E-commerce Branding Guide for a Strong Foundation of Growth

Building a brand is a challenging exercise in all circumstances.

It’s even more difficult in an e-commerce setting because there are fewer opportunities to engage and connect with consumers.

When your product is on the shelf of a store, consumers can at least touch, see, smell and otherwise experience your brand. When confined to e-commerce, however, probably all they know about you is what you share on your website and your social feed.

Still, there are ways to help consumers make emotional connections to your brand. If Amazon did it, so can you! Here are our best tips for growing your brand and building the kind of foundation leading brands have.

Improve Every Brand Touchpoint

You already have a compelling visual identity and possess a good understanding of where your brand stands. You created your mission, vision, brand pillars and guidelines.

Now is time to dig deeper into all your brand touchpoints and find ways to enhance the customer experience. We love to build brands by under-promising and over delivering.

This is where magic happens in the eyes of the consumer! Promising 2-day shipping and not achieving it can only disappoint and disillusion your customers, feelings you need to avoid when your goal is to grow!

Be as transparent as possible and understand your capabilities. 

Generate Loyalty with Delight

Your goal should be to delight your customers, not merely satisfy them. Ensure your customer service team understands your brand as well as you do and enable them to fix any concerns your customers have.

Your customer service team should feel confident to answer every question. Enable a live chat widget on your site and reply promptly. Deliver beyond your customers’ brand expectations and they’ll gladly stick with you. 

Building a Community

With 54% of shoppers trusting information from online reviews and peer recommendation, user-generated content (UGC) is one marketing tactic you don’t want to ignore.

Featuring your consumers in your messaging will help create a sense of community. When doing so, be selective and curate your content. When using UGC, you still want your target audience to continue to identify with your brand.

Who you feature in your content has a direct impact. UGC has multiple benefits, so leverage it. The interactions of real people with your product validates your brand and provides social proof which helps build trust. 

Encourage testimonials and don’t be shy to ask for reviews. Create content that nurtures, entertains and educates your audience. Be informative about your product, but also connect on a deeper level.

The worst thing you can do is constantly bombard your audience with “buy now” messages.

In fact, sales messages should be only 20% of your content. The rest of what you produce should add value to your audience. If your product line is focused on cosmetics, position your brand as healthy skin thought leaders. 

Being helpful this way increases your engagement and helps you collect more customer data, which in turn can guide the development of more targeted, useful content!

Use Google Analytics from day one to understand your audience and what kind of content they like. As Syed Balkhi states, “Google Analytics reports can be used as inspiration to brainstorm content ideas for your blog.

You can look at different reports to identify what kind of content works on your site. Then, come up with similar content ideas that resonate best with your audience.”

Collaborations can bring big opportunities

Engaging with influencers is a must nowadays but also consider partnerships with other brands. It can help build stronger relationships with the community (like a “shop local” concept) to build your brand awareness.

Utilize hashtags like #shoplocal or #smallbusiness to help you connect with other companies that are at the same stage or that are wanting to collaborate as well. 

Your Buying Persona 

Your brand is evolving constantly and who you are attracting may not necessarily be who you had in mind. Use surveys to continue to identify who your buying persona is.

Once you have this clear, focus on creating ads that are tailored to them. This is an iterative process; continue to experiment with different types of digital ads to find which one works best.

And don’t relax when you find things that work. What works now won’t necessarily work a year from now because your brand will grow and change and so will your audience.

All brands are different and what works well for one may not necessarily be a top performer for another. 

You already have clients. Now what?

This will be a more in depth topic for our next blog.