Horse First, Cart Second: A Lesson in Building Your Brand’s Online Strategy

Dana George is the Senior Web Designer at Standing Dog Interactive

For most businesses with a new idea for a product or service, building an online presence seems like the best way to make that new business venture come to life. Therefore, it might seem like forward progress to get online as quickly as possible. It’s a common misconception that the FIRST thing your business needs to do is to get online. This is what we refer to as putting the cart before the horse.

Why is this?

Brands often expect their websites to handle virtually every aspect of the customer life cycle: attract, inform, convert, transact, support and engender. That’s a lot of work for a site, and this is only a partial list.

Brand Strategy

Websites matter, and your website is part of the conversation, but the business/brand strategy matters more. Your brand no longer needs to convey brand essence in every customer interaction, but rather become part of their life, their friends’ lives, the communities they know, places they go and things they love. That’s not easy to do, but if you have a brand strategy, the quest to solve this problem becomes tangible.

Before you build a new online destination, you need to build strategy around what your customer really needs and where else they’ll be hanging out.

Here are a few Key Components to creating brand strategy:

• Identify or define your most important customers.
• Discover what motivates your customers and what could cause them to choose your brand over your competitor’s brands.
• Develop brand messaging (including an elevator speech).
• Reinforce your brand’s promise at each point of customer contact.
• Measure the ongoing equity of the brand and make adjustments as necessary.

The infographic below illustrates the thought process you need to take while building your strategy.  Just replace”you” with the name of your brand.

To inquire about online strategy building for your brand, call Standing Dog at 214.696.9607.