ADEPT Marketing

Branding in any media in not just about visual representation of your logo and colours, it’s also about the personality of your business and it’s people. Online media provides some unique ways to effectively share and reflect your brand image that allows engaging and interacting with your customers at a one to one level. Businesses can really use this to set themselves apart from competitors with how they communicate and manage relationships.

Here are some ideas that businesses can use to build and manage their online brand:

• Have a blog on your website – this will show your personality, expertise and interests, read more about the benefits

• Be part of the conversation – check online regularly with searches of your business name in blog posts and social media, you can use free tools like Social Mention or Technorati (for blogs). Wherever possible, get involved in discussions and reviews about your business.

• Create a Facebook page and build some “fans” – this will allow you to start any conversation and easily let them share their thoughts, photos and videos with you. LinkedIn is popular for business to business and career profiling.

• Get Tweeting on Twitter – an easy and quick way to build a strong online profile, great for connecting with people as well as driving traffic to your website and blog.

• Be active online – contribute to content by commenting on relevant and high profile blogs in your industry or area of interest.

What online activity has helped build your business brand? Keen to hear any other suggestions or examples of successful online branding.

For the bulk of businesses they do the obvious thing when establishing their website domain name and register the name of their business with a URL like www.acmeindustries.co.nz. Which by and large is not necessarily a bad thing, but unless you have “keywords” in your business name like “Auckland Lawyers Ltd” then it won’t necessarily be the most effective website domain name that you could choose for search engine marketing.

If you are in the situation of choosing a domain name for a new website then here are some tips to get it right from the start:

• Choose something that describes the key things that you offer, particularly if your business name just doesn’t do it and there is a lot of competition in your area. For example if your business is a motel in Tirau then www.tiraumotel.co.nz would be a great choice (it’s available by the way, quick someone register it!)

• Also register your business name as a domain name but simply redirect it to your main domain name to avoid a competitor using it and keep control over your online brand.

• If some of your best choices are already taken then try variations using hyphens or an extra word e.g. www.great-furniture-design-store.co.nz (note: search engines love hyphens but people don’t like having to type them in a URL).

• If you are a New Zealand based business but target customers in both New Zealand and internationally then register a co.nz and a .com version particularly if your website has different content versions for different countries. Just register .com if your main target market is international.

• Don’t confuse customers and the search engines by registering lots of different domain names and promote them all going to the same website, focus on having one main URL name that can be universally promoted.

If you are reading this and think, oh I should go and change my website domain name right now, then consider the following things:

• An established website will have already gained some level of search engine ranking and network of traffic sources, if you then change to a new domain name this ranking will be lost until you build traffic with the new domain name.

• If your existing website is already ranking well in search engines don’t muck with the domain name – enjoy the rankings and keep on building it with great content on your site.

• If you do want to change your current domain name to improve rankings then make sure you redirect your old URL address to the new one, and immediately change all inbound links you have advertised to the new address to quickly build up rankings. Submit the new address to the search engines, and promote it intensively with pay per click advertising like Google AdWords and Facebook ads. Share it on social media too.