Building a Brand Online: 5 Steps to Your Success

Ilona Kondakova
Oct 24, 2024
5 min read

A brand is what customers first notice. It's the name that comes to mind, the one they hear about in advertising, the cornerstone of your reputation, and the topic of conversation. Developing your brand, especially online, is a crucial part of any business. To start building your brand online, all you need to do is follow five simple steps. Let's take a look at what they are.

Define Your Target Audience

The target audience is a group of people who are already interested in your product or service or who might be interested in it in the future. To avoid making mistakes that can harm your business and to increase sales, it's important to carefully analyze who your potential customers are.

The process of analyzing a target audience involves several steps. The first step is to divide the audience into different groups based on certain criteria. These criteria should be relevant and specific, allowing you to identify the most likely target groups for your campaign.

To do this, you can use one of the most popular methods — the 5W method by Mark Sherrington. This method uses five questions to divide potential customers into groups:

What? About the ‘Product’. What exactly do you offer your customers? This question helps to pinpoint the key features of your product or service. What makes your product stand out? Perhaps it's its special features, a favorable price, or something else.
Who? About the ‘Consumer’. Who exactly will buy your products? Who is your customer? Where is your target market? What specific problems and needs does your offer address? The better you understand your audience, the easier it will be to create personalized advertising.
Why? About ‘Motivation’. Why do customers choose your product? What should you write about in your advertisement to highlight the main reason or multiple reasons that can motivate customers to take action? What exactly are you offering customers? This question helps you understand customers' needs and problems, and focus on the problems that your product solves.
When? About the ‘Moment’. When do your customers buy your product? This question helps you understand the seasonal changes in demand or how often they buy it. Understanding these patterns is crucial for tailoring your advertising campaigns and special offers to meet customer needs.
Where? About the ‘Sales Channel’. Where do your customers like to buy your product? Do they prefer online or in a physical store?

Then, create detailed profiles of your ideal customers. These profiles should include their needs, barriers to purchase, motivations, and insights. By doing so, you can better understand the problem that your product or service solves for customers and what their real needs are.

Create Quality Content

Content is the cornerstone of your online brand. High-quality content helps build trust and captures the attention of your audience. Content goes beyond blog posts or social media. It includes everything you share with your customers, from website content to advertising, newsletters, and video products.

To create content, you can either hire professional commercial writers or copywriters, or you can do it yourself. If you choose to go it alone, here are some tips to help you get started:

Create a content plan that includes the type of content you want to produce, the platform where you'll publish it, and the timing of its release. Your plan can be detailed or only loosely outlined — the important thing is that you understand it and follow it.

Understand the unique characteristics of each platform. The content you create for a blog will be different from the content you post on social media. You can publish longreads with detailed professional advice on a blog, while social media platforms prefer shorter formats with engaging visuals.
Use specialized tools. Nowadays, there are many tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) that can help you create and improve your content. With these tools, you can produce videos, images, texts, find new ideas, check the spelling and grammar of your work, and much more. However, it’s important not to create all content using AI. Search engines can ban your content and not show it to users if they request it. AI should be your helper.

Choose a Domain and Launch a Website

Choosing a domain name is a crucial decision. It will be the identifier for your website on the internet, so it should accurately reflect your brand or industry. It should also be short and easy to remember and spell.

To make your domain even more memorable, you can use a domain hack. The word “hack” in this context refers to a creative way to solve a problem, similar to “life hacks.” This technique involves selecting a domain name that forms a single word or phrase when combined with the domain zone. For example, you could go for something like examp.le or buy.it.com. Users are sure to remember a domain like this!

You can either hire a professional to create a website for you or do it yourself. Modern website builders like Site.pro make it easy to build a website without any technical expertise.

All you need to do is choose a template that you like and customize it to your needs. You can rearrange the blocks, add or remove them as needed, create pages, choose fonts, and customize the design.

In most website builders, it's also straightforward to set up all the essential SEO settings right away to help your site rank.

Promote Social Media

Social media is a good tool for marketing your brand and connecting with your customers. When you use social media platforms effectively, you can significantly boost your visibility. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of social media:

Identify the social media platforms that are most popular with your target audience and focus on them.
Publish interesting content, run contests, and engage with your followers through comments and messages.
Consider running paid advertising campaigns to reach a wider audience and attract new customers.

Join the IWA

Getting help with your business growth is a fantastic opportunity to boost your success. The IWA (International Women's Alliance) offers a wide range of resources and avenues for building, developing, and enhancing your brand online.

The Alliance provides training materials, courses, and guidance on enhancing your online presence. You'll find all the knowledge you need in the IWAcademy.

At events organized by the IWA and its partners, you can make valuable connections, learn from the experiences of other women in business, and share your own.

All Alliance members have access to experts in various fields such as business, finance, marketing, and more.

Building a successful online brand requires time and effort. IWA is here to share its expertise with you.

Looking for more tips to succeed online? Visit our blog and follow us on social media.