Developing your brand is one of the most important aspects of your online presence. Although your search engine optimization and marketing strategy is quite important, the long term impact that your site will make is due in large part due to your branding efforts. In order to succeed, you must understand the difference between advertising and branding, yourself.

What Exactly is Digital Branding?

Digital branding is the way that people perceive your company from top to bottom. If your logo and slogan are recognized by your target market, then you have created a good brand. If your products are associated with a certain industry, then you’ve branded yourself properly. For instance, Xerox is the name of a company, but when the average person says it, he or she is referring to an action of making a copy. With this kind of cultural relevance, the company Xerox has been able to keep sales level on its printers and other tech devices without increasing marketing spend for decades, even as the market expanded into the digital space and competitors tried to take market share from Xerox.

Digital branding is focused on the online portion of your company’s branding efforts. As more consumers find their way into the digital space, especially the mobile space, the opportunity to access the expendable income of new consumers will come from digital branding. In order to succeed, digital branding should be incorporated into the overall marketing strategy in order to build a positive feedback loop that brings in more new customers while reinforcing the value of the products of the company to repeat customers.

Why is Digital Branding So Important?

The number one reason that you must brand yourself is so that you can take the limits off of your stream of revenue. People are very stringent about paying a premium based solely on the quality of a product; a company will only be able to charge a certain percentage above the cost of the materials used before customers will start to fall away from the product. However, a brand can add an exponential amount of value to your product without having to spend money to improve the quality. In effect, branding gives you the ability to scale your business, keeping costs level while improving revenues.

Digital branding is also important because of the ability of the brand to hold marketing costs steady. Once people are familiar with a brand, they will look for that brand whenever the problem that brand solves comes to mind. Without this recognition, a company will be forced to fight for the same customer over and over again, proving the worth of the product through marketing spend without gaining any leverage. The business will be stuck in the same place indefinitely.

Lastly, digital branding allows a company to hold its market share. Without brand recognition, a company will be forced to spend an increasing amount of money just to hold market share against the flood of new businesses that are constantly entering the digital space. Even companies that cannot compete from a price or quality level create advertising noise that can drive potential customers away from your brand. If you stand still with your digital branding, then you are losing ground.