Branding for online audiences is a bit like telling a story made up of many individual threads. On their own, each thread is intriguing, but braided together into one grand narrative, they become undeniably compelling. Each thread complements and provides context to the others, leaving the listener (in this case, your customer base) fully invested and engaged in the tale.
This type of digital brand strategy helps you stand out from your competitors and earn a positive reputation with your audience. In this article, we’ll cover the benefits of digital branding and how to get started with your own digital branding strategy.
What is digital branding?
Digital branding is the unification of your brand across online platforms, including your website, social media channels, email marketing, and more. Digital branding communicates your brand’s look and feel, vision, values, and product positioning through a digital lens so you can meet your customers where they spend a lot of time: online.
Digital branding is distinct from traditional branding primarily by medium: Where digital branding prioritizes the brand experience across digital platforms like websites, social media, and online search, traditional branding leverages more “traditional” physical media like print ads, billboards, and broadcasting to communicate brand identity.
Benefits of digital branding for ecommerce
Here’s how digital branding can help your ecommerce business:
Cohesive brand story
Done well, digital branding presents a cohesive brand narrative across every platform you use, from your website to social channels to digital advertising channels like email marketing. That consistency fosters confidence and trust in new and existing customers.
Increased brand recognition
A clearer brand story and presence also means more accurate awareness about what your brand is and what it offers in the wider marketplace. Each time a customer encounters you, either intentionally (like visiting your site directly) or unintentionally (like seeing a search results ad), it’s an opportunity to underscore your brand messaging.
Better customer experience
Digital branding sets the tone for many of the real-life interactions you may have with your customers, whether through customer experience or order fulfillment. Being thoughtful about the style of communication throughout all your digital spaces creates opportunities to foster customer loyalty and engagement.
How to build a strong digital brand strategy
- Standardize your brand identity
- Craft brand guidelines
- Invest in great site design
- Balance flash with functionality
- Build trust through the user experience
- Focus on a few social media channels
- Create engaging content
- Complement a digital presence with tangible assets
Sara Mote and Rembrant Van der Mijnsbrugge are the creative director and CEO, respectively, of MOTE, a creative agency focused on ecommerce. Here are some of their guiding principles for creating a digital branding strategy:
1. Standardize your brand identity
One of the first steps to take when crafting a digital brand is to decide on a logo, color palette, and typography style. Designing a logo is a branding exercise in and of itself. Once you’ve created the right logo for your brand, all other design elements can evolve from it.
2. Craft brand guidelines
Brand guidelines establish rules for how your business presents itself out in the world—from logo usage to communication tone and style. A brand guide can also include your mission statement and important details about your product portfolio. Your brand guidelines are the unifying foundation beneath all of your digital branding efforts, so keep them handy and refer back to them often to keep things cohesive as your business evolves.
3. Invest in great site design
“Like a conversation, design has the power to captivate an audience, convey information, and evoke emotions which will directly impact consumer decision-making,” Sara says. “Good design increases the quality of those conversations. It helps create a seamless and engaging experience which, in turn, reinforces brand identity and drives performance metrics like sales and customer retention.”
Your homepage should feel like it was designed with intention. Starting with a clean, simple Shopify template allows you to hone your vision and messaging at your own pace.
“The most important thing is to establish a solid baseline. That means a simple website that focuses on performance and cognitive ease while making sure that we establish some branding,” says Rembrant. His advice? Start with a great font. “Typography can convey so much personality very quickly. Good typography is the foundation of all the design we do at Mote.”
4. Balance flash with functionality
As creative director, Sara says she returns again and again to a singular goal: Craft something both beautiful and strategic.
“The challenge of designing for ecommerce is that solutions often require a delicate balance,” Sara says. “Imagery and typography that establish a brand’s unique narrative shouldn’t overshadow or impede the basic functionality on the website. A good ecommerce site is immersive and experiential and represents a brand authentically, but the design also likely shows restraint—because at the end of the day, it needs to function.”
If you’re overly focused on creating an exciting website, you might lose sight of the core functionality. “The goal is to communicate your products and ensure that every single customer has a really clear sense of your offering,” she says. Strive to give customers clarity about your brand, and instead of requiring them to dig for important details, make sure they can easily navigate your site.
5. Build trust through the user experience
User experience is an essential part of web design, and it’s integral to digital branding, too. “When users have a positive experience with a website and it’s both intuitive and enjoyable to use, they’re more likely to trust the brand behind it,” Sara explains. “Sustainably growing a brand requires brand trust, which is built over time with consistency.”
Good user experience, she says, means attention to details large and small to ensure a brand’s overall narrative is conveyed and maintained at all touchpoints. Poor user experience, on the other hand, can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, eroding brand trust, and damaging a brand’s reputation.
That perception and sense of trust extends past the website. Rembrant, who also serves as Mote’s lead software engineer, underscores the importance of responsive design and cross-channel harmonization. “The experience doesn’t need to be identical, but it does need to feel like it’s the same brand,” he says. This keeps cognitive ease top of mind, especially when your customer might be interacting with your brand in any number of digital settings, jumping from desktop to mobile to Instagram to email and back.
6. Focus on a few social media channels
It may seem like you have to be on every social media channel all the time in order to boost engagement. However, it’s often a better and more realistic strategy to focus on platforms you actually enjoy, especially ones that resonate with the target audience you’re trying to attract.
Forcing yourself to make TikTok videos because you think you should can result in videos that feel disingenuous; instead, find a happy medium between where your customers are and where you like to be. Then you can craft unique strategies for each platform based on that happy medium. Product demos and explainers might perform best on TikTok, for example, while you might devote your Instagram page to lifestyle photography or more polished media content.
7. Create engaging content
Once you’ve narrowed down your social media strategy to a few key platforms, aim to create content that’s most engaging for those channels and that highlights your unique value or message. “Values can be a really interesting way of keeping people engaged with your brand,” Rembrant says. “If people can build an emotional connection with your brand, that is far more powerful and long-lasting than if people are simply purchasing a product to meet a quick need that they have.”
Visually and tonally, make sure that your marketing content feels like a natural extension of (or complement to) your website branding. Many social platforms favor a more playful brand presence, but customers shouldn’t feel a total disconnect when they navigate to your homepage. Essentially, the core of your brand personality should stay consistent, while the tone and flavors of that personality shift depending on the platform.
8. Complement a digital presence with tangible assets
When digital branding leaks into the real world in the form of product packaging or company merch, it can reinforce the identity of a primarily digital brand.
“There’s a brand I like called Sunspel,” Rembrant says. “They’re a very old English company that makes cotton t-shirts and things like that. When you get your package, there’s this little postcard in it. It’s a picture of nature, a pretty landscape. And what happens, at least for me, is it puts me in a good mood.”
This kind of behavioral priming, he explains, means he’s now trying on clothes in a good mood, and is typically much more likely to keep them. “That packaging is great customer experience design. It’s minimal, yet it delights,” he says.
If you can channel the look and feel of your digital brand ethos into the physical product, it solidifies the world you’ve created for your customer.
Digital branding FAQ
What is the difference between digital marketing and digital branding?
The main difference between digital branding and digital marketing comes down to presentation versus promotion. You must have a digital branding strategy before a digital marketing strategy. That’s because a digital marketing strategy exists to promote the work of your brand through advertising and targeted marketing on digital channels.
What is an example of digital branding?
An example of cohesive digital branding would be a skin care brand partnering with an influencer on Instagram for a new product launch, while featuring the same model in some of the editorial imagery on their website. This creates visual continuity across channels, ensuring that the company’s online presence is cohesive.
What are the components of digital branding?
Digital branding communicates brand identity and informs a customer’s experience of the brand across various online platforms. Those might include your company website, social media platforms, online forums, loyalty programs, and digital marketing campaigns.
