Brand Identity in the Digital Territory: Why is Brand Identity Essential for Every Digital Marketer?

Building a brand is most of all a social process. Yes, a process. It includes hit ‘n’ miss adjusting of your offers and needs to the demands and needs of customers. Something as abstract as a brand identity, a perceived personality of an inanimate concept, actually has a strong impact on the course of your buyer’s journey.

Your brand is an extension of a mere product or service – think of it as a person, with its own personality, its own outlook, perks and weak points. When a person chooses a brand, the person chooses all its features, thus communicating his own personality through the chosen brand’s personality. Like people, every brand has its own personality and thus its own identity, or it should have its own unique identity (*side eyeing at copycats*). This personification of the brand signifies that it connects to the customer on an emotional basis.

Choosing your weapon

“We almost always use “things” as a way to identify ourselves and to identify others” – Dori Tunstall.

According to the latter statement, it is clear why people choose certain brands over others. The choices we make represent our own identities. Through consumer’s perspective, a brand has its own gender, age, socio-economic status and personality traits. If your brand has a strongly grounded identity, every message it sends will be looked through the prism of its features.

Brand strategy first, brand identity second, or is it the other way around?

Sure, everything needs strategic planning. You should have a strategy for determining your brand’s identity, and your brand’s identity has great importance when building the brand strategy for social network communities.

Why? By having a vivid brand identity, it is easier to detect your target group, the mean of communicating with them and come up with interesting content to deliver. If you and your co-workers are having a problem understanding your own brand’s identity, how can your customer recognise it?

Are you trying to represent a powerful luxurious lifestyle for an elite group of individuals or reach out to a broader public with powerful centennial family values? Although you want to display power, there are only a few overlaps between these two brand representations.

Miss congeniality

Your brand communicates and interacts with your customer. Your brand is not into small talk. It has stories to share, it sparks thoughts and offers guidance. By treasuring the unique identity of your brand, you create a community that goes a long way and sticks until the end.

Are your brand’s values clear and appealing? If you answered yes, don’t stop asking yourself this question now and then. It is crucial to stay flexible and listen to the community you gathered.

When creating content for social media, you are creating it for a distinct group of people. You already know that you can’t please everyone so you have a goal to present your work to the ones most likely to cherish the information you are giving out. The goal is to make the content appealing to your target group. Your brand started attracting consumers who aren’t really interested in your services? Don’t be afraid to analyse your progress and rebrand.

Importance of finding your soulmate customer

Consider the identity match between your brand and your customer as a social currency bonus. Social currency of a brand is the degree of presence of the brand in everyday social situations. Social currency isn’t restricted to the digital area – it expands offline. This everyday organic sharing helps to create the brand’s identity by interacting with consumers who start to acknowledge the brand’s existence.

This is an extremely valuable concept to consider when building a brand. As it develops organically, it follows the context in which the brand is presented. So if your brand identity supports the values of your customers, the bond strengthens and raises the social currency value, making it more likely for your customer to stay loyal.

Simply be aware the brand is the toehold when creating a customer’s journey. As you have already noticed, in the era of digital media, customers check for reviews and gather information before deciding to take action. The positive conversational connotation of a brand, therefore, has a huge impact on accelerating that journey.

So how to maintain the brand’s reputation? With content, content, content! Delivering content lead by the same idea keeps the customers engaged and trusting that their interests are met. The main question for you, my friendly marketer, is what is so special about your brand that makes your customer connect with its identity?