Online Marketing: What Makes a Good Brand?

The effectiveness of online marketing depends on the integrity of a website's brand. After all, online marketing only works when a website is focused on quality: the best product and customer service matched by the best website and content (Photo source).

The idea of a "brand" is a cliche. Everyone from Apple, the world's most valuable brand, to your next-door neighbor Fred is a brand. We're all branding ourselves at all times. Several years ago when I posted a picture of my daughter on Facebook, a close friend commented: "I love how you've incorporated your daughter so seamlessly into your personal brand."

Taking my friend's bait, admitting my daughter as a part of my brand, I wondered: What inspired this comment? And how could I do more of it? 

I actually asked my friend these questions in a follow-up comment. 

"It's how you present her," he wrote, "with well-composed pictures and thoughtful stories. Most people just throw any old picture on Facebook without any background. You create a story."

Regardless of my friend's flattery--my brand is a doubtful product, at best--his comments speak to the purpose of online marketing: the thoughtful presentation of a quality product.

If you have an online business with a quality product, you deserve customers. You also deserve a good online marketing campaign, including organic SEO, online reputation management, and social media marketing.  

But what if you're not selling a quality product? Can online marketing help? Maybe. First, it's important to understand how to inspire brand loyalty. Nothing can be taken for granted.

The End of Brand Loyalty?

A few years back, James Surowiecki's article, "The End of Brand Loyalty" struck an ominous tone for brands that "coast[ed] on past performance." In the past, when customers toiled in an "information poor environment...brands served as proxies for quality." But the Internet, Surowiecki noted, has changed everything:

"What’s really weakened the power of brands is the Internet, which has given ordinary consumers easy access to expert reviews, user reviews, and detailed product data, in an array of categories...The rise of social media has accelerated the trend to an astonishing degree: a dud product can become a laughingstock in a matter of hours. In the old days, you might buy a Sony television set because you’d owned one before, or because you trusted the brand. Today, such considerations matter much less than reviews on Amazon and Engadget and CNET."

This was bad news for stodgy (and rapidly failing brands) like Sears or J.C. Penney, but it's been a boon for small business owners. As Surowiecki wrote, "...upstarts now find it easier to compete with the big boys. If you build a better mousetrap, people will soon know about it."

More telling, however, especially for brands that don't offer the best product experience, was Surowiecki's comment at the end of his piece about Lululemon, a perennial brand favorite that had seen better times: "For brands like Lululemon, there’s only one consolation: make something really great and your past sins will be forgotten."

If a company does not have a good product to promote, marketing will not be nearly as effective. As we often say at SEO Sparta: Online marketing is all about the customer's experience, and his or her relationship with the brand.

Most online marketing firms optimize websites with Google in mind, but the purpose of SEO is to make your website, and your brand, appealing to potential visitors. 

Search engines themselves compete for customers. The best way for Google to attract traffic is to deliver the most accurate results. By delivering appealing websites, search engines cultivate repeat customers. This is why Google is popular--its algorithm delivers quality websites with quality products.

The lesson? Quality trumps all.

This is the true goal of online marketing: a quality customer experience engendered by a blazing fast website with relevant content.

In short, the best everything--a quality product, website, and importantly, customer service

If a brand is founded and developed on the guiding principle of quality, and quality is followed as a matter of integrity, success is inevitable. It's about customer experience. And online marketing is all about making sure your website connects to your intended audience in a way that inspires a mutually beneficial relationship.

If you are interested in transforming your website into a money-making tool or are interested in exploring opportunities to outperform your competition, we encourage you to contact SEO SPARTA.

We combine traditional marketing methods and organic SEO--emphasizing natural website optimization--to design thoughtful, inspiring, and effective marketing campaigns.

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