Introduction
In today’s fast-paced digital marketing, having an established brand is essential in converting new customers and maintaining their loyalty.

What is Branding
These days, branding is a ubiquitous marketing subject, where answers are as wide and varied as the internet. I define branding as the essence (plus ethos) of the company, or non-profit organization, where its DNA is captured, formalized, and consistently communicated across all marketing touch points, including to all its employees and stakeholders.

Samples of Branding
Back in 2005, when I was with Singer Valve (purchased in Q1 2017 by Mueller Co.), the principals and I set out to re-brand the then 50-year-old private company.

After some internal, corporate soul researching, we uncovered key characteristics about Singer:
• Singer’s water-valve products represented their clients’ water-conservation objective;
• Singer’s products where engineered, manufactured and marketed by employees that cared about their work, clients and the company;
• Singer cared about its clients, employees, and the environment; and
• Singer was an international company with a sizable global market share.

Thus, after the findings, we formalized those points and consistently communicated them across numerous marketing touch points, such as the newly trademarked logo, photography, copy, print, digital, trade shows, training seminars, swag, sales agents, and staff. The results were positive and memorably unique to the water-valve industry.

Another example is outlined in the book A New Brand World by Scott Bedbury, who was the marketing genius behind many Fortune 200 companies, such as Nike and Starbucks. (As an aside, Scott’s book is my inspiration for this blog.)

Bedbury outlined the inspiration behind Starbucks (established 1971), where coffee shops then were unappealing with uncomfortable furniture, and lacking coffee flavours. So Starbucks set out to change the persona of a coffee shop—their objective was to carve out a inviting location between home and office that represented a comfy look and feel with various merchandise, food and especially choices of coffee. Today, many years later, Starbuck’s branding has continually resonated with its millions of loyal consumers.

What Is Digital Marketing Today
Today’s fast-paced digital marketing world is very different from the landscape of, let’s say, over 15 years ago, where marketing automation tools were nonexistent in mainstream businesses (except mostly with CRM softwares). Rather, the tools where mostly about the creation of websites, for instance, and not necessarily about measuring their effectiveness like today’s use of web analytical tools, such as Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Screaming Frog.

Samples Of Digital Marketing
A unique and interesting automation tool I used at Singer Valve/Mueller is Oktopost. Beyond its listening and social media scheduling functions is its “Social Employee Advocacy” solution. With this function, the admin can create a board of social media postings an employee can choose from to post on his/her personal social media channel. This way the corporate message is distributed through its employees, and this execution creates trust amongst the employees’ friends as a form of “word of mouth”, or employee-generated lead with a touch of human element.

In Search Engine Marketing (SEM), there are numerous options to get your website to rank high during a potential customer’s search for your product, or service. A popular method is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where you would research your ideal keywords and include those in the headline and body copies. Further, you can write your meta description to better explain what the page is about to search engines. Next, since search engines still cannot read photos well, so it’s best to provide alt tags that textually describe the photos on your pages. Also, a web page’s text-to-html ratio needs to be over 15%; thus, if below that number, more text needs to be added to the page for it to be perused well by the web crawlers. Tools such as Screaming Frog and SEO Quake can assist with this.

There are other tactics to consider in SEM, such as paid advertising (Cost Per Click, or CPC), content marketing, remarketing, and backlinks/social media (2 types of off-page SEO). Then all these variables need to be maintained and measured. For instance, is the campaign accomplishing it’s 30-day goal; viz., assuming it’s B2B, is it getting leads through the landing page form; or for B2C eCommerce, is the campaign selling the widgets it’s suppose to?

At SEI Industries, my marketing colleague and I formalized and implemented a lead generation tactic where we utilized Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, MS Dynamics 365 CRM, and Mailchimp (used its landing page function). The objective was to build on the staggering 90% global share of the legendary Bambi Bucket by placing it top of mind when searching for an aerial firefighting bucket. So, either an organic page will be listed in the top SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and, if the CPC bid has been won, a Google Adwords listing will be posted for the potential customer to click on, lead to the landing page, and allow them to fill out a form to ask for more information—inclusive of that customer journey.

How Branding And Digital Marketing Can Coexist
Before establishing your digital tactics, knowing what your company represents is an imperative foundation. When you craft keywords and meta descriptions for your website, you want to convey content in the form of images, colours, and text that will be true to your company/organization, and, thus, be transparent and resonate with your potential customers, as well as existing ones of course. What your quality product/service signifies, plus what your company/organization represents will be the key factors that will convert your new customers.

These days, loyal customers don’t just want to purchase a quality product, they also need to know what you represent—where/how your widgets are made, are you environmentally friendly, and do you respect your employees are some essential factors that you need to address in your branding. Those branded human elements will then reflect the digital marketing tactics.

Even with backlinks, the linking website needs to share, or at least compliment, the same essence and ethos as your company’s. Also, when sending a news release to web editors outlining your newly released widget, you need authenticity in your story that evokes your company brand so they can better relate and eventually review your product.

My BrainStation SEM instructor Jesse Ringer (president of SEO agency Method + Metric), recently mentioned in our online class that search intent and content need to match. In this situation, let’s assume the intent is informational (there are 2 other types of intent: navigational and transactional), now if the consumer who’s searching can authentically match your product (per your true branded content) there’s a high probability of conversion and even perhaps long-term consumer loyalty. Further, with informational intent, your site will need to include, for example, specifications about your product and infographics that will satisfy the user’s thirst for information, where then can then perhaps advance to the transaction phase.

Conclusion
Just like in any traditional marketing medium, such as in print and broadcast, the branding is echoed. Moreover, it’s true of any digital execution—paid advertising, website optimization, backlinks, content, etc.—they all must be consistent in visual and textual vocabulary with the company’s, or organization’s, brand. This way, the potential consumer will better relate; and thus, be converted to your offerings.