Branding is essential to growing your business. Online branding is the art and science of differentiating your company from your competition in the eyes of customers and potential customers. The goal of branding is more than just building customer awareness of your product or service. The goal to branding is, ultimately, building customer loyalty.
There are many ways of pursuing branding online. In fact, online branding is one of the most cost effective, efficient methods of branding. The costs are miniscule compared to the potential rewards in growing your business. The key aspects of branding through online content are making your web content relevant and engaging. The first step toward relevant and engaging content consists of knowing who your potential customers are. Once you have identified your target market, you need to find ways to engage them and keep them engaged.
One way to think about the relationship of your customers to your website is to think of them as your site’s audience. You want to promote your business, but it is vital to engage your potential customers and keep them engaged. One way to do this is through sponsored content. Sponsored content is content that offers something of value that isn’t directly related to your product or service. It can involve content that resides on your website, or content elsewhere on the web that redirects traffic to your website.
Sponsored content on the World Wide Web comes in many shapes and forms. For example, online publications often have links to sponsor sites, which in turn transport you to another site. Other sites host sponsored special feature pages on their own web servers. Bear in mind that such sponsored content varies a lot. Some is mere promotional fluff, whereas other sponsored content involves genuinely useful editorial material.
From a branding point of view, you are better off pursuing useful editorial content than pure promotional puffery. So many potential customers have been so inundated by so much blatantly promotional, shrill, thinly veiled advertising masquerading as content on the web, that the average web user has become cautious, if not outright cynical. Bear in mind that creating material that is mere promotion and having it masquerade as sponsored content when it’s really a mere infomercial is likely to fail. If you want to make an infomercial page, fine, but don’t pretend it is genuine editorial content.
Another possible error in creating sponsored content is going to far in the other direction—sponsoring content that is so independent it is utterly irrelevant to your company or product. This can be a tricky and somewhat nebulous area. If your brand is ‘lifestyle’ or ‘prestige’ oriented, then you may benefit from sponsoring content that on the surface is somewhat incongruous to your product or service. To make this work, you have to make both the product and the sponsored content feed into the same aspect of the customer’s self image (or at least, how they’d like to see themselves).
A much simpler way to make your sponsored content relevant is to select content that is relevant to your business. Done right, sponsored content can be a great way of deepening your relationship with your customers and enhancing online branding.
