more players in. Because there are a lot more players, I think you see that it’s much more difficult to maintain customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is really built on branding and on building a relationship and those two go together. You have to build this bond with your customers and prospects. You have to build a relationship with them, but at the same time, part of building that relationship is maintaining a consistent theme, identity and message. That’s really what branding is about. Branding is about communicating a message. I come from the old direct mail, direct response background in marketing, and in the old days, I think that if you talked about branding to a direct response marketer, they would have laughed at you. But you know it’s not the old days. It’s the new days, it’s the days of the Internet, and I think that even direct response marketers are seeing you have to leverage every asset, every opportunity that you have on line. You have to develop that loyalty, and try to keep it. The only way that you maintain price value is by having a brand in this relationship, and that’s how you keep out of cut-throat price-oriented competition. That’s the need for branding. Creating a Brand There are several things that are important when it comes to building a brand. Number one, you look at the models for good branding. One of the good models, for example, is the whole series of books 'for Dummies.' You have Computers for Dummies, this for dummies, that for dummies, and they all have the same character logo used on the covers and on their website. It maintains a consistent color theme, which is black and yellow. Everything has the same graphic design, and so what that means is whether you’re looking at the website, whether you’re looking at the book, you know the company, you know the look. If you think of Starbucks, what colors do you think of Starbucks? Starbucks is associated with that green color they have, and so this is subconscious association. Psychologists call it contiguous association, and that’s really what you’re trying to build in branding. I would like to say a few things to people just getting started on the Internet. 1) Find a group of people with a common interest, problem, passion, desire or need that you can solve or provide a solution for. 2) Find out what it is they want and need. 3) Supply it to them. 4) Do this with a sustainable competitive advantage. 5) Brand yourself with a consistent message theme, logo, appearance, colors, and design so that you build equity with your customers. Then, over the long term, build your loyalty base. The final step is to concentrate on building your relationship with your customers by email, teleconference calls, in person contact and so forth. This way, you’re really building a long term relationship with your customers. You’re branding, you’re creating equity, and you’re creating a sustainable competitive advantage that’s going to keep you in business a year from now. Marlon Sanders is a brilliant, dynamic
e-marketer whose specialty is developing marketing strategies and writing
killer copy. He is the brains behind a dozen successful Internet ventures, the
first of which, "The Amazing Formula", continues to be one of the
top-selling ‘How-to’ guides on the Web. www.PushButtonLetters.com
(C) 2007 Mitch Meyerson |
