How To Maintain Online Brand Continuity
ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Do you know where your brand is online? Or, more importantly, is the money you’ve invested in honing your marketing content enabling you to reach and engage consumers that are researching your product or planning to buy? Statistics show you have a reason to worry.
As marketers and brand experts, we spend enormous amounts of time crafting careful product messages that are designed to engage users across all points of the purchase cycle. Yet, our hard work can be rendered meaningless if it’s not reaching the right people at the right time. Sure, we can flex all our marketing muscle on our own branded website but the reality is, most consumers do not buy directly from manufacturers and consumers usually look for product information in places other than a manufacturer’s own .com website.
While marketers rely on large ecosystems of online partners and retailers to showcase – and sell – their brands, they also run the risk of losing the ability to offer consumers a consistent brand message.
Ideally, as interested consumers research product information to make a buying decision, marketers would present a consistent and compelling brand message across the Web. For example, if a consumer visited site A, Site B, Site C, or Site D, the consumer would experience the brand message you intended for them on each site. Not only would consumers see the striking visual appeal that defines your brand, but they would also have access to the latest brand or product content – extensive product information, video, audio.
Unfortunately, marketers currently face a variety of issues with ensuring this type of brand continuity and consistency online:
• Historically, there has never been an easy way to update product and brand information across the Web on the hundreds or thousands of websites that sell or promote your products. When you refresh your brand, launch new creative, or update your visual design, your current process for distributing and integrating this marketing content on partner sites is likely to be manual and, therefore, out of sync with your overall launch plans.
• Out of date information means that consumers can easily encounter conflicting brand messages on your products and services. When consumers research information about your products or services they may discover at the point of sale that that particular offering has been discontinued or replaced with a newer product or service.
• The cumulative impact of inconsistent, outdated and/or inaccurate product information eventually leads to loss of brand value and less sales for both your brand and the retailers selling your products.
As brand managers and marketers continue to expand their online marketing efforts, online brand continuity becomes of paramount importance to boosting both brand awareness and sales. Moreover, when marketers spend enormous time and effort in designing, building, and growing a brand, they need to make sure that they are optimizing their investment in the Web and control their brand message along the ecosystem of retailers. Their marketing efforts will be for naught if they leave it up to others to ensure that their branding is delivered consistently online.
Unless you are successful updating partner sites manually – and the odds are against you – you will need to rely on automated content syndication tools that can handle rich media content syndication and are pre-integrated at the product page and site search level on retailer sites.
Ultimately, online retailers have thousands of products that they’re promoting. You have a significant asset in your brand – and you should make sure that your brand message is consistent throughout the web – wherever your customers or potential customers are online.
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