What's the secret to building a successful digital marketing brand strategy? It's certainly easier said than done.

If you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that everyone has a "brand" or identity that "sells" themselves to other people, in a sense. You don't need to be a marketing expert to realize that even gardeners and teachers along with marketers "advertise" themselves through their personality, voice, values, and appearance.

The same is true when it comes to companies. Regardless of how big or small your company is—whether it's a multinational or startup company—you want to establish a branding strategy that takes advantage of today's Internet-connected digital world.

As of 2020, there are already over 4.57 billion active Internet users. That's more than half of the world’s population. Yes, it's more than a stretch to reach every one of those people, but it's easier now because they're on the Internet.

• Easier Connection: As far as your brand is concerned, it's easier than ever to connect to these people using viral marketing or social media marketing compared to traditional strategies of newspaper advertisements on the classified or posters and flyers everywhere.

• The Fine Art of Communication: Don't be scared of the Internet. It's just another marketing medium with countless other available multimedia. You can even synergize online marketing with traditional marketing under one strong brand.

• A Novel Marketing Medium: It's even as effective a medium as TV commercials like Super Bowl ads or infomercials when it comes to making your brand world-famous instead of just famous among Americans since the web is global.

• The New Television: TV time has been cut down exactly because people have more options for entertainment, which includes the billion-dollar videogame industry and the Internet itself, which is home to streaming sites, user-generated video, and applications galore.

• Requires Professionalism Instead of Luck: Startup founders who think they can do everything in a DIY manner like YouTubers or social media influencers who've made their brands at the back of their parents' garage with a laptop and a dream may be relying too much on luck to succeed.

In this brave new world, you'd want someone to depend on — professionals like us here at Marketing Ignite.

We will set aflame your online marketing and brand strategy so that you'll be able to start imprinting your digital footprint on the right foot and on the right track!

If you want your business to become successful in the digital world of today and tomorrow, you might want to get assistance from the experts in developing and sustaining an effective online brand!

On that note, let's discuss what a digital marketing brand strategy is and what it entails. Just because something is done online it doesn't mean it's cheaper or requires only amateur effort.

• Your Digital Branding Strategy: Your digital branding strategy is translating your real-world startup branding to an online audience. You should make your brand identity—which starts with logos but shaped by your mission-vision—

• Overarching Goal: Your digital brand should also have an overarching goal of increasing customer loyalty along with sales. You're not just providing useful goods and dependable services—you're also family. A familiar face. Consumers tend to congregate with the familiar or anything with good publicity.

• Imagine Your Brand as a Person: Personifying your brand or making a personification of it all can pay dividends to your digital branding strategy. A person has values, appearance, personality, and name. It has meaning and represents something that your consumer base might agree with.

• Communicating Your Brand's Personality: You should use Internet-based marketing strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), Google rankings, social media, email mailing lists, or YouTube ads to communicate to a target audience what your brand is all about and why they should buy your brand of products.

• Something to Say and Someone to Say it To: Your brand's personality should have meaning or something to say as well as someone to say it to (your target audience). Your digital brand strategy should take this personality then position it to perform competitively against other brands in your market segment.

• Synergy is the Key: Your corporate or brand identity should synergize with your online marketing. You can use your existing identity if it's a perfect fit with a modern online audience or change its personality to move with the changing times without going overboard and forgetting the essence of your brand.

• Learn What Actual Influencers Learned: Not every company can follow the success stories of PewDiePie, Logan and Jake Paul, James Charles, or even Justin Bieber (who originally had a YouTube channel before he was discovered and turned into a superstar). You can learn from how they used the platform.

It's important to establish your digital brand strategy on the Internet using all of its available tools because a company with no brand is the same as a person with no personality—it's boring and too utilitarian.

• Utilitarian and Unknown: It just doesn't jump out and its customers are mostly those looking for any merchandise like batteries, sacks of wheat, or shoes without caring about the brand. Any box of matches will do if you just want the matches themselves.

• Boring and Interchangeable: Whether you advertise by blog or podcast shoutouts, unless your brand logo, name, and presentation have some personality to it, the "cult of personality" of Brand X, Y, or Z will go over your nameless brand every time.

• Establishing Brand Identity: Your brand can have the personality of a friendly neighborhood superhero or kind neighbor who’s eager to help out. You can have a mascot like Mr. Clean showcasing friendly yet overpowering strength against stains.

• Bigger Brands Got Bigger Personalities: People tend to avoid associating with boring people or companies. They'd rather ride with Apple or Microsoft instead of some miscellaneous Chinese knockoff brand unless they prioritize cheapness and availability over guaranteed quality.

• Establishing Relationships: Your brand allows a nebulous entity like a corporation or startup to establish a familiar relationship with your customers, even if it's the guise of a Ronald McDonald appealing to kids with the McDonald's franchise world-renowned Happy Meals.

According to 81 percent of customers, they believe trust is their number one priority when purchasing goods and services. They also value brand consistency because they're 33 percent more likely than other customers to stay loyal to the most consistent brands.

They're also 27 percent more likely to advocate for the brand, thus it's not just your marketers who are making the push for others to buy your products—it's your existing customers themselves who are advertising for you for free!

It's how Apple was able to weather the Microsoft storm and develop strong branding for their iPod, iPhone, and iPad products to the youth at the time while Microsoft products like their Microsoft Surface tablet and Zune MP3 player bit the dust.

Aside from gaining consumer trust, developing an effective brand-building plan can do the following:

• Boost sales
• Increase company value
• Lower employee turnover
• Heighten the perceived brand quality

Digital branding, marketing, and advertising is centered on building customer relationships. Thus, they require the right unified or synergized strategies that maximize your earning potential and the scalability of your consumer base.

How did recognizable brands like Apple, Netflix, and IKEA establish their brands through their overall branding or even, at times, their online marketing strategies? Let's find out!

• Apple: Apple at first was all about innovation, with competitors trailing behind it (like its creation of the keyboard that's even better than the standard QWERTY keyboard that unfortunately flopped), but then it realized marketing in tandem with innovation is the way to go.

  They became branding experts that communicate relationship-building, creativity, and passion through the stories they make. For example, their popular "Share Your Gifts" video has 25 million views on YouTube.

  It tells the story of a four-person family traveling to their grandpa's house during the holidays. The family waxes sentimental as they long for their respective grandma, mom, and wife.

  The children then use Apple tech to make a digital presentation of their grandmother using memorabilia in the house. This is why Apple is able to tug at the heartstrings of their current customers, which they couldn't do with their mostly nerdy and businessperson niche.

• Netflix: Although Netflix at the time of this writing is suffering from mass unsubscribes and cancellations of their service due to oversaturation of every company making their own streaming service, it still established a strong brand identity online.

  It's through its company personality that it's able to survive this current drought it's facing. Netflix's online marketing of its online services succeeded in convincing cinephiles and couch potatoes who love movies and TV shows to actually pay for streaming instead of pirating content for free.

  Netflix broke ground and made its brand identity all about convenience. As long as you have a $10 subscription to Netflix, you can watch your favorite shows on the networks or Netflix originals at the comfort of your mobile phone or laptop as well as HDTV.

  They were ahead of the curve in figuring out that consumer behavior has changed in accordance with 20 years of technological advances. Their marketing reflected this. Not just in ad content but also what they offered—the ability to binge-watch movies or TV programs like with DVD.

  It combined DCMA strikes against the pirates of Pirate Bay torrents and Content ID on YouTube with the meme "Netflix and Chill" (its meaning is raunchier among youths but it did give the company publicity regardless) in order to sell the image of being better and more convenient than traditional or cable TV.

• IKEA: IKEA also grew their customer base outside of its country of origin—Sweden. It's a brand that exudes quirkiness and fun. It advertises its affordably priced furniture as not low-grade but rather a shabby-chic way to make your own furniture like they're LEGO blocks.

  It aims its digital branding to a younger audience and thus they were able to stay connected with their buyer personas. It was all through the branding strategists of IKEA and their constant creative brainstorming.

  They're able to think outside the box and use such tools as art installations, YouTube videos, social media posts, and other digital content channels to turn IKEA into a hip company that gives Millennials and Gen Z a more affordable way to own furniture that won't break the bank.

  IKEA also did their research when making their personalized campaigns like Oddly IKEA. They're aware of the dire financial straits of the current youth generation as well as the things that amuse them, like the ASMR trend.

  They thus produced a 25-minute ASMR video using things like sheets, pillows, comforters, and other IKEA merchandise to appeal to a much younger consumer base compared to Gen X or the Baby Boomer crowd.

Since digital marketing brand strategy depends on your brand's voice, vision, mission, and personality, you should translate such concepts into concrete identifiable visual elements such as logos, fonts, and color schemes.

Keep the following in mind:

• The Internet is All About Visual Communication: When you're doing digital branding, you should tell your consumers what your company is all about visually, from the logo to what sort of themes your advertisements and commercials delve into.

• Make the Concepts Related and Thematic: Your consumers will get lost as soon as your digital marketing plan becomes a grab bag of contradicting, dissimilar, or chaotic concepts that don't fit with each other even as direct opposites.

• Optimized for Target Markets: You have loads of tools at your disposal when it comes to marketing on the Internet. You can use things like SEO to establish key phrases your site should rank high on, which helps define what it is and which customers you wish to find on Google.

• It's Easier to Find Your Audience: You can also use digital content creation, partnerships with other sites, and lead generation tactics to appeal to specific demographics in ways you couldn’t on TV and through newspapers. Figure out your audience then appeal to them by branding.

• Strong Digital Strategy Development: You should partner with us at Marketing Ignite to better strategize your digital marketing, because without such assistance, your half-baked experimental methods towards appealing to online netizens might result in more failures than successes.

Brand creation doesn't happen immediately. You need to constantly and consistently work on it with the right platforms, an abundance of creativity, digital strategy research, and long-term goals.

To create a digital marketing brand strategy, you need to do the following:

• Perform brand audits
• Publish quality content
• Know your sales funnel
• Understand your audience
• Create a cohesive design for your brand
• Choose the right digital publishing platform
• Determine your brand’s mission and vision
• Leverage market opportunities and competitive positioning

Building a brand isn't a one-and-done deal. It's something that's continual, like the growth of your company. This is why you see companies regularly change their marketing theme seemingly every season or even every 4-5 years.

This is because they're aware of how fickle their casual consumer base is even as their hardcore customers will stick to them through even the same marketing plan every time.

A person changes as they grow, learn, and develop. Since your brand is supposed to emulate a person, it too should change over time, for good or for ill, so that you can establish new relationships with every new generation of consumers.

This also applies to changes in market trends and even technological advances like the Internet, social media, and Web 2.0 (we're actually on the verge of Web 3.0 sometime around the 2020s).

Your branding strategy in the 21st Century or in the 2020s should reach a modern audience that's less about TV ads and more about instantaneous information spread in social media.

As you may have observed, doing digital marketing brand strategy by yourself is a fool's errand. Thinking that reading a couple of articles then planning it out on your own or through a haphazard marketing department will not net you much success.

Instead of learning from all your marketing mistakes along the way through trial and error, we can map out a sensible direction for your brand from the get-go.

We can take care of everything for you and get the results done quicker — and you can focus on maximizing your strengths and growing your business.

You need to put the digital in your digital marketing brand strategy to make your company more relevant to your tech-savvy audience, thus resulting in better and increased sales when all is said and done!

You can either do all of this yourself and spend lots of time, effort, and headache to create an online marketing brand or get your strategy from actual experts here in Marketing Ignite.

What are you waiting for? Contact us today and let’s talk about how we can help you establish a great online brand strategy.