Top positions in major search engines improve brand awareness and credibility. It also creates identity for an unknown brand. Online brand building activities drive offline sales and offline brand building activities drive online sales.
Every interaction with a service, a product or its provider gives tangible proof of the real value the brand has - its action. All these interactions and impressions add up to the brand.
* Branding helps you differentiate from competition when tangible things are not enough.
* When considering new features and content for your site, alignment with the brand is as important as alignment with user goals.
* Online branding improves the click through rate (CTR) and conversions.
* Communicate Brand Image and deliver Brand Action (value to consumers) to your target audience.
* Create the online experience you brands deserve and craft ‘brand personas’ to measure support for both Brand Image and Brand Action and guide your image-oriented design efforts.
* Analyze the ways users search for your type of product and help you positioning your brand better.
* Take users to appropriate pages when searching for your kind of products.
When the Internet was first used for advertising, the watchword was accountability. As visitors to websites could be traced from first sight of an ad to an online purchase (or lack of purchase), it seemed that marketers had finally found an instantly traceable way to account for the success or failure of advertising.
Click-through rates followed by purchase rates were the most important metrics in those early years. Advertisers began to pay the sites they advertised on only for the visitors who actually clicked through, and in some cases even cut deals based on “cost per acquisition” of new customers -- meaning if customers saw the ad but did not go on to buy, the site got nothing.
The Internet, ran conventional wisdom, was a medium that could deliver a direct correlation between advertising and purchasing behavior, and should be used with that correlation in mind: in other words, ads should be a direct call to action. The idea of using the Internet for branding in the way that radio and television have long been used received little attention.
But the premises behind these conclusions were flawed. More recent research has shown that the Internet can indeed act as a powerful tool for pushing brand messages as well as a direct response mechanism. Though click-through rates have declined dramatically (to less than 1 percent in many cases) since the days when novelty kept us clicking, that doesn't mean people are no longer receptive to Internet ads.
Online advertising seems to work best when combined with conventional media such as print and television: the same research found that combinations of print and television advertising lifted awareness to 9 percent, but combinations of print, television and online raised awareness to 14 percent.
However, the success or failure of brand management relies on more than one or two factors. From product to distribution, pricing to customer service, public relations to advertising, and financial resources to management talent, successful branding is an all encompassing multidimensional process.
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