eCommerce Essentials: How To Start Building Your Brand As An Online Retailer

Once you have all of the logistics of your online business set up, including your parcel delivery processes, you need to start thinking about the big picture. Building a brand, for example, is critical for standing out from competitors and creating a company that your customers love.

There is a lot of work that goes into creating a powerful brand. However, following some straightforward advice will ensure that you do not forget anything when you are starting out.

Let’s look at some of the steps involved in building your brand as an online retailer.

Identify (And Identify With) Your Customers

Keeping your customers at the heart of your brand is essential throughout all steps of the process. You do not want to get too carried away with your own ideas and neglect to consider whether anyone is actually interested when it is too late.

First, you need to know who your customers are and what they want and need. If you already have some customers and have collected some data about them, then use this to your advantage. Explore this data to determine some trends about your customer base and what type of person is interested in your company.

Having this information will guide you in the creation of brand identity as it grows with your business. While you want to create a brand that is a reflection of your actual values, you also want to be sure that it fits with your customers if you want it to resonate.

Use Video Content

Publishing and posting regular content is critical for engaging with your audience and keeping people informed about your business. While all content is potentially beneficial to this end, video content reigns supreme as the easiest to digest. Video content is also the most humanising type of content. If you create video content in the right way, perhaps even featuring you and your staff prominently in the videos, you will attract more interest in your business.

Create A Narrative

Branding is about writing a good story about your business that people can identify with. While this needs to come from a genuine place, it is also worthwhile to reflect on what you want to say to make sure that it fits with your overall goals and with the type of customer that you want to attract. 

Part of creating a good narrative involves positioning your business as part of something larger. In other words, your business needs to have some kind of overarching goal that it is helping to achieve. For example, your products or services may be helping people lower their carbon footprint to combat climate change. This puts your business at the heart of something greater and provides your customers with extra incentive to identify with your brand.

Elicit Emotion With Your Marketing

Whether you are marketing through social media, print, or email, it is important that you set the right emotional tone that you want your business to represent. Emotion is powerful and can quickly attract interest in your business if it is incorporated into your marketing correctly. However, you need to consider whether your business is always professional and serious, funny and satirical, more neutral and calmer in temperament, etc. Too many conflicting styles can create discordance in your brand identity and alienate customers.

Build Up Your Brand

These four steps will get you started with making your online brand as a retailer. The hard part is not so much in the implementation of these steps but in the amount of reflection and thought that needs to go into the process if you want the end product to be great. Put in the time and your brand will be something that your customers love.