How Do Branding and Digital Marketing Connect?

Companies spend a significant portion of their revenue on developing unique branding strategies. Investing in building brand awareness is essential, especially if you are relatively a new player in the market. Once you create brand loyalty among your target audience, you can focus more on other advertising tactics.

Digital branding involves the process of creating or promoting a specific attribute or USP that the potential buyers can immediately relate your business or brand to. It is the process of creating a name, a design, an insignia, and above all, a personality for your business that helps to stay ahead of the competition.

In short, digital branding is the method of building value associated with your eCommerce business by developing and promoting a feature that your consumers will relate to your business instantly.

What is Digital Branding?

Digital branding is the approach of leveraging smart technologies, digital channels, and the Internet to develop or manage your brand name or brand identity. It is the process of making the brand communicate with the target audience. In other words, digital branding involves the process of using different digital platforms to build your brand.

Digital branding involves the following key −

• Building and developing a digital brand story

• Leveraging digital channels to boost website traffic and reach more customers

• Being creative in using digital media to build brand awareness

• Creating and maintaining customer relationships and digital awareness.

The Connection Between Digital Branding and Digital Marketing

The terms digital branding and digital marketing are interconnected. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin, and hence they co-exist, even though they are different from one another. Before discussing their connection, let's discuss the differences.

Differences Between Branding and Digital Marketing

Here are some of the major points of difference between digital marketing and digital branding.

• Digital marketing focuses on promoting one's products and services through diverse online channels. On the other hand, digital branding focuses more on establishing your brand identity and brand name. Branding is a way of telling your target audience who you are, what is your brand value, and what you stand for.

• While the end goal of digital marketing is to promote and sell your products and services and convert potential leads into paying customers, digital branding is to impact your audience by leaving your value and essence to them.

• Digital marketing works on attracting more people from one’s target audience for spelling one’s products and services, thus expanding the customer base. Whereas, digital branding focuses on imparting one’s business values to the audience.

• Digital marketing focuses on developing effective advertising strategies to sell one’s goods and services and boost revenue, whereas, digital branding puts more effort into building one’s business reputation and brand personality.

• By implementing impactful digital marketing tactics and messages, digital marketers can convert leads into customers. However, using branding strategies, eCommerce businesses can convert their customers into promoters, and in a way, brand ambassadors.

To make things clear, the terms are not used interchangeably, but rather in relation to each other. In other words, you cannot choose one over the other - they both share equal importance and hence co-exist.

How are Digital Branding and Digital Marketing Linked?

In the marketing world, customers are everything - they have the power to make or break a business. Customer satisfaction is the key to success for any business, and therefore, if you cannot deliver that, you will lose your valuable clients.

There is a huge potential for digital marketing, more so because of the technology-driven society we live in today. In modern times, more than 3 billion people worldwide are active on various social media platforms every day. So, digital marketers and eCommerce merchants are leveraging this advantage to curate their campaigns specifically for online buyers and social media users., to generate higher-quality leads.

Apart from promoting your products and services, digital marketing can help build brand loyalty and brand awareness, thus driving more sales in the long run. Here are some ways online marketing can boost your brand image.

It can make your Brand Go Viral

At times, we have seen how a single social media post or digital campaign has skyrocketed one’s brand image within a short period. Even though it may seem effortless, sudden, or sometimes even luck-by-chance, it is anyway working favorably for the brand.

Besides, believe it or not, a lot of pre-planning and strategic decision-making has been involved, as a result of which, customers are witnessing such immense popularity of a particular brand. So, if there are any unique selling points or viral elements associated with your brand, go ahead and push them over the digital channels to gain maximum reach in shorter periods.

It can Build trust Across Multiple Channels

Since the potential of digital marketing extends to multiple channels, including websites, mobile or web applications, social media, emails, and more. Hence, it helps to build and maintain a unified brand identity across different online channels, using unique digital marketing strategies.

You can create similar messages for each of your audiences present across diverse platforms after making some fine-tunings and customizations based on the market sentiments and customer behaviors of the concerned outlet. If your customers see similar ads on every platform they visit, it will automatically create an image of your brand, encouraging them to think about it positively and relate to your brand value easily.

It facilitates Effective Communication.

Digital marketing works on maintaining transparency between the brand and its customers through efficient communication. Modern-day eCommerce brands are offering robust 24x7 customer support systems to address the unique issues, queries, or concerns of potential buyers.

Today’s advanced technological and analytical tools allow businesses to keep track of these chats and conversations, along with other key metrics, including clicks, shares, feedback, recommendations, and social engagement rates. Such details help businesses understand their customers’ buying behaviors, sentiments, and engagement.

It Distinguishes You From Your Rivals

Digital marketing offers endless opportunities for innovation and creativity to help your ideas and messages stand out. It’s not even a secret anymore that companies across diverse sectors and industries are experiencing fierce market competition in the face of changing customer demands and preferences. So, it’s necessary that you set yourself apart from your rivals by doing something different, thus developing your brand image.

Online advertising can promise you a profitable and stable position in the marketplace by leveraging the strengths of your business and creating a positive impact among your audience, thus making you different from your rivals.

Final Words

In a nutshell, digital marketing and digital branding co-exist and they both help to build a successful brand. Without digital marketing, digital branding would have no meaning, and vice versa. So, it’s high time you start focusing on developing string braiding techniques too, alongside your digital marketing strategies and campaigns.