Brand Strategy : Creating an Online Community

Your brand positioning strategy should include a determined effort to create a loyal online community. Building this interactive audience takes time and requires that you offer quality content, which will pay off when Google and other search engines index your content. No matter what the latest SEO techniques are, they have always pointed toward a refinement of search engines weeding out weak content sites and giving high rankings to quality content sites.

Web Content Development

The web content you create will determine who visits your website. Like minded followers will eventually find your site if you feed the search engines with web pages full of original and in depth content. Pages with useless content flooded with ads are what search engines are trying to avoid, so don’t fall into that trap. If you fill your product pages with lots of description and customer reviews, then you’re on the right track. Other types of web pages that help search engines bring you traffic are reports about the history of your product, industry reports, interviews, product demonstrations and any type of meaningful analysis.
    

Sitemaps are very important to search engines, so be sure to include one on your site that can clearly be accessed from the home page. The sitemap is the directory to the main pages of your website and serves as a quick summary and navigation tool. Adding a contact page or link can help start a dialogue with your users through email. It can also help you build your marketing list and establish communication with possible future customers. Once you have a substantial marketing list, you can strengthen your brand positioning strategy by starting a newsletter that you can email to your users regularly. The newsletter can help develop a sales funnel by providing links to your product pages.

Blogging Your Brand

A blog is almost like having a regular TV talk show or newspaper column. It only needs to be a series of articles, but adding video or audio pod casts can help attract a bigger audience. Many newbies to the web still aren’t clear what a blog is, although they write one anyway. Try not to follow the herd that thinks blogging is a superficial trendy art form. Focus more on bloggers who are thought leaders in your industry and can prove they have huge followings. Avoid copying them or anyone else, but let their success inspire you.

Blogging is storytelling about your niche expertise, whatever it may be. The goal of blogging is to become somewhat of a cult leader in your field by sharing deep information that cannot be found elsewhere. By giving your brand a narrative through blogging and providing a contact link, you can enter people’s minds and correspond with them. Over time you can learn which followers are worth spending time with. If you consistently share fresh unique content, you can develop a following that relies on your information for their empowerment.

Social Media Content

The easiest way to build a quick following is through social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. All you do is open an account, build a profile and start adding friends. Google+ is particularly designed to add new friends who share your interests. By interacting with social media friends, you can learn a lot about your market in a short time.    

One of the things that social media lets you do better than old media channels, is share a multi-dimensional personality. This dynamic allows you to build bridges with people beyond your brand positioning strategy and opens the door to developing a wide array of relationships.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.