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Today, a brand’s digital presence is just as important as its physical locations and traditional marketing—if not more so. Not surprisingly, this development has drastically changed how many businesses approach brand management.
After all, the needs and interests of digital audiences can vary widely. Ensuring that a brand’s positioning and content are presented in a way that will best appeal to its target audience is crucial in any sphere, but especially so in the competitive online marketplace. Fortunately, embracing these five rising trends in brand management will go a long way toward improving a company’s perceived value in the digital world.
1. Digital Customer Experience
With more and more people having their primary interactions with a business in a digital space, optimizing their customer experience becomes perhaps the most important aspect of digital brand management. This trend will only become more pronounced after the past year, as 68% of consumers report that the Covid-19 pandemic has raised their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities.
Brands have the responsibility to become more digitally “mature” by transitioning away from a reactive digital approach. Customer service and sales become proactive, and customers are served by an individualized level of personalization, rather than segment-based personalization.
Design should become highly intuitive, matching the lifestyle of the target audience to deliver superior convenience. Whether a customer is connecting through a Facebook Messenger chatbot or from your website, your brand needs the infrastructure to provide simple, convenient service for making purchases or requesting assistance.
2. Omnichannel Marketing
Many brands know that they need to have a presence on multiple social media platforms, a great website and so forth to build a strong digital presence. But a true omnichannel approach goes beyond simply having multiple online channels.
Omnichannel marketing is a form of multichannel marketing that optimizes content, offers and messaging across each channel based on a user’s previous tracked interactions with the brand. Each step of the buyer’s journey is interconnected, with everything from email to social media ads feeding into each other to provide a more personalized experience.
Smart data gathering that is shared across marketing channels becomes far more engaging and makes your brand more memorable. Companies with strong omnichannel engagement increase their revenue by an average of 9.5% each year, far outpacing the 3.4% growth of competitors who lack omnichannel capabilities.
3. Heightened Emphasis on Inclusivity and Sustainability
After a tumultuous 2020, today’s digital consumers are more impassioned than ever on issues related to inclusivity and the environment. In fact, 41% of consumers state they will shift at least some of their business away from brands that don’t showcase diversity, with ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals being even more likely to feel this way. Eighty-one percent of customers also feel that companies have a responsibility to help the environment.
Needless to say, your company should take these attitudes into account when determining your overall digital branding strategy. Sustainability and inclusivity must become part of your brand’s identity to remain relevant with increasingly socially conscious consumers.
To illustrate your brand’s commitment to inclusion, make sure your branded content represents people of different races, genders, religions, ability statuses and so on. Highlighting the eco-friendly actions your company is taking can also improve perception of your brand.
4. Visual Search
Visual search is a more technical aspect of digital brand management that is continuing to gain relevance. Google now gives users the ability to upload an image as part of a search to get information about the contents of the picture. The Google Lens app, in particular, uses image recognition tech to help users identify products and other objects simply by uploading a picture.
In fact, surveys show that 62% of Millennials prefer visual search to text searches. In many ways, Google is following Pinterest by providing more image-heavy search results to adapt to changing user preferences. Quality branded visuals ensure a strong presence no matter how users search.
Brands can leverage this to their advantage by uploading high-quality images with rich alt text that includes target SEO keywords. Adding an image sitemap can make your images more easily discovered, which can be especially valuable to e-commerce brands.
5. Increased Interactivity
Interactive content is seeing a strong comeback, especially after 2020, when so many people had little to do other than spend time online. Interactive content like quizzes, polls and contests can be a strong driver of customer engagement on your owned platforms. The more time a customer engages with your brand online, the better your website will rank in search engine algorithms.
Interactive digital content enhances and personalizes the customer experience. It makes your brand more memorable and makes users more likely to come back in the future.
Perhaps even more importantly, interactive content gives you an opportunity to collect valuable user data. The data users provide through interactive content helps you understand their behavior and preferences so you can adapt future marketing efforts to better appeal to them.
Improve Your Online Presence for Dramatic Digital Growth
None of these trends in any way supplants the essential principles of crafting a strong, distinctive brand that connects with customers. And, of course, none of these efforts will do any good if your company doesn’t deliver high-quality products or services.
However, as you incorporate these important aspects of digital brand management into your 2021 marketing strategy, you will be better positioned to carve out a strong foothold in your market and achieve meaningful growth.
