| An online business becomes successful when buyers recognize the brand after purchasing products and services. Allbusiness.com has provided some helpful guidelines on increasing brand equity on small online businesses.
- Recognizable doesn't necessarily mean universally known:
A business's brand will increase its chance to compete successfully for attention and market share in the appropriate space. It doesn't take an expensive global advertising campaign to brand your business.
- Branding can be accomplished in several ways: Through partnerships, direct marketing, a robust Web site, and a bit of good public relations.
- Branding online is pretty similar to branding offline: The palette is different because the medium is reduced to a screen instead of a billboard or a print advertisement, but the opportunity for messaging is the same.
- Brick-and-mortar company: When a business like this takes its business to the Web, an online brand usually serves as an extension of its offline presence. Think of FedEx, AT&T, or CNN. For these companies, their online brands reinforce or influence the preexisting ideas about the company.
- Amazon and Yahoo: They have developed brands that, for the most part, only exist online.
- Your logo: Is a visual cornerstone of a company's brand. Your company's identity is visually expressed through its logo, which, along your company's name, is one of the main things that makes your business memorable. Think of eBay, Google, and Yahoo. Each one of these companies has a distinctive logo that a large percentage of people would be able to describe without seeing.
- Your domain name: Is an essential part of your branding efforts. It's becoming increasingly difficult for companies to find available domain names. While a URL certainly has to be unique and easy to remember, it doesn't necessarily have to relate to what you sell in order to be successful. How does the name "Amazon" relate to books and other products? Or "Google" to a search engine? These are successful names and brands, but it's a stretch to say they have anything to do with the companies' offerings.
Remember, even if your business is an Internet-only venture, that doesn't mean you can't brand offline. You can get offline brand exposure through TV, radio, print advertisements, and public relations efforts. A brand constantly reinforces a business's identity, even that of dotcoms. Most likely, you already strengthen your brand in ways you don't even think about: distributing business cards at trade shows; sending invoices, letters, and holiday cards to your clients; wearing your company's logo on a T-shirt; and a variety of other activities.
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