ONLINE BRANDING – DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!

A company’s brand image has the power to make or break it in terms of commercial success and recognition. Reputation management organisations like Zenera Consulting focus on helping clients to build strong brand images and maintaining high standards for same. Nigeria is increasingly becoming more digitised and more businesses are realising the importance of creating (and sustaining) a memorable digital footprint in the online community.
One of the keys to successful online branding is simplicity. The greatest brands excel in simplifying life for their customers. In this post-modern era, consumers are becoming less patient and expect things to be done instantly. If you look at the success of international organisations such as Amazon and EBay, they have one thing in common- the simplicity of their websites. This has been a dominant contributor to their success. Nigerian online market platforms such as Konga and Jumia have also adopted this feature which has helped their brand awareness and success.
Another key strategic to business fortune in the online platform is brand differentiation. Your brand positioning should convince consumers that your product is indeed different from others in the same genre. This is especially important for products that have a high price elasticity of demand, where a higher price would lead to consumers seeking lower prices for similar products somewhere else. With successful brand differentiation, the price elasticity of demand becomes more inelastic with consumers being more receptive to changes in price- a similar product elsewhere would not give perception of standards already set by the unique brand. Successfully branded products project images that are memorable and likeable.
A third factor in successful online branding is having an active social media. This paves the way for enhanced reputation awareness and the sustainability of this reputation. When determining the social media strategy to adopt, organisations must consider the target audience they wish to market their products to. A company interested in selling women’s clothing online would focus more on the aesthetics of their website and the design of online contents to attract consumer attention.
Generally, it is desirable for an organisation to have a regularly updated blog that would keep consumers up to date with what is going on in the organisation. The blog may be about new products or services, awards and accomplishments, articles and general information that would keep the organisation permanently in the minds of consumers. The foregoing insights, when used in tandem, are among the most successful branding tools to engage your online audience for business success.
– Idegbua Higo, Media & Communications Intern at Zenera Consulting.