Do we need to brand our web business online?

We are not talking about giant 'street' companies such as Coca Cola who spend a small portion of their total advertising budget to make their names appear on the Internet. We are not talking about giant online companies such as Yahoo who try to make their names more appealing. We are talking about numerous small online companies (small dogs)----just like you and us.

John said: Yes!

Here we give you five more reasons to make your own brands online:

1. We want to become a major player in our industry;
2. We want our business to grow;
3. We want our business to have a good personality;
4. We want everyone to be aware of our business;
5. We want to do business online;

Without branding online, we don't know how to fulfil these wants. Are these reasons reasonable enough for us to pursue online branding?

Branding is a rather abstract concept. Therefore, branding effects may be defined in different ways. How to brand your web business depends on what branding goal you want to pursue. In general, you have the following choices to brand your web business:

1. Awareness. This is the most preliminary goal of branding but most important to most of us. Both banner advertising and email promotion usually have only temporary effects. Unless the person who see the ads need your products or services immediately, your advertising won't bring you any good. However, to make people be aware of your business is like to put a banner in his/her brain. It has long lasting effects;

2. Consideration set. Although awareness increases the chance greatly that people will buy your products or services, it is not always true. Only when people include your products or services in
their consideration set, have you had a non-zero probability to sell your products or services. To make people consider your products or services, you need more than merely increasing
awareness. You need to give your future customers good reasons to include your brand in their choice set;

3. Positioning. Every web marketer needs to face this reality: we are not facing a mass market. Instead, we are facing an unlimited market with many segments. So we need to position our web business to make it more appealing to our targeted segment(s).

Currently, many people are discussing whether online advertising has branding effects. I personally think they are talking about the wrong issue. What we need to discuss is: Do we need to brand our web business online? If the answer is 'Yes', we need to find a way
to make our brands online instead of arguing whether the current online ads have branding effects. The fact is: if the current online banners are not aimed at online branding, how could they have online branding effects?

We leave how to create effective online banners to advertising agencies. Here we just discuss the process of branding our business from the angle of marketing strategy.

We should always remember: advertising is only one element in our online branding process. Without other elements, advertising cannot help brand our business.

The key to brand your web business is to understand your web market and design your web business to fit the targeted segment(s) in that market. If your customers in your market need apples but you want to sell oranges to them. Even you make everyone in the market know
that you are selling oranges (a big if), will they buy from you? If you advertise that you are selling apples but when they come to your site and find you are still selling orange, how many of them
will buy?

Advertising cannot change your service quality or your service itself. It can help you only when your service is good enough to help your customers.

So, to brand your web business, you need to:

1. Understand your web market. Understand the basic needs of the customers in the market and understand the preferences of them;

2. Segment the market. Based on customers' basic needs and preferences, divide them into relatively homogenous (in terms of preferences and need structures) segments;

3. Target segments and position your web business based on your competitive strength and customers' preference structure in your targeted segments;

4. Design advertising campaign;

5. Measure branding effects and modify your campaign plan;

Online branding has long lasting effects on your online business but it needs long lasting efforts. If you don't want to disappear from the Internet next year, you should start your online branding
today.

You brand your web site and we help you measure the branding effects.

Cheers!
Tim Lee

Director of Research
http://www.WebCMO.com/
A site dedicated to web marketing research