Digital Brand Management

In essence, digital brand management is an amalgamation of policies that directly or indirectly influence the way your customer interacts with your brand online. This includes your landing pages, apps, social media engagement, blog marketing, PPC and anything that is executed over the digital medium.

Brand management is pretty straightforward in the offline segment where the approval for brochures, flyers, and print ads are all conducted by one centralised authority who is mostly the brand manager. In the case of digital brand management, a number of key components of business like web design, PPC advertising, and social media marketing are outsourced to third party agencies. Ensuring that you communicate your branding mission to these third-party service providers is absolutely critical.

Digital brand management policy

It is important for a brand to have one unique brand management policy that applies to all channels of marketing – both offline and online. In other words, your brand management policy for offline channels should be the same document you should be using for online branding as well. There are two main categories of brand management that one must look into – design and positioning. The design factors essentially include all the marketing materials that originate from the company’s digital accounts. This includes the look and experience on the landing pages, ad copies and even the cover photo on your social media accounts. Positioning is the actual communication being delivered through digital media. Apart from the ad copy text, images and taglines used in the digital media, positioning can also include the tone and tenor of the tweets and email messages sent from the company’s account.

The next step is to identify unique elements in each of your marketing channels and identify a way to appropriate the universal document to fit this specific marketing channel. Take social media marketing as an example. There have been thousands of cases in the past decade where inadvertent tweets have led to a social media boycott or negative publicity for a brand. In other cases, legitimate social media campaigns have been hijacked by critics and that has led to the brand losing control over its campaigns.

For instance, when McDonald’s launched their #McDStories hashtag campaign, it was quickly hijacked by posters who tweeted stories about food poisoning and hygiene at restaurant locations. In another instance, a staff of the Vodafone UK social media team published an obscene tweet from the company’s official account that threw the company into a crisis. A holistic digital brand management policy should take care of both the internal and external factors that affect the brand on social media and create a policy that fits the brand’s social media strategy.

Communicating the digital brand management strategy

At Black Dove we believe the most important component of digital brand management is communication with the stakeholders. As we noted earlier in this article, digital campaigns are often decentralised in any organisation and are typically handled by external media agencies that specialise in specific channels.

At Black Dove we set up a one-on-one meeting with the owners or allocated managers to discuss a top down brand strategy. This includes a complete knowledge transfer on the universal brand philosophy as well as deciding the brand strategy specific to the marketing channels chosen.

Digital brand management is evolving to become a much-required component of a company’s overall brand strategy. Given the multiple stakeholders associated here, Black Dove Consultancy can help businesses to create a well-studied, holistic strategy that can address all their digital branding goals without compromising on their overall branding strategies.