Look at this front-page advertisement in one of the leading print media.
Image-1: How Businesses are Getting Diversified Online
Leaving aside the promotional content, the nature of this print advertisement showcases the buzzing categorization of the online marketplace – women entrepreneurs, artisans, local shops, emerging digital companies, cloud kitchens and more creating a “brand” out of themselves – all for the sake of visibility and outreach.
While some are enjoying a formidable offline presence, many are proactively investing in omnichannel marketing. At this point, most brands are not just selling solely on their website; they are selling on various e-commerce platforms, as well as social media, and in brick-and-mortar shops.
According to a survey by Square and Mercury Analytics on US business owners, common channels where brands sell their products and services include:
- Brick-and-mortar shop (56%)
- Website (34%)
- Pop-up shops, events, and markets (26%)
- Facebook (25%, but 40% as a whole on social media, including platforms such as Twitter and Instagram)
- Amazon (16%)
- Others (22%; includes eBay, Alibaba, Etsy)
“Digital technologies are empowering brands to reclaim the customer relationship, shifting the balance of power away from retailers.”
A report from Deloitte noticed a trend where the consolidation of major retail industry players has strengthened the hold on their customer base. Brands, on the other hand, are left with little negotiating power to go directly to customers offline.
Image-2: New Opportunities for Brands. Source
Brands now opt to take advantage of digital platforms and tools to reach out to their customers. Moreover, because private equity (PE) funding is now more accessible, brands can more easily expand and go directly to customers while retaining complete control of the channel.
Going direct allows brands to gain access to their customers which was previously difficult to do as customers primarily interacted with retailers.
Brands can use the data they collect online to refine their products and offerings and better meet customers’ needs and demands. They can expand their reach across the country or around the world and sell goods more profitably.
And they can do it without making significant investments in infrastructure or establishing vendor agreements with local retailers.
So, how to best market such brands?
In mature digital markets like the USA, the UK, Canada, instead of relying on mass advertising, marketers can now focus on building continuous relationships with buyers through unique digital means.
“Not that what we are suggesting here is something out of the box but this digital strategy is yet to be championed by many brands, i.e. Branding via SEO- dominating the SERP via Local SEO.”
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a website in order to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local search.
Image-3: Sample Google Local Serp
A local SERP would typically include a local pack, local finder, localized organic results, Google Knowledge Panel, Google Posts, Google Shop, Featured Snippets. Brands should aim to appear here.
Tasks associated with local SEO include finding local keywords, optimizing a business’s Google My Business profile, and building “NAP” citations.
But before realizing the full potential of local SEO, let us discuss a few related terminologies, and how is local SEO beyond lead generation & ORM.
What Is Online Brand Communication?
“Branding is a marketing practice used to identify and differentiate companies, products, services, and people from their competition.”
Start with entering your business name on Google Trends.
Do you see any search data centered around your product/service?
If no, start communicating online!
One of the biggest differences experienced by brands already operating in a bricks-and-mortar context when they launch online is how they communicate their brand.
In a traditional retailing context, a brand is communicated in a controlled fashion. The onus is on the retailers to do their best through advertising and marketing to send a message on behalf of brand purpose and build a positive impression.
In an online context, it is all about allowing customers to communicate amongst themselves about the brand and in many cases actively endorse the brand to a wider online audience – through online reviews, ratings.
The primary method of brand communication online is the business’s website. Other options available to them beyond websites, include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, each of which has a different focus and outcome.
Eventually, the focus should be on:
- Brand Positioning Online, and
- Effective Employment of Online Tools – SEO, PPC, Social Media.
#1 Brand Positioning - Personal Branding VS Product Branding
Today, in permission and the privacy-driven world, marketing is becoming even more suspicious to consumers. Therefore, it is even more important for brands to bring out real, authentic connections and engagement with their target customers and give lesser importance to marketing and selling campaigns.
“Marketing is about making a promise, but Branding delivers on experience.”
When most organizations mention branding, they’re referring to the carefully crafted perceptions surrounding their products or services designed to create an emotional response in their target audience – product branding.
But there’s another type of branding that can be equally important in marketing your business – one that is revolving around a personality – personal branding.
Neil Patel advises in one of his earlier blogs,
“If you want to build a lifestyle business then consider building a personal brand. It’s easier to build, and you can make good money from speaking, consulting, or partnerships.
But if you want to build something big, something that will continually live and move on without you, then focus on building a corporate/product brand.”
However, there is no real difference when you are building a personal brand or product brand as the entire strategy is to focus on a certain group of people. If you think about it, business brands have already started to behave more like human entities – adopt a personality or authenticity or a tone of voice to establish beliefs/values.
#2 Effective Deployment Of Online Tools - ORM & Local SEO
To build pipelines in sales, search engines allow marketers to generate leads through several methods, including search keyword analysis or paid advertising that is referred to as pay per click or PPC.
Subsequently, lead generation techniques prompt users to interact – like filling out forms or comment on engaging posts – with the information present online about the brand.
However, the online marketing campaigns have become so obsessed with employing SEO for certain targeted keywords that they fail to recognize its impact on the end-users. Here is where Online Reputation Management (ORM) kicks in.
Through ORM, brands focus on multiple online sites – business websites, online directories, social media profiles – to shape public perception and create a spotless image about themselves through influencing online information. Some of the best practices following ORM would be social media monitoring & response, public relation campaigns, building positive content, etc.
Traditional SEO is ably supported and strengthened by ORM during web analytics, web development, content development.
But what happens when information about the brand is optimized for local “near me” search online?
People do a local search with a strong intent to buy –
60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the search results such as the “click to call” option.
Thereby, local SEO automatically bypasses the need to deploy outbound lead generation techniques and cut-short the role of ORM to maintain positive public relations, thereby saving additional efforts.
More importantly, local SEO is free and behaves just like organic SEO but limited to geography!
TABLE OF CONTENT
2-STEP SETUP FOR LOCAL SEO
Stage-0
- Optimize Website/Search Results for Mobile Device
- Create Business Profiles on popular Search Media & Social Media
Stage-1
- Keyword Research For Local Organic Ranking
- On-Page Optimization
- Schema Markup
Stage-2
- Local Citations
- Build Backlinks
DON’T MISS BRANDING VIA SEO COMPONENTS
Techniques
- Glocal SEO VS Local SEO For Brands
- Personal Branding With SEO VS Product Branding With SEO
Local SEO Across Industries
- How Local SEO Can Help Digital Products/Brands?
- How SEO, SEM, And Content Marketing Can Help SaaS Products/Brands?
- Local SEO For Brands With Multiple Location Businesses
- Local SEO For Non-Profit Brand Communications
Case Studies
- Example: Local SEO Case Studies Of Cafe & Restaurant Brands
- Example: Local SEO Case Studies Of Top Chefs
This post first appeared on Digital Marketing Services Company | White Label Online Marketing Agency, please read the originial post: here
