Brand identity is your route to setting yourself apart and be ‘unique’ as a brand. For any successful business it is crucial to be different as this difference is one of the few things that current and potential customers will remember of you as a brand. And in todays fast paced online world, building a digital brand identity is a given.

What is digital brand identity?

Before we talk about digital brand identity, we have to know what ‘branding’ is. Branding is your methods and strategies for telling the customers who you are and what you are as a company. Through branding you must tell your customers what you do in a way they can easily remember. A Michelle Robertson article from 2020 divides branding into 3 ‘B’s.

• First, the way the world sees you is your ‘brand’
• Second, your process of developing a memorable brand is ‘branding’
• Third, ‘brand identity’ is the many different pieces you put together for branding.

Becoming successful as a business largely depends on your brand. If people forget about the maker, they forget about the product. Developing your brand is all about getting people to remember you.

With that in mind, what exactly is digital brand identity? In simple terms, digital brand identity is building your presence online. As the world progress, analog methods like magazines are slowly being phased out from under the limelight. This is because more and more people prefer online/ digital methods. The easiest way to reach out to the maximum number of customers is digitally.

In digital branding, you create your presence through websites and social media. Clean, modern websites and ‘catchy’ posts are key for digital branding. Also digital branding is letting your customers know about you and building customer loyalty. This is not to be confused with digital marketing which is just plain advertisements aimed to increase sales.

Breaking the Importance factor

Now that you know what digital branding is and just have a rough idea of its importance, let’s take a deeper look into how crucial it can actually be.

In 2021, the rate at which people- your potential customers- are getting glued to screens is exponential. With most of their reserved daily time and attention span for such branding campaigns now being spent online, to reach them, you need to be on the platform they are on. It is an effective way of communicating with your customers. A 2017 Matt Berry article describes the key importance of digital branding as the modern way of conveying your value as a company and the value you can provide, to your customer.

How to create your digital brand identity?

Creating your digital brand identity might look simple at first glance. A simple website here and a few social media accounts there must do the trick… right? Nope. Creating a digital brand identity is a whole new world. And attempts at creating a digital brand identity receives just as much, if not more scrutiny than older methods. But by taking calculated steps, it is compellingly intuitive to create your digital identity.

The first step- as in any type of branding- is to identify your customer. It is imperative to know who they are, and what they want from you. This is especially important in social media interactions. Are the people you have in your sights enthusiasts? Or are they just normal folks? Knowing such facts will help decide the way you want to be seen. And it will also allow you to target specific groups whilst proactively catering to their preferences. Being in-line with them will ensure greatest success with your branding efforts.

Secondly, designing an intuitive and interactive website is a must. Whilst building a digital brand identity, having a clean, modern and attractive web design that conveys the information you want smoothly is the best foundation to build upon. The website you create should be able to spark conversations and get saved in the memory of the people who visit it. Your website should have an easy-to-navigate UI with universally palatable design. Also design the website with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind. To be found online, you want to appear on the first page of every search engine. For doing so you have to make sure your page in easily findable through links in other sites. You also must actively monitor the sites for hackers and bugs as these can reduce traffic. Another way of being easily findable is to include common keywords within the items of your page.

Next-up you will need active social media accounts. On platform like Twitter, Instagram you must ‘interact’ with the customers. These interactions will help you to hold onto their interests for longer developing brand loyalty. Cater each individual posts to each platform and expected viewer. This would ensure a positive reaction from the viewer. For example, Instagram is driven by interaction-likes comments- so make a post that would generate the most likes. Alternatively, Twitter has a more real time and conversational environment making it the platform for frequent text-based updates or key discussions with customers.

The fourth step is email marketing. Through your website and social media platforms, encourage people to sign up to your mail service. From there, send out regular updates through email. By sending updates through mails, you can guarantee a large sum of people are getting that information, further developing your identity.

The fifth step is online marketing. You need to advertise your brand- not products- as a whole. You can do it through YouTube ads, Google ads or Twitter’s ‘promoted’ service. By serving these ads, you can make sure you appear on top of every search page or timeline making sure that people see you.

In conjunction to the fifth step, you also need to have an influencer program. Get influencers on social media to create posts about you. As an influencer, these people have created their fan-bases over a long time and have built trust. When an influencer with a lot of fan posts about you, immediately your info has reached many new people who trust the source and are less skeptical.

Ultimately, catchy logos are obviously important. A logo is the first thing a person notices about your brand and making it memorable will help that person remember you.