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How to Build a Digital Product Brand That Lasts

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Guest post by Tara Dwyer.

A digital product brand is a recognizable symbol that distinguishes an organization from its competitors. A company can use its brand to differentiate itself from the competition to build customer loyalty, generate greater demand for its products or services, and attract new audiences.

How to build a digital product brand

Image credit: Olya Kobruseva on Pexels

To build a lasting digital product brand, start with understanding how to create an effective brand strategy. The foundation of your success begins with defining your product and the problem you’re solving for people. Brands that create a simple, compelling brand promise—and then live up to that promise—will stand out in the marketplace over time.

Here are 11 different ways you can build a digital product brand that lasts.
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Five Impacts of CMO Budget Cuts – Gartner 2021 CMO Spend Survey

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CMOs are reporting that marketing budgets are being slashed. Here’s what that means, and practical ideas that go beyond the bad news to how B2B marketers to adapt.

According to Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey, as reported by Laurie Sullivan in MediaPost, “Marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue fell to their lowest level in recent history…Marketing budgets as a proportion of company revenue fell from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021, their lowest point in the history of Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.”

CMOs frustrated by deep budget cutsAs bad as that news is, the situation isn’t entirely gloom and doom. Most CMOs expect budgets to increase modestly this year after the deep cuts during the pandemic. And as the article points out, “It’s not a secret that marketing budgets have always been the first of the enterprise budgets to be cut, and the last to be restored.”

Here are five likely impacts of those budget cuts. But first…
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How Your Competitors Will Shift Their Digital Marketing Strategy in the Next Two Years

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More than half of companies with revenue under $50 million already spend the majority of their marketing dollars online. And roughly 70% plan to increase the share of budget devoted to digital marketing over the next two years.

But the channels they focus on change as their companies grow. Understanding where your competitors are allocating their spending and how your efforts should evolve as your firm’s revenue increases is vital to your marketing success.

Disruptive Shift in Digital Strategy reportThose are among the findings in 300 Marketers Reveal Disruptive Shift in Digital Strategy, a new report from Ignite Visibility. The reports breaks down digital marketing practices and plans for small to midsized businesses in six ranges. Among the high-level findings:

  • Businesses under $1 million in revenue invest the most in social media, while businesses between $1 million and $5 million invest the most in search engine optimization (SEO); businesses with $5-10 million invest most in online advertising; companies in the $10-20 million revenue range invest most in email marketing, and firms over $50 million invest roughly evenly between all channels.

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Maximize Your Online Visibility: The Web Presence Optimization (WPO) Framework

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Recent research makes clear that, for high-value consumer purchases as well as b2b procurement, being as “findable” as possible online is critical to winning the business.

Of course that means it’s imperative to produce relevant, compelling, optimized content for your company’s website and blog, but online visibility goes beyond that. It also requires an active presence and network of relationships in social media, coverage in industry press, and carefully targeted online advertising to be where your prospective buyers are looking, when they are looking.

Optimizing online visibility then requires the coordination of public relations (PR), content development, social networking, SEO, digital advertising and marketing communications efforts. Without coordination, the efforts of these different individuals or groups are like the blind men and the elephant; none of the experts are wrong, but none get the big picture either.

We refer to this maximization of online visibility as web presence optimization (WPO): the combination of PR, content, SEO, SEM, marcom and social media efforts to make a company as ubiquitous as possible, with relevant content, everywhere online that prospective customers are looking when they are searching for what the company offers.

As a practical matter, the WPO process includes:

Research: a number of questions need to be answered before a tactical WPO plan can be roughed out, such as: where are your prospective customers congregating online? (e.g., are they more likely to use Facebook or a specialized discussion forum? What online publications do they read? What groups do they belong to?) What topics are they most interested in exploring or discussing? How are your competitors approaching the market?

Execution: this includes multiple avenues of content creation, distribution and follow-up. For example, a news release may be written, search-optimized and then distributed through wire service like Marketwire or PRWeb. But it may also be sent to specific journalists and bloggers, who need to be followed up with, shared socially, and have any questions or comments responded to.

Measurement: What was the result—how much online visibility was achieved with a particular piece of content? How much website traffic did it drive? How many conversions? How does this compare to other activities? Lessons learned and intelligence gleaned from these metrics feed back into the execution phase, driving and refining additional projects.

(This is the essence of the web presence optimization strategy and approach we’ve been using at KC Associates for the past year. We research a client’s current competitive and digital landscape, develop a WPO and content strategy, execute, measure and refine.)

The WPO framework has evolved over the past 34 months from the spaghetti-ish original WPO model to the refined definition of web presence optimization a year ago to today’s streamlined version focused on the five broad areas of presence:

The Web Presence Optimization Framework

Content strategy is developed based on market interests, competitor moves and company or product differentiation then shared through one (or more often a combination) of channels. Content creation, optimization, distribution and sharing results in five types of measurable online presence:

Press Presence (news release pickups, news articles, product reviews, publication-sponsored directories, etc.)

Social Presence (tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates, social bookmarks, videos on YouTube, presentations on SlideShare, etc.)

Website Presence (content published on a company’s own website, blog or microsite which ranks highly and attracts organic search traffic)

Industry Presence (trade association articles, association membership lists or directories, trade show exhibitor lists, industry analyst coverage, etc.)

Paid Presence (search engine ads, banner ads on trade or publication sites, social network ads)

To learn more about the WPO framework, check out this free whitepaper.

The coordination of the various specialties—PR, social, SEO, SEM, content marketing—depends upon having a clear, unified view of actionable metrics. This single,  comprehensive (but not overwhelming) view of results keeps a team in alignment about next steps, what to do more of, what to drop, and what to do differently.

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