7 Ways Your Business Can Protect Its Online Brand

Building and protecting your branding through digital marketing and social media can be tricky. Not only do you need to use analytics and competitive intelligence to see what works and what doesn’t, but you also need to be incredibly mindful of how your brand is represented online. Using your entrepreneurship skills to actually set up a company is one thing, but using your it online is a different matter.

Here are some tips to protect your branding when you use social media or digital marketing.

Schedule posts ahead so you have the opportunity to double check them

Near enough all of the current digital media channels offer the opportunity to use a third party piece of software to schedule posts ahead. Although most social media platforms, like Facebook, have their own way to schedule posts, a third party piece of software can let you do this for all channels at once. This means you can double check the content before posting.

Respond immediately to complaints or feedback

One of the dangers of using digital media for business is that you open yourself up to all sorts of comments from the public. For the most part, the public is reassured if you answer straight away and deal with the issue. Although it seems counter-productive to have this showing on your channels, a lot of the time a complaint can turn into a compliment if dealt with swiftly.

Use analytics and competitive intelligence

You can use certain third party software to monitor the analytics for your websites and anything social you use online. This gives you a great insight into what works and what doesn’t. Not only this, but check interactions of competitors posts, and you will be able to see what works for them too. It is never a good idea to directly copy, but at least you can get an idea.

Have clear branding goals before signing up

Make sure you have dealt with all the brand specifications before you actually sign up to advertise yourself online. Nothing looks more unprofessional than a haphazard logo, a website that is still under construction and no set colour scheme. Think about all of this, and have it in hand before you start with your online marketing.

Have all digital media channels point to one thing

Sometimes companies can fall foul of spreading themselves too thinly. A confusing entanglement of social websites is likely to do nothing but put off potential customers. Ensure you have a set vision of what all of your channels are going to point to. The most common one is for all of the digital marketing to point to the website, which is likely to have the most information.

Think about the way you talk about other brands

Initially, it may sound like a good idea to disparage other brands online, especially when their downfalls appear in the new. It can be tempting to repost things alluding to your competitor’s failures, but you need to think about whether customers will really care about this.
Making another business look bad does not make yours any better.

Find your brand personality

The first few months of posting are always trial and error, but if you are looking at what works and what doesn’t, you should soon be able to start cultivating and online presence and ‘personality’ that people equate to you as a company. You need to think about your target market and what you think they will enjoy. Are they going to enjoy factual posts? Humour? Insights? News? Only you will be able to tell what is the most popular.

Finally, the most important one is to have fun!