Blueprint of an Online Branding Strategy

We have different online marketing methods to promote our products. For example, we invest on PPC; advertise directly on different blogs and networks etc. Some marketers take the initiative to invest in affiliate marketing too.

Do you think these advertisement campaigns help us in any other way apart from increasing sales volume?

In my opinion, online advertising can also help you a lot in brand development apart from improving your sales volume.

Why so?

In any branding strategy, the most important part is being visible in the target market. If you can put your brand forward in every possible occasion, this would definitely help you in brand promotion.

A lot of marketers employ someone to talk about their brand in different forums, social networks and blogs. This is a good solution. But if you compare the return from these sorts of below the belt promotion and direct advertisement, the last option will definitely offer you better ROI.

Does it require any special attention to details?

What happens in normal PPC advertisement? You prepare a catchy copy to sell your product. Here you are mainly focusing on the product than the brand name itself. At the same time when you are investing on regular link building to promote your website in search engine result pages, you are primarily emphasizing on keywords to write the anchor text. Do these keywords represent your brand name?

As far as my experience goes, the best way to go for online branding is to go for image or flash based advertising, video advertising and affiliate marketing. You can also think about paid blog promotion to promote your brand online. I will talk about each of them in the following paragraphs from branding perspective.

Image based advertisement: In an image based advertisement, you get the opportunity to focus on the product as well as the brand. And visuals appeal more to the audience than the text that they see everywhere in the page. To add to this, most seasoned web marketers know very well that being present in a page is not enough; your advertisement must attract the visitors. And an image based or flash based advertisement offers you ample space and scope to promote your brand.

Video marketing: What is a brand? It is a comprehensive story about the company that people believe. And thus video advertisement can offer you a better brand visibility across the web. However, there is a basic difference between traditional advertisement and video based advertisement. In a video based advertisement you do not get click value. However, if you want to go viral with your branding strategy, the logo in the video would help you a lot.

Affiliate Marketing: It has got best of both the worlds. If you have a good product to sell and can offer better profit percentage to the publishers than your competitors, you would definitely get a lot of interested webmasters. Now, though you have just a 125 X 125 space, it is just enough to promote your product as well as your brand, and you get click value too to improve your sales volume.