Online branding is one of the primary pillars of any Singapore internet marketing campaign especially in the highly competitive industries. Achieving a high amount of branded search volume can help online companies to establish a strong positive reputation online and dominance.
Singapore digital sphere continues to provide businesses with unlimited opportunities of connecting with their respective target customers. Robust branding online is the key to success, and the most successful companies in Singapore have continuous online branding campaigns.
Here are actionable tips on how to do online branding in Singapore and get tremendous results.
Here are some ways that you can get branded search volume to your website.
Understand your Brand
Before you take any online branding action, it is imperative to understand your brand well. Otherwise, there will be a misunderstanding between how the target audience perceive it and how you view it. One of the best ways to prevent this conflict of interest is by asking yourself what are three words that best describe your brand and would resonate with it well.
Once you identify the words, request someone you trust and knows your business for their input. If the three words do not match, try to identify the underlying reasons. It could be a sign of a gap between your online reputation and your brand.
Know Your Customers
Now that you have a clear understanding of your brand, the next step is to understand the customers. Know what they expect from your business. Get to know the potential customers, their preferred mode of communicating with you as well as where they hang out online. Concisely, knowing your customers will help you to determine the type of content and messages to share online.
Desist from Being a Faceless Brand
This does not mean that you let people see your face on social media platforms, even though that could promote your brand awareness effort. We suggest adopting a personality that your target audience will feel comfortable connecting and engaging with online. Strive also to captivate your audience and lure them to look for more information about your brand through the communications you have with them online.
Show Up
One of the secrets of establishing a successful brand online is by using your social media as a customer service outlet. Make sure that you are approachable online to spur engagement with the customers. Note that 80% of your online success depends on showing up and being available to your target customers.
Use Stereotypes to Your Advantage
Contrary to popular belief, identifying with a stereotype will not influence your business negatively. Numerous studies have proven that making your online business relatable is essential. One of the best ways of achieving this goal is by identifying a stereotype and taking advantage of it.
Once you understand how customers perceive your business, you will be able to identify one or more assumptions that you can leverage to scale up your branding efforts.
Transparency is Essential
One of the main reason why most businesses fail is that they in most instances they do not mean what they say. If you are to succeed in building a strong brand in Singapore, you need to be transparent. Strive to mean what you say to ensure that your target audience perception online is correct.
Always ask yourself what the target audience will think about your brand before posting online. Remember once you send out a message to your target audiences, there is no turning back.
Concisely, to succeed in online branding in Singapore, you must always mean what you stay and stand by it. Otherwise, establishing an authentic brand that is successful is going to be even harder and expensive to achieve.
Communicate with Customers in Real-Time
While it is possible to use bots to respond to frequently asked questions, it is recommended to spare time off your busy schedule to communicate with your customers in real-time. This can be done through a live Q&A session on Facebook or Instagram. You can also install a live chat feature on your website that clients can use to chat with the support team in real-time.
Strive to Build Long-Term Relationships
Long-term brand success demands that you build long-term relationships with not only clients but also other people who are in one way or another with your business such as trade show organisers and influencers. Your cordial relationship with them will help increase your brand’s exposure online and offline.
Create Value-Packed Content
Blogging is great and will help you pass information about your brand to a broad audience online if you do it right. However, not all potential clients want to read blocks of text about your business and the services that you offer. Stand out from the crowd by creating content in other formats that are more engaging with the modern day audience.
Here are some content format ideas:
- Infographics
- Podcast
- Vlog
- eBooks
Establish a Loyal Following on Social Media
Singapore has more than 4 million active social media users. Time warp two decades ago and think about how challenging it was to contact the CEO of a company. Over the years, social media platforms have become the most convenient and fastest ways of passing information to the target audience. Nowadays, a simple tweet about your service or market trend can open a line of communication that will propel your business to success.
Establish a loyal following on social media to take full advantage of these platforms. If you already have a Facebook page or group for your business, you can hire an influencer whose followers are part of your audience to popularise it. Paid Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ads can also help you to establish loyal community of followers on any of the sites.
Make Use of Branded Keywords
Branded keywords are words that contain your company name or brand name and are strategically included in your content. The keyword may be a variation of the primary company name or brand name. Over the years, this type of keywords has proven to be very effective in increasing site ranking and visibility on SERPs. Consequently, they help to increase traffic to the site from organic searches.
Create Curiosity
The most successful online marketers in Singapore have mastered the art of creating interest. They do this by first understanding the needs of the target audience then coming up with top-notch content that responds directly to their questions and concerns. Make the customers curious to know what your brand does to trigger them to carry out a branded search.
Influencer marketers can help spread the word about your brand. Word of mouth is also another great tactic that you can use to increase the popularity of your brand in specific geographical regions. Go an extra mile and come up with a formal referral program to help catalyze the whole process.
Brand Mentions
Receiving brand mentions from the authority influencers especially on social media platforms will significantly increase your branded search volume. A recent study showed that 40% of people purchase products online after seeing them being used by an influencer on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and other popular social media platforms.
Carry out an intensive research to identify top bloggers and social media gurus in your industry and request them to give your business a shout out on their channels. Sweeten the deal by offering them a commission for every sale made through their affiliate link or offer a discount to their followers.
Finally, consider guest posting as one of your content marketing strategies. The most influential bloggers and content marketers such as Neil Patel have repeatedly proven why guest posting is one of the most efficient inbound marketing strategy through research. Start writing high-quality posts and get them published on high-end sites to increase your Singapore brand visibility online and offline.
Make Use of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Determine what you want your brand to know for in your specific industry and focus on creating stellar content around it. Go an extra mile and carry out extensive research to identify the particular keywords that the target audience use to look for information about your brand online. Use them to optimise your content to ensure that your website ranks high on search engines via search engine optimisation.
Understand Your Brand
To be successful when branding online in Singapore, you must ensure that there is no misunderstanding between how your target audience perceives your brand, and how you perceive it. To eliminate such a misunderstanding, ask yourself about words that you associate with your brand.
Thereafter, ask some of your long-term clients about words that they associate with your brand. If most of those words do not match, it means that there is a mismatch between what you think of your brand and what others think. This mismatch is the gap that exists between your brand and its reputation online. Closing this gap will help you understand your brand better.
Change the Perception of Your Brand
After establishing how your brand is perceived, you should go ahead and ensure that the right message is communicated to the target audience. The right message is that which resonates with the target audience, and also speaks positively about your brand.
Build a Standalone Personal Website
Launching a standalone personal website is one of the ways that you can use to brand online in Singapore. A personal website will push people towards your brand especially if it incorporates different ventures besides attracting inbound inquiries about any new ventures that you intend to launch.
Posting blogs and creating profiles on different social networks is good for all businesses. Nonetheless, if you are looking to brand online in Singapore, it is advisable that you separate your personal and business brand.
A basic website comprising a blog and an “about” page is all that you need for a start. When you consistently post blogs and share content a via your personal website, attract attention to your brand. This helps grow your brand.
Take Advantage of Influencers
Traditional media had celebrities as influencers. This has changed with the advent of social media. Currently, what we call influencers are simply faceless individuals. Each niche of the market has its influencer.
When branding online in Singapore, you need to take advantage of the popularity that influencers have among their followers. You can simply ask them to mention or even showcase your products in their posts.
Similarly, consider sending samples of your products to influencers so that they can review them. Most influencers so paid promotions. For a small fee, they can market your products to your target audience thus helping you build your brand online.
Create Contests and Giveaways
Contests were popular with traditional branding methods. Contrary to what you may think, they are not an outdated branding method. Social media contests and giveaways provide an excellent way for you to engage with your customers.
When your followers participate in contests by tagging their friends and followers on your profile, your brand grows. Similarly, you can partner with influencers and give out prizes and giveaways through them. The best way to build your brand through giveaways is ensuring that the gifts you give out are your products or services.
Build an Affiliate Marketing Channel
There is no better way of increasing sales and branding online in Singapore than starting an affiliate marketing channel. This works particularly well if your company offers high-value or high-involvement services and products. Getting online influencers to plug your products in their content is a great way to build your brand name.
When you incorporate affiliate marketing into your branding strategy, it is easy to track influencer’s sales by giving them discount codes or hyperlinks, which their followers can use. Offering a small commission off your sales will provide them with the impetus to build your brand online.
Update Your Store Front
If you sell products and services through your website, you should ensure that the storefront is regularly updated. Keep in mind that this will significantly determine your brand identity. Keeping your storefront current with the latest trends in the market will show that you understand what your audience needs.
Even if the products or services that you offer are not seasonal, keeping your storefront updated is an excellent way of ensuring that your communication is in sync with market trends. This builds customer trust and the belief that your site is up and running.
Get Into Partnerships
In today’s dynamic online market, there is likely to be another business that offers complementary and non-competing products. Since they pose no threat to your business, it is advisable that you partner with these businesses to promote each other’s services and product. This will help both companies to grow their market reach as well as build an excellent brand name for themselves.
When getting into partnerships, you should ensure that both businesses have similar sales and followers. This way, you won’t pick up the burden of the company that you intend to partner with. If both businesses have identical goals and far as branding online in Singapore is concerned, partnering will increase their respective fan bases and sales.
Partner with Local Communities
Even as you endeavour to build your brand online, you shouldn’t forget about the local community where your company is based. Donating your time, resources, and expertise to local community projects will endear you to current and prospective clients.
CSR is a great way of establishing yourself locally. The contacts that you make at the local level will help you build a loyal following. When you participate in local community programs, you will be considered a contributing member of the society. As a result, opportunities for growth will present themselves to you.
Get Clients’ Reviews
Businesses receive lots of feedback from clients. Nonetheless, the reviews that you get do not necessarily help you get the entire picture about how you are perceived out there. Online surveys by asking clients specific questions about your products will give you an insight about their favourite products and what they prefer seeing.
Taking a proactive approach towards the interactions that you have with clients will let them know that you are concerned about their opinions. They will also be eager and willing to help you out.
MediaOne can help your business get a firm footing in Singapore by creating and running effective online brand campaigns. We will also continuously monitor the campaigns to ensure that they deliver the expected results and you get maximum ROI. Get in touch with us for more details about our branding online services.
