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Improve your Brand Authority/Positioning with these latest Digital Marketing Strategies

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What is the relationship between Digital Marketing strategies, Brand Authority, Brand Positioning, and Brand Awareness?

To solve this puzzle, let alone answer the question as to how Digital Marketing strategies can be used to improve branding, it is essential to be on the same page regarding brand strategies, their core elements and how they are useful to businesses.

Table of Content

Brand Strategy

The brand strategy is perhaps the most significant factor in establishing a strong foundation for downstream marketing and sales initiatives. A brand strategy is particularly important especially for industrials that contest in crowded spaces and sell highly commoditized products.

Even though many businesses believe that they are in a ‘commodity trap,’ others argue that there’s no such thing as a ‘commodity trap’ when it comes to sales. Either way, the power to take control of such situations lies with the company controlling its destiny. Essentially, this means having a branding strategy.

A brand strategy shapes the brand elements that will be designed, organized, and deployed in a manner that is in line with the business plan. The brand strategy, therefore, incorporates all touchpoints that shape market behavior and determine perception over time. These touchpoints include:

Successful brand strategies always benefit from strong branding that allows the business to stand out in its category. The center of such a strategy is relevancy and believability that is built on strong foundations of credibility, trustworthiness, and compelling truth. Such brand strategies attract more customers, ward off competitors, command higher prices, gain favorable treatment from distribution channels and, generate healthier/higher earnings.

Brand Equity

Since a brand strategy is vital for a successful business, leaders should invest, measure, and improve brand equity. Brand equity measures brand strength and consider three vital metrics:

Elements of a strong brand strategy

A company’s brand position must be believable, relevant, and defensible to thrive, be sustainable, and support business performance. Strong brands own a mindset because they stand for something compelling and claim the highest moral ground. To achieve this, a brand strategy must include the following basic elements:

Brand Authority and Brand Positioning

Marketers must, therefore, counteract the temptation to commoditize and lower the prices of their products by finding ways to differentiate their offerings from the competition. There are two primary methods to achieve this:

At the end of the day, buyers will prefer one seller over another because they have been referred by a trusted advisor or because of a pre-existing brand relationship with the seller. Basically, people buy what they know and trust. Brand authority is, therefore, the business’s way to become an entity that is known and trusted.

Authority is the quality of an entity that can be relied on as a source of knowledge or truth. Brand authority refers to the perceived power and expertise in which a brand’s activity, voice, or opinion has over other brands. Brand authorities have the ability to control an audience’s perception of their product as well as increase sales. In general, there are four types of Brand Authorities: Celebrity Brand ambassadors, Industry Brand ambassadors, Thought Leader Brand ambassadors, and Local Brand ambassadors. These roles differ according to an organization’s internal infrastructure and business goals but all play a pivotal role in increasing product sales through public relations efforts.

Brand positioning is about how you communicate your brand to create meaning for consumers. Brand positioning complements and contrasts with brand awareness by seeking to identify a business’ unique attributes and pairs them with a distinct customer promise. Essentially, brand positioning for an entity is about:

Digital marketing strategy

The next piece of the puzzle is to appreciate how a digital marketing strategy and a brand strategy relate. Let’s pay attention to a few statistics to guide the conversation:

What do all these numbers mean? The conclusion here is that, to a large extent, demand generation is driven by customer interaction with touchpoints that are mostly dependent on online references. From the perspective of buyers/recipients, 75% of them want branded content that helps them research business ideas.

A digital marketing strategy includes a series of actions that help a business achieve its overarching business goals through well-chosen marketing channels that support a campaign around a specific brand mix. The digital marketing strategy defines how businesses:

Elements of digital marketing strategy

A strong and effective marketing strategy starts with a sales funnel. Businesses should have distinct and personalized sales funnels depending on the different industries or recipients. Each funnel should map out a sales cycle and how it specifically relates to the buyer’s journey.

For example, a blog could be the first step in a sales funnel that helps a lead get answers to questions that they may have.
The business should prove that they are a reputable source and keep producing high-quality content that engages and leads the visitor/potential customer to the next stage of the sales funnel. At this point, the visitor will probably join an email list and become a lead.

If the blog is designed based on a strong brand strategy defined by credibility, trustworthiness, and a compelling truth, then the result of such a consistent effort will not only be to build brand awareness but also loyalty (from distribution channels and the consumer), better pricing, and healthier profits.

Although the above example may be a simplistic view of a highly nuanced digital marketing strategy, the idea is reinforced by the fact that 45% of consumers unfollow brands that focus on self-promotion at the cost of totally ignoring their audience.

Businesses should take time to ask themselves, why does this lead need us? How can we make their life easier? What is our UVP

? And why would the leads choose us over our competition?

Digital marketing strategies

Since the business lead usually wants to know more, marketers should seek to answer the above questions by creating a digital marketing strategy that addresses these needs.

Due to the peculiarities of each business and its customers, each company shall have different digital campaigns and different digital marketing strategies. That said, below are some of the standard techniques used in digital marketing strategies:

Website design:
Where landing pages and websites are built with lead generation in mind.

Content marketing best practices
Brands build awareness by consistently creating high-quality and popular content that search engines can easily relate to customer queries. As such, content is the engine that drives brand authority.
High-quality content boosts SEO rankings especially when Google (and other search engines) deems it to be from an expert who is trustworthy. There are several ways to build content authority including by:

Digital Marketing Strategies to Improve your Brand Authority

A research study conducted in 2014 showed that 93% of brands focused their content marketing on their own products and services. More current studies show an increasing reversal in this trend where activities around building brands show:

Brand Positioning: a value-driven, customer-centric approach

Purchasing decisions continue to become increasingly complex. Often, social positions and corporate culture are infused into the buying process. According to, ‘The State of Branding Report 2018’,  88% of customers believe that businesses have the power to influence societal change and should, therefore, address societal issues. The same report cites that 79% of marketers think that social and cultural issues will play a role in their marketing and branding strategies in 2018.

A more holistic approach to marketing is therefore required. Today, marketing leaders with successful brands no longer market to the world but instead play a role in the world (and behave strategically) that boosts their brand authority.

Also, relationships are not just vendor-buyer relationships anymore. Instead, they have become partners and participants in the value chain.

With this in mind, there are three fundamental changes that businesses can use to position themselves as a valuable selling companies:

Using customer experience to define value

Delivering high-quality value to customers is at the heart of building brand awareness, positioning, and authority. To provide increased value, it is essential for the business to:

Some strategies to improve customer experiences include:

Additional digital marketing strategies that can enhance brand authority and positioning include:

Create content that praises your customers

The bottom line

By understanding how audiences research and learn online, brands can improve their presence and authority by using digital marketing strategies that focus on building trust, thought leadership and the right kind of exposure without having to compromise on website traffic, lead generation, and revenue.