In today’s technical world, it’s easy for marketers to become overly concerned with trackable metrics. They have a good reason – SEO and similar digital marketing methods can breathe new life into a flagging business. However, marketers should remember that those strategies tend to assume one thing – that you have a brand worth marketing in the first place.
How to Spot a Strong Brand
Any brand that works is strong, but there are still commonalities between leading brands across the world. On the surface level, there are four aesthetic elements that every brand seems to have. These are:
1. A logo.
2. A consistent color scheme.
3. An official font.
4. A consistent brand voice.
Pretty much every successful brand makes use of these and does so in a way that’s consistent and keeps the attention on them. This kind of branding can be found everywhere, from real-world companies to online business models like those found on e-commerce or casino websites. For a more complex example, people who enjoy Huff N Even More Puff Grand online and other slots on sites like Paddy Power will know the recognisable Paddy Power brand, hosted on a site with a clear, green-tinted color scheme that uses a playful but informative tone of voice, as fits a casino.
However, they are a site that presents a lot of slots, with each one being a smaller brand. Their solution, also one used by YouTube, is to present content in isolated windows while the site design leans toward the main brand.
Those examples are quite specific to the online world, but the same can be seen for brick-and-mortar brands that start their own website. That’s because consistency is key, so customers expect the Subway sandwich site to have the same green and yellow color scheme and emboldened fonts. That consistency breeds familiarity, so customers will instantly recognize the brand wherever it appears, whether that’s on the side of a bus or an online ad.
Brand Identity in the Digital Age
While brands need to have creative, memorable aesthetics, choosing a set of colors and a quirky font isn’t going to cut it. The best brands also present a meaningful identity or aspirational goal that customers can buy into. To this end, a lot of brands use their own story while newer brands have forward-looking ideas for the industry they work in. For up-and-coming businesses, big marketing names like Mailchimp offer brand persona guides to help new entrepreneurs out.
A widespread brand identity is typical nowadays, but digital marketing has made those identities more important than ever before. Today, a company can broadcast its values, for better or worse, across social media where millions of people can see their posts. As a result, having a strong and appealing brand is necessary when trying to launch a digital marketing campaign.
If that brand is a dud, it loses the authenticity that catapults a lot of brands toward popular appeal in the digital age. This is why we’ve seen brands try to become more relatable to their audiences, through sarcastic social media accounts or leaning into meme marketing. It’s that authenticity that forms the foundation for a lot of technical benefits in SEO, due to Google’s long-standing E-E-A-T guidelines.
While they are often cited by SEO experts, many fail to understand that they are also a hierarchy. That’s to say, a site that fails in T – Trustworthiness – is scrapped from search no matter their Experience, Expertise, or Authoritativeness.
So, a brand that doesn’t have an appealing aesthetic or identity won’t just turn away your human customers; it could also hamstring a digital marketing campaign at a technical level. Algorithms will respond poorly to negative reviews or no reviews at all, impacting a brand’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Without a strong brand at the center, a digital marketing strategy will struggle to generate human and algorithmic interest.