Creating a memorable brand is extremely beneficial: wherever you display your logo or ads, people instantly recognize your business name and have you top of mind for their next purchase. With people spending more and more time on the internet – using their smartphones to connect with friends, find information, and shop – it is important that your brand is also online.

Creating an online brand is somewhat different from building a brand in the offline world. The internet has two main characteristics to keep in mind:

• There are a lot of distractions and it is increasingly difficult to be visible to people
• Whatever you put online will stay there forever, in one way or another.

This means that you have to spend time not only building and promoting your brand image but also being aware of how your brand is perceived and what people say about it online, while being able to take quick measures to counteract any bad reputation online.

These are five useful guidelines to help you achieve these goals:

1. Be Consistent Across All Channels

An online brand image is built across many digital properties: your website, blog, newsletter, and all social media accounts. If you want people to recognize your brand and connect with it, you need to develop a unified image and tone of voice.

Adapting your brand image from your website to your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile requires careful fine tuning – for this reason your company should work closely with marketing, social media, and digital graphics specialists to plan and execute a careful growth of your online brand.

 2. Don’t Forget About Mobile

Your online brand image must ‘play nice’ with the mobile devices. You don’t need to do anything special on social media, but you do need to make sure your website is 100% mobile-friendly.

If you run any ads online it’s also important to keep mobile in mind. An ad/image that looks perfect on a computer screen can sometimes look small and unreadable on a mobile phone. Always check your ad on a mobile device before publishing.

3. Prevent Your Brand from Being Taken Hostage

As crazy as it seems, brand hostage taking is quite frequent across the globe. It happens like this: an individual finds a domain name or social media profile that wasn’t registered by a business. They go ahead and register it and then reach out to the business and request money for the domain/account. This recently happened to the online giant Google – for a few hours the domain name google.com belonged to an individual.

To prevent this from happening, make sure that you remember to renew domain name on time (or prepay for years ahead of time) and that you reserve your business name on the social media, even if you don’t plan on being active right away.

4. Engage with Your Prospects

The best way to make your brand image is to be active and engage with your users in effective and meaningful ways. Building trust in a brand is not easy, but if you demonstrate diligence and care for your potential customers you can do it; you can convince people that you are a valuable business partner for them.

A final thought – – One of the worst things you can do is have a website or social media presence and never update it!

>> Are you looking for a reliable partner for your print or online brand needs? Get in touch with Impact Color today.