Adapting Your Brand for a Digital-Centric World

 
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While recent years have demonstrated a huge surge of online retail, a surprising number of businesses are not nearly as digitally fluent as they need to be - particularly considering recent shifts in consumer behavior.

If your beauty or wellness business isn’t particularly digitally savvy or “active” online, you aren’t alone.

If you haven’t already, businesses relying on retail partnerships must dust off their procrastination and take this opportunity to shift into the next gear.

While Digital Natives were “born” in the digital space, traditional brands tend to struggle with identifying the right strategy for “creating” their digital brand existence. Here are a few tips on how to navigate building a digital-centric business and brand.

 

1.           BE A DIGITAL CONSUMER
In order to build a digital savvy brand, you must start with a digital savvy team. And while your team may be digitally fluent, the more you, the leader understand the role, functionality, as well as pros and cons of each digital channel, the higher likelihood your brand will perform better.

While you may consider yourself fairly digitally knowledgeable, never underestimate the lack of understanding your team may have. I had an 8 figure cosmetic client that out-sourced their digital advertising, social advertising and SEO/PPC. While revenue generation was strong, customer acquisition cost was so high that it accounted for a large portion of profits - leaving small margins. Out-sourcing wasn’t their problem - attempting to manage a vendor who’s services the team didn’t understand and couldn’t effectively manage was a problem.

 

2.         TRANSLATE, DON’T RE-APPROPRIATE
The default approach to content strategy for non-native brands is to simply take a piece of content and post it on every channel they are active on (e.g., Instagram, Facebook and Twitter). However, this does not take into consideration the different ways that consumers use each of these platforms and mediums, let alone the different types of users in each of these spaces.

As social media offers more unique ways to interact with your viewers/customers, it is important to leverage each in the appropriate manner. Again, the better you understand the way your customers use these communication tools, the more digitally relevant your business will be.

 

3.          MAKE (ALMOST) EVERY BRAND EXPERIENCE SHOPPABLE
First, it’s important that your brand is leveraging all opportunities to make your customer engagement shoppable, whether it be shoppable posts on social media, or enhancing your website experience to be responsive (mobile friendly) and every other trick in the book to drive conversion. 

But more importantly, the other definition of the word “shoppable” that I want to emphasize here is the idea of drawing customers in by being accessible and relevant. Accessible is a matter of building proximity with your customers as well as being personable. By relevant, I mean both standing for something that customers align with, but also ensuring your messaging is relevant to the experiences and shifting needs they may have.

 

4.          FOSTER YOUR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS
One of the primary benefits of pursuing a direct-to-consumer business model is that you can nurture your relationships with your customers. This goes a long ways in terms of building customer loyalty, but one of the biggest missed opportunities is to open up the relationship to become a two-way street so that your business can learn from your customers. Their needs, their interests, their values.

 While many companies manage to derive customer insights by default, many do not fully leverage their customer base to further grow their business. As you build your customer base, consider building customer loyalty programs to reward customers and create programs that allow your customers to help shape your product and service development process.

 

5.          BUILD A DIGITAL-FIRST MINDSET
This goes without saying, but your company must live and breathe digital. This can be challenging for some businesses - especially if there is a fairly established mindset. Changing a company’s mindset might be one of the hardest aspects to adapting your brand for a digital-centric world.

  • If your team avoids use of digital tools being implemented internally, that’s a red flag.

  • If you have staff that wants to put your Ecommerce site on the back burner, that’s a red flag.

  • If you don’t think social media is that important, that’s a red flag.

Know your company’s weaknesses and find strategic ways to build digital into your business.

 
c okubo