Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

By Hunter Amato, Guest Contributor for Inland Empire Business Journal

The digital revolution brings with it both challenges and opportunities that never existed pre-internet. Even the concept of e-commerce, now a huge percentage of total brand sales every year, was dismissed as negligible until the last decade or so. But things have changed.

In the modern digital age, new marketing strategies have developed to utilize technological advancements and take advantage of the possibilities offered by a new interconnected world. Here’s how your brand can keep up.

Stay Consistent

The modern digital consumer is bombarded with content at every turn. With friends, family, and competing brands vying for attention, how does your brand stay relevant?

A large part of getting consumer attention is consistency. Make sure to invest early and effectively into a good design team or designer who can give your brand marketing a visual throughline that will last.

Humans are visual creatures and great at pattern recognition. This means that if someone sees an advertisement or thumbnail for your brand once, they may not pay it any mind. If however, they see it consistently and regularly, it’s more like to leave an impression.

Consistent visual media campaigns and visual branding are great for this sort of thing. Consider a similarity that all your marketing could have, whether that’s a color palette, font family, general layout, etc, and stick to it.

Consistency is also key in matters of tone and personality. In the digital age, all companies should have a specific voice that they stick to in advertisements, posts, public statements, and even customer service responses. Consumers want to feel like they “know” the brands they buy from, and consistency of tone helps in that regard.

Leverage Social Media

A perfect place to develop and maintain a consistent brand personality is social media. More than one million people join social platforms every single day, and 90% of brands use social media to communicate with users.

It’s important to diversify your social media use; don’t just have a presence on one platform. By maintaining pages on different sites, you can reach different demographics and also track where your strengths might lie.

Mastering every social network out there may not be possible simultaneously, but do get acquainted with the basics and make sure you’re active regularly.

Consistency matters not only in visuals and tone, but also in post frequency. Adjust your post and curation rate for each social media site, but never go silent for more than a week at a time.

Social media companies know that brands rely on them in the digital age, so they offer business tools that can be incredibly useful. In addition, social media offers the possibility of working with brand ambassadors, influencers, and even partnering even temporarily with related brands.

Big Data is Your Friend

Another key marketing component that social media offers your brand in the digital age is big data. The big data revolution is making sweeping strides in many fields, from the commercial to the healthcare sector.

Essentially, what big data means for brands is that there are incredible amounts of user data and customer behavior data being generated every day, and that new technological innovations make those massive troves of data searchable, analyzable, and usable for marketing.

Facebook provides a fantastic analytics service, that can be combined with Instagram’s analytics since the former acquired the latter company. Snapchat also includes its own user analytics for official accounts, called Snapchat Insights. Pinterest has its own suite of business tools as well.

Now that your brand has access to big data, it’s important to use it in the most effective way. The primary ways of going about this are by targeting ads to specific demographic groups, analyzing the effectiveness of different brand marketing strategies, and split testing ads.

By utilizing the power of big data, your brand can make smarter choices about where to invest inherently limited resources, and develop a marketing strategy fit for the digital age.

In Summary

Brand exposure and favorability are more important than ever in the digital world, given the number of choices consumers have at their fingertips.

By maintaining consistent branding in both visuals, tone, and values, your brand will retain consumer attention well. By leveraging the power of social media, you can not only increase e-commerce activity but also further your brand familiarity and develop a positive relationship with your consumers. Finally, the big data revolution has enabled increasingly useful analytics tools that can be used to optimize your brand marketing even further.