When people talk about business branding they are referring to the aspect of creating a comprehensive message for your company and product or service, using names, logos, slogans, copy and other collateral. Branding is actively creating the perception you hope consumers have as they come into contact with, and experience your company, product or service.

Let us break the process of branding a company into three core phases:

• Brand Strategy
• Brand Identity
• Brand Marketing

Brand Strategy is a plan that focuses on the long-term development of your purpose and impact. Your Brand Strategy will map out how you are different, trustworthy, memorable, and likable by your ideal customer. It will convey your purpose, promises, and how you solve problems for people. You can think of Brand Strategy as the blueprint for how you want the world to see your business.
Brand Strategy is a critical and foundational piece for building a successful brand. It’s one of the areas that most businesses overlook, because they jump right into the design and marketing.

Brand Identity is the way that you convey this to the public with visuals, messaging, and experience.Your brand identity should be applied across all channels consistently. It is the way that your business becomes recognizable. This includes your logo, colors and fonts, website design, content, advertising, print or packaging, and more.

Then we have, Brand Marketing is the way that businesses or organizations highlight and bring awareness to products or services by connecting values and voice to the right audience through strategic communication.

There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. Here are a few key examples that are most suited for startup businesses.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing in itself. The Balance defines it as “the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.”
The most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page include:
Quality of content
Level of user engagement
Mobile-friendliness
Number and quality of inbound links

In SEO, there’s no quantifiable rubric or consistent rule for ranking highly. Google changes its algorithm almost constantly, so it’s impossible to make exact predictions. What you can do is closely monitor your page’s performance and make adjustments accordingly.

Content Marketing

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitability”.
As in any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material.
As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need to be able to rank highly in search engine results while also engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. The most popular platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Because social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way of getting attention. It’s the most popular content medium for B2C marketers at 96%, social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely useful in helping you to understand how well you’re reaching your audience. You get to decide which types of interactions mean the most to you, whether that means the number of shares, comments, or total clicks to your website. Many brands use social media marketing to start dialogues with audiences rather than encourage them to spend money right away. This is especially common in brands that target older audiences or offer products and services not appropriate for impulse buys.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is posting an ad on a platform and paying every time someone clicks on it. How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated. When a spot is available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engine fills the spot with what is essentially an instant auction. An algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on a number of factors, including:
Ad quality
Keyword relevance
Landing page quality
Bid amount
Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers are meant to complete after clicking an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is a newsletter signup or a call made to your home office.
Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them via your chosen platform to see how your campaign is doing.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing lets someone make money by promoting another person’s business. You could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the same in either case.
It works using a revenue sharing model. If you’re the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you’re the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.
Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants.
Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the other party. You can use a platform designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single-retailer program.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising.
Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:
Collect and analyze consumer information
Design targeted marketing campaigns
Send and post marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences
Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This level of real-time customization means that you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.

Email marketing

The concept of email marketing is simple—you send a promotional message and hope that your prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an opt-in list that does the following:
Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
States clearly what kind of emails the subscriber will get
Offers a clear unsubscribe option
Integrates both transactional and promotional emails
You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.
It can be even better if you incorporate other techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer’s needs more effectively.