Digital Branding and Building the Right Voice

If I were to ask you what Digital Branding is, what would be your first association? People often don’t really know how to answer this question and they tend to wander around visual associations. Yes, brand’s logo is an important part of it, but digital branding is much more than the logo.

 

To help you figure out the real value of Digital Branding, I will explain what’s in its core and how it can transform the perception of your digital products in the eyes of your users.

The Powerful Impact

What makes us choose the digital tools we are working with every day? What makes our favourite news portal that good? How do we choose which e-commerce service is the best for us? Which running app is our top pick?

For every digital product we use, we can ask ourselves why we picked it and not some other. We might say that all of our favourites have great functionalities, that they are secure and trustworthy, that they offer great service and great user experience etc. But how did we get to this conclusions? Before we had the chance to form an opinion, we first had to pick the product.

The selection of digital products these days is huge, and a lot of digital products with the same functionalities are pretty similar in terms of their offerings. So how do we choose the one that is right for us?

Often, when we search for the “right one”, our first step is to google popular digital products and take a leap of faith. If you think about it, to some extent we already trust its quality, we just need to see which one fits our needs better.

So how do we start trusting popular digital products if we never used them before? One of the main reasons is definitely good digital branding.

It Is Much More Than the Logo

Digital Branding implies having the vision of what is your brand is. Slogan, colours and shapes of the logo, typography, presentational website, tool, app, microcopy on the buttons, newsletter…everything is a part of the bigger picture defined by your brand’s tone of voice.

Dropbox, Google drive, NY Times, Pitchfork, Nike, Slack… our first associations with these brands would probably be visual because humans are primarily focused on the visual aspects. It’s the reason why we can consciously remember the brand logo, but sometimes we underestimate the importance of other things such as the emotional branding and brand’s tone of voice.

Same as with humans, in order to connect with the brand, we need to bond with it on an emotional level. Colours and shapes are just the final expressions of a carefully thought-out branding strategy. The thing that comes before this is the core of the brand identity – it is the emotional branding.

That’s why you will often hear the question “if your brand was a famous person, who would it be”. It is important to have a clear vision of your identity because that’s the thing you’ll build your brand on. To be able to build this emotional connection, it is important to have a clear vision for the brand.

There Is Something Special About Your Brand

The key is to find out what your brand’s best qualities are, and what we mean by that is – what are those two or three things that make your brand really special, what makes it stand out from the competition. Let’s say that you have an IoT company that provides the tool for important data managing. Being able to say that your tool is trustworthy and secure is very important, but that trait’s not something unique to your brand.

To find out what brand traits make your brand stand out from the competition, we need to go a lot deeper with your company or a product. All of the answers are there, we just need to find them in your business model and values. It is the ideology that makes us connect to anything, whether it’s our favourite news portal, a mobile app, a singer or a sports team. The trigger is always the same – we connect to the story of the brand.

Through our experiences, we learned of the importance and saw the benefits of having a close partnership with our clients. We had the opportunities to do digital branding strategies that really made difference to our clients, and it’s always the same feeling of excitement when you get these kinds of projects. That is because we know that the process of discovery will give us the best understanding of the brand. When we have that, we believe that we can create a great digital branding strategy that’s aligned with our client’s goals and that will push their digital products to the top.

Give Your Brand a Voice That Can Be Heard

How many digital storage tools, other than Google Drive and Dropbox, do you know about? Probably not that many. Their positioning in the market is so good that it is almost impossible to offer a new one. Yes, they have good functionalities, but they also have users’ trust – a thing they built many years. By doing that, they built their entire brand.

By knowing our client’s vision and goals by heart, we can start building a brand identity which will help them to position their digital product on the market. We can help them reach their key audience and, at the same time, save their time and the effort needed to get good results.

Still, it takes time to build a strong brand identity and the consistency is everything. Once you explain your brand to yourself, you will be a lot closer to your goals and the way you want your users to see you. Having a defined tone of voice for your brand will help you to always stay on track and focused on your goals. By defining the tone of voice and completely branding your product, you will add the value to it and that will ultimately enable you to stand out from the crowd.

Start Working on Your Digital Branding

If you need help in branding your product, you can always contact us and tell us about your situation and needs. Because every project is different, we always approach new projects open-minded. It is important for us to research, discover and to get the correct information about your needs and your business model. This enables us to adjust our process in order to get the best possible outcome.

Because you are oriented to your business and have all the answers, our role is to ask you the right questions so that we can find the best direction/solution that will help us to build your Brand Identity together.

If you are curious about the work we’ve done, take a look at these Brandbook examples.