If your online brand presence is falling flat, it may be time to reanalyze how your business is portrayed online. The lull after the holiday rush is the perfect time to take a step back an figure out where you can improve your digital branding elements so you can re-engage your following and increase online conversions to help boost your business in 2019.
Finding Your Brand’s Essence
Without the right strategy in place, representing your brand digitally can be overwhelming and inconsistent for some small businesses. We’ve broken down your digital brand presence into four key elements.
Extending Your Look Digitally
Expanding your brand to digital should be a seamless transition between your physical and virtual space. If a client has visited your physical business, they should be able to easily recognize your virtual space (social media accounts, website, etc.) and vice versa.
A brand that does this very well? Chip and Joanna’s Magnolia. Everything from their Instagram account to books, to physical spaces, are cohesively and thoughtfully designed.
Nailing the Voice of Your Brand
Social media has allowed marketers to transition their brand voice to be more casual. However, as a result, your voice may now get lost in the sea of social conversations. How do we break through the noise? A strong brand voice.
Your voice is anything from the copy in your newsletters, on your website, your signage or even your social media captions. One of the great things about the beauty industry is that we are all creatives – so don’t afraid to be you, even if it’s a little outside the box. If you need help determining your voice – try picking a few adjectives (edgy, quirky, sassy, etc.) that describe the personality of your brand and build your verbiage from there.
Does Your Brand Pass the Scroll Test?
In the age of the smartphone, we are all guilty of monotonously scrolling through our phones until something catches our eye. The scroll test has two parts:
- Is your post eye-catching enough to make someone stop the scroll AND
- Can a viewer instantaneously tell the post is yours solely based on aesthetic?
Mastering the scroll test comes with a strong online identity. Overlooked design elements such as color palette, font choices, are crucial to creating a consistent look online.
Posting Through a Strategic Lens
There are certain ways we direct our business narrative in-person to show clients only the best areas of our business (i.e. not the dirty laundry room) and online shouldn’t be any different. Posting with a strategic lens is important because your online presence is often the first impression that clients have of your business, so make it count!
Too many businesses cross the line between professional and personal. What if your Instagram Story is full of your team out at the bar and then member shows up late for an appointment the next morning? It’s not too hard for the client to connect the dots. Keep in mind whatever you post is like a “digital tattoo” that forever stays on the Internet and attached to your brand. Here’s a rule of thumb to follow: your social media posts should delight, inform, or inspire, otherwise they aren’t worth it.
Branded Content: Where to Start
Beyond social media, what are other ways to increase your presence online? Additional content helps support your brand online and lets the search engine algorithms know that you’re a thought leader – thus upping your search result rankings – a win-win for any business.
Content Subject Matter
It may seem simple – but use your mission vision statement as a foundation for your content. What do you stand for? How do you want to serve your clients and the community? If you’re not sure where to start, ask your clients! What do they want to know? You can also utilize tools like answerthepublic.com and FAQfox.com to see what people are searching on the internet to topics related to your business.
Content Mediums
Creating content beyond social media doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You have a vault of valuable information that may seem like second-nature to you but are golden nuggets of information to your audience.
| Blogging | Whitepapers/eBooks | Video |
| Blogs are a versatile content medium that can be used in newsletters, social posts or given to clients as resources. They are also a great way to announce company news. | Easily design how-to PDFs with tools like Canva. Make them downloadable on your website/blog and then you can capture emails too. | All modern smartphones shoot high-quality video – you can make tutorials, testimonials, business tours and so much more. |
