Branding is more than just logos, fonts, and commercials. It’s something more universal – more human. When people interact with your company, they’re not just reacting to the way your products look or how you’re presenting yourself. They’re reacting to how you make them feel on an emotional level.
This is where brand signaling comes in. The purpose of brand signaling is to create positive feelings in people who interact with your business, especially online. Is your business credible? Does your business have something useful to say? Are people likely to heed what your business says or are they more interested in the thoughts and opinions of other brands?
Sending out brand signals, rather than being considered generic, is essential for the long term success of your startup. You want to be recognized as an authority, and so you have to provide search engines with the right digital cues.
Here’s what to do to strengthen your brand signals and become a force to be reckoned with.
Start Posting Regularly On Social Networks
Social networks are fast becoming the most important business hub in the digital space, if not the world. Search engines are increasingly factoring in social media links to your web pages, so companies that have multiple social media accounts are more able to “prove” to search engines that they are brands, rather than generic businesses, blogs, wikis or something else. But this isn’t the only reasons to use social media: it’s becoming the platform of choice in and of itself, regardless of SEO. Branding through social media is now as viable and as effective as the regular branding channels, and helps to reinforce your existing strategies.
Focus On Regular High-Quality Visual Content
Ask any top branding consultant, and they’ll tell you that high-quality visual content is what really matters. This is because brand signaling isn’t just about getting shares or being mentioned elsewhere. It’s about the full impact that those “mentions” have once followed through by users. In simple terms, the impact of a video is likely to be far greater than the impact of a page of text for connecting with your audience.
Visual content is also more visceral, meaning that it is more likely to go viral and more liable to create a buzz. Right now YouTube is a burgeoning platform with more than a billion active users, and greater reach to the 18 to 34 age group than network TV. But even though video might be seen as the ideal way to communicate visually and develop your brand signal, it’s not the only way. Simply including images in the posts you publish on your blog can increase traffic 94 percent above baseline.
Brand Signal With Authority Site Guest Posts
Another way to signal the quality of your brand is to piggyback on brands already out there. Writing an article for a global business site like Forbes or Business Insider helps to prove that your brand is worth listening to. Use whatever expertise you have on a particular topic to sell an interesting story to these top sites.
