Creating a Strong Online Brand

Summary

Building a strong online brand identity hinges on several elements. It begins with establishing a relatable brand identity through elements such as logo, color scheme, tone, and voice.

Once created, enhancing brand credibility is a top priority. It's achieved by obtaining positive reviews and testimonials, inclusion in industry lists, and by building partnerships with other reputable brands.

A well-crafted mission statement sets out the brand's purpose and its target audience while selecting a niche market enables the brand to focus its marketing.

Brand qualities, including leadership and resilience, help drive success. Articulating the benefits of the brand is key to customer understanding and satisfaction. Because of this, communicating clear brand intention engenders loyalty among your audience.

Reputation is built by telegraphing brand trustworthiness and honesty, communicating authenticity, and maintaining positive relationships with the audience. 

Any brand that stands the test of time must be perceived as reputable. It's important because, without a healthy brand image, customers are more likely to flee from your brand to that of a competitor. 

Brand identity

Your brand's identity is pivotal to its success and future opportunities, but only if it acquires certain attributes that are relatable. The steps below will help you understand the requirements needed to give your brand the perfect identity. This is the logo, color scheme, tone, voice, and much more. 

Credibility

Credibility is always going to be a top priority, which is why it’s last on the list (so it’s fresh in your brain). Credibility has a lot to do with the marketing side of every reputable brand. This represents a promise to your buyers and it will always have an impulse on them. Here are a few ways you can bring credibility to your brand:

1. Reviews/Testimonials—When you receive endorsements from other credible brands, this shows an area of expertise in the product that you’re selling, as well as the overall understanding of the way your brand works. This is considered a recommendation, and how likely are you to buy a product based on a recommendation, rather than a sales pitch?
2. Inclusion in Lists
   Every industry seems to feature a list of the "best" companies in the space. For example, if your brand is a brokerage, then a list of the best brokerages would be a good place to get featured. People trust the opinions of others, and lists are a great place to start. 
3. Get Involved with Partnerships—partnerships will give you the resources needed to continue growing your business. Whereas marketing and advertising are harsh on the pockets, developing partnerships with credible brands can increase your sales and customer base.

Mission Statement

All reputable brands need a good mission statement. This statement is responsible for projecting the general purpose of your brand and its intent to its audience. A good mission statement is going to highlight your services to others, as well as the goal of those services. It will answer what, whom, and the how of the brand.

• What does the brand do?
• Who does the brand service?
• How do you service your consumers?

Niche

Selecting a niche market is a critical step in any business, but it's also a very critical step in determining whether or not your brand is a  reputable one because it identifies which division in business is best for your brand. Here are a couple of options:

1. Are you selling B2B? (Business to Business Marketing)—a business decision will have less personal emotion involved in the decision to sell a product. Of course, this requires knowledge of the buyer’s company and how they run the company.
2. Are you selling B2C? (Business to Consumer Marketing)—this form of marketing opposes B2B because this will require emotion to understand the logic of a product you're going to sell. This requires clarity on what the product is going to conveniently offer to the consumer.  

Qualities

Qualities don't refer to how much you can offer, but what you can offer and in what way. These are the characteristics that will help drive your company to its success. Qualities involve:

• Leadership
• Strengths
• Resiliency In Risk-taking
• Positive Inspiration
• Encouragement
• Awareness

Benefits of the brand

Do your customers understand the value of the product you are offering? If they don't, pay attention to the way these benefits are listed because customers want to know how their lives will shift once they begin investing in your products and services.

Customers are going to initially focus on price value, but if they don’t have an understanding of how the benefits are translating to the cost value, they stop caring. Below is a list of questions you may get from customers based on the products they buy.

• “What does this do for me as a buyer?”
• “As a buyer of your product, how does this change my life?”
• “What benefits does this give to me? Does it make me smarter, give me a better nutritional lifestyle, or help me accumulate wealth?”

Intention of the brand

Setting an intention for a brand isn’t just about the brand or the company. It’s about giving people the choice of an initiative. When customers are able to take the initiative from using a service, it gives them power.

When a customer has the power, it gives them a sense of success, wealth, encouragement, strength, and awareness. If your brand's intention is clear, this allows people to be receptive to the brand, and in turn, they’ll reciprocate to it by being faithful customers.

Trustworthiness of the brand

Trustworthiness gives your brand the right to enter a customer's personal space, and without trust, your customers will steer clear of everything relative to it. Customers want to trust that your brand will always be relatable, stay true to its mission, and intention. Here's how your customers will hold you accountable:

Honesty of the brand

Honesty embodies integrity. Above all else, the integrity of your brand is going to communicate your brand’s authenticity. If you’re questioning your brand's authenticity ask yourself these questions:

• Are you showing yourself and others consistency?
• Are you passionate about what your brand represents?
• Is my brand transparent?
• Does my brand place importance on customers’ questions and concerns?
• Is my brand consistently maintaining and building new relationships with customers?
• Is my brand interacting with old customer relationships?
• what do I  know about my customers, and how can I  better serve them using this information?

Believability

For a brand to be believable, it must show authenticity by being accessible to its customers. A common, limiting factor for losing a client's trust is a result of a product’s value decreasing. One way to keep a customer's trust is to deliver the same product consistently.

Brand personality

Personality refers to the way your customers interact with your brand based on the way it makes them feel. Just like qualities have characteristics, so does a brand's personality, but it doesn’t stop at only having a list of characteristics to show.

The personality isn’t about your feelings towards your business; it's about the way the brand's influence is projected to reach the perfect customers. Build a brand that will cater to your customer's way of life and identity, and showcase that through meaningful content. 

If you’ve ever questioned whether or not your brand is reputable, these will always be good references. They narrow down everything you need in order to get your business flowing the way you know it can.

FAQs

What makes an online brand reputable today?

Brand identity. Credibility. Mission statement. Niche. Qualities.

What factors contribute to a brand's credibility?

Good reviews, testimonials, inclusion in best-of lists, involvement with beneficial partnerships and more contribute to brand credibility.

Why is trustworthiness of a brand important?

Trustworthiness gives your brand the right to enter a customer's personal space, and without trust, your customers will steer clear of everything relative to it. Customers want to trust that your brand will always be relatable, stay true to its mission, and its intention.

How do customers hold a brand accountable?

Honesty of the brand. Believability. Brand personality.