We’ve all heard it before, image is everything. For beginners, developing a brand can be extremely intimidating. Our previous blog on establishing your personal brand highlights how consistency is key to establishing your personal brand image, and the same theory applies to legitimizing your brands appearance by using online branding strategies to build a consumer base.

Your brands online appearance is crucial to building a strong consumer base. Your blog posts, website, social media accounts and SEO ranking all contribute to the success of your brand. Once you have consistency and cohesion in these 4 areas, you will begin to notice loyalty in your consumers.

4 Online Branding Strategies That Will Make Your Sales Increase

1. How to Create a Blog that That Generates Traffic

It’s extremely important to start blogging if you haven’t already. Your blog posts can range in a variety of topics, including “how-to” lists, interviews, recaps (of a conference/book/webinar you’ve attended) or even current events that effect your target demographic. Your blog posts needs to be engaging and it has to be something your consumer is tempted to click on and read more. Avoid talking about your services and products and focus more on the interests of your consumers and give them something valuable to share with their peers.

Blogging Tips and Tricks

It’s also important that the tone and voice of your blog matches your product and service. Are you a B2B or B2C business? Who do you want to read your blog post? Whether you choose to select a more conversational or professional tone, ensure that your blog generates an emotional response from the reader.

Here are a few foolproof blogging tips: use relevant images (be careful of copyrights!), make sure it is easy for the reader to share on social media, and create author authority (include a short description on the author and what makes them a creditable source).

2. Make Sure Your Website Is Not Driving Consumers Away!

First and foremost, is your website easily accessible on a mobile device? 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action. More than half lead to sales. (Source: SearchEngineLand). Therefore if your website isn’t mobile accessible, you need to fix that right away! You are literally diminishing your sales by the second.

The appearance of your website must be sleek and appealing. For users visiting your website on a computer, ensure all the valuable information is above the fold (meaning they don’t need to scroll down). Make sure the homepage clearly identifies what your business does and what the consumer will gain by making a purchase/using your services. Include clickable buttons that lead to valuable sources of information on other pages of your website.

Remember, simplicity is key. Entice the consumer, do not confuse them! 55% of users spend less than 15 seconds on your homepage.  What are you telling them in those 15 seconds?

3. Alternate Your Tone on Each Social Media Network

It’s valuable to know who you are writing for. Although you want a consistent tone/voice across all social media platforms, it’s important to know which percentage of your target demographic is on which channel, and when. Your Twitter audience and Instagram audience may not be composed of the same consumers.

For example, what Tigris shares on LinkedIn may not be the same articles that we share on Facebook and Twitter. Our Instagram audience loves ‘real-time’ photos where we share images of an event with our staff at that exact moment. On Facebook, we praise our events staff by highlighting a member each #TalentTuesday. On Twitter, our posts with motivational quotes obtain the most likes. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn tend to have an older audience while Instagram attracts the 18-29 age group. Do some experimenting and find out what works best for you and your brand. Ensure your posts are consistent on each social media platform, but not too frequent!

4. Get On Top – of SEO rankings!

To gain the ultimate authority and highlight professionalism, it’s crucial that you spend time on your SEO rankings. This is the most important of the 4 online branding strategies. You want to build your consumer base, and to do this, your target demographic needs to be able to find you! When looking for a new product or service, we all tend to ‘Google’ what we need. You need to ensure that when a potential consumer is searching for a keyword, your website comes up on the first page of their google search.

How do you make it into the top 3 (non-paid) Google search results? Create original content, and post frequently. Take the time to properly research which keywords your target demographic is using to search for your product/service. Improve your on-site content structure by using H1 tags, bolding, and images. Make sure your URL contains the keyword you are optimizing. Take the time to back link on high authority sites as well.

Get On Top – of SEO rankings!

From Online Branding Strategies to Face to Face Branding Strategies with Brand Ambassadors

As you can see, it takes some time to solidify your brand’s appearance to build your consumer base. Image is everything, from your website to the branded invoices you send your new and existing consumers. We know a lot of our promotional models and brand ambassadors across Canada are aspiring entrepreneurs and actors, so we hope you found this post beneficial to building your customer base and strengthening your brand.

If you are looking for another way to solidify your brand’s appearance to gain a larger consumer base, you may want to try experiential marketing – use a promotional team of brand ambassadors to increase awareness about your product or service by placing them in locations and at events where you know your consumer base will be. Have the events staff give out free samples and promotional items while engaging with potential consumers about your brand. The face-to-face interaction is extremely valuable and is an effective way to reach hundreds of potential consumers in a short amount of time. Contact Tigris today at 647-286-9392 for a free quote on any of our event staffing or experiential marketing services. We operate in over 15 markets across Canada, including Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Vancouver and Calgary.