With all of the competition buzzing around on the Internet, things can become a little gloomy, and a little tricky. It can be difficult to rise above the noise from millions of other online retailers selling similar items. Even more, you also have to contend with online marketplaces like Amazon, and big box stores like Costco or Target. As the overcast winter sky gives way to spring sunshine, the need to create a real brand is on the horizon.
Big brands, and even successful small ecommerce stores, stand out by becoming a brand. They stand out by applying a great, integrated marketing strategy to all marketing channels. Being just another company selling products online rarely makes a successful business anymore. The trick here is to make real, personal connections with your customers, and tend to your business as it blooms.
Overgrown Big Brands
First, let’s look at the impact of brands online. Unfortunately, many smaller business owners give up on their online presence before they even really try. With companies like Amazon, EBay, and more glaring back, they can oftentimes become discouraged by these stores’ massive inventory, deals, and takeover of the search results. Granted, Google makes it very easy for these brands to be found. Things like autocomplete search results and extended search results on the SERPs tend to push, and suggest, big brands before anything else. People often get hung up on Google letting manipulative SEO tactics slide for these big brands as well.
Our best advice here: accept the big online brands, and move on to cultivating your own brand. Simply setting up shop online doesn’t cut it anymore. These big brands are so successful because they have become a household name. Now, this type of marketing can take years and millions of dollars. Despite the time and money it can take to create a brand, there are plenty of things a smaller ecommerce store can do to stand out.
Let’s take a page right from Google – Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is famously quoted as saying “Brands are the solution, not the problem…brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” Google made their opinion of brands very clear after the algorithm updates Panda and Hummingbird were aimed at good content, and even better experiences. When preparing to plant your brand’s seeds, you must remember Eric Schmidt’s insight – brands are the answer.
Planting Your Brand’s Seeds
Now that we know what Google wants from brands, and how they tend to treat big box stores and online marketplaces, how do you make sure your brand has a chance to flourish? Just as you would with any garden, you need to make sure the foundation is right and primed for planting. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about your site’s foundation – things like your response codes, tags, and more. We won’t go into a lot of detail here about the bare bones of your site. Just remember, for a plant to grow, the soil must be packed with everything it needs to flourish.
The next seed that needs to be planted for your foundation is your online social presence. Social media is a truly powerful, and often free, way to reach millions of potential customers with your brand message. Simply having a few functional social media accounts with contact information for your business isn’t going to cut it though – you need to use your social presence to catch Google’s attention, and more importantly, your customer’s attention.
Of course, you need to gain a following. But, gathering hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of followers like the mega-brands can be a daunting task. One thing these big brands do well is communicating with their audience. This means responding to tweets, direct messages, Facebook comments, reviews, and more. This communication via social media channels is one of the biggest trust signals you can send to Google, and even your customers.
We can apply this practice of good, honest communication and engagement with your audience to all aspects of your business. This practice extends far beyond the social realm, into areas like your on-site customer service, sales, and marketing. This simple commitment to good communication with your customers can do wonders for your online brand image. This helps to show the search engines that you are committed to your customers, that you are a real brand striving to provide real relationships. This small step lays the perfect groundwork for planting your brand’s seeds.
Maintaining and Growing Your Garden
After you’ve made small, but important, steps to cultivate your groundwork, its time to focus on maintaining your brand image online and everywhere you market. Here, we begin to expand into the multichannel approach that big brands spend so much time and money grooming. Like any successful garden, these things must be constantly watched and adjusted for the best results.
One of the most important things to focus on is your user experience. This extends far past your site, into areas like your social presence, marketing emails, order pages, and more. Having a consistent message and information across all of these channels can help to solidify your brand message. Again, your user experience is something that should continue to grow and evolve. Listening to your customers through reviews, surveys, and more can help you to constantly improve your user experience. Once you get the hang of listening and improving, it becomes much easier to create a cohesive brand message.
Next, it’s important to focus on your organic marketing in hopes of improving your brand’s search reach. This means you need to establish your brand as something people actually search for on Google or other search engines – a branded search. These big brands do so well organically because millions of users type their brand name right into that search box each month.
To achieve this, that brand consistency needs to be used here as well. To increase people’s knowledge of your brand, things like links, mentions, and content need to carry your brand message. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure you are using good anchor text in your content. This means linking your brand in natural, helpful ways to improve your customers’ experiences and build that trust. This practice of good, branded anchor text applies to your on-site blog, social posts, listings, and more.
It is clear brands do well on, and rule, the Internet. Consistency, visibility, and engagement are the keys to success. These are the aspects of your business that should be planted alongside your marketing, social, linking, and listing efforts in your online garden. Grated, building a successful online brand that will hopefully become a household name someday takes a lot of time and money. There is no reason you can’t take the important, small steps needed to create this level of authority and trust as a real brand. All it takes is some love, commitment, and a little bit of sunshine to grow your business into a beautiful brand.