How to use online to establish a brand

Branding can be a powerful thing. With it, you can convince people that your products are worth far more than if you didn’t have it. But developing a brand can be difficult, particularly for eCommerce stores that specialize in a wide variety of products or services. Often, you must decide on your own what the primary focus of your brand should be. It’s all right if you have some additional minor focuses, but you need to keep coming back to that primary platform.

Back in 2005, one of the best ways for building a brand was to send out a newsletter to a list of all opted-in users. Some businesses even sold these lists, although there were some problems associated with that. The bigger problem is that 80 percent of emails sent out are not read. People don’t spend as much time on their emails as they do on social-media conversations. The reason that people tend to prefer social media to email is that they prefer faster engagement. Fast engagement combined with high quality form the secret for

establishing an effective brand platform. Here are some powerful ways that you can start to leverage this for your eCommerce store.

Write Discussion Provoking Blog Posts

Often, businesses and eCommerce stores focus on developing blog posts that give general information or promote the product. While it’s all right to provide general information that will be of interest to your customers, you want to make sure that you also provide content that provokes discussion. Conversation-provoking posts do not mean controversial posts. In some cases you might be able to do this effectively by asking people what their favorite product was growing up, or what their favorite memory was as associated with a particular item. You may even offer a prize for participation such as free website templates. But the point is that you give people the opportunity to talk.

One of the best ways to do this is to write a blog post that summarizes all of this material and sets the background. Then you go to your social media platforms, ask the question, and then post the link. Posts that include questions are significantly more likely to get attention and responses.

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Publish a Training Course

People like to learn things of value. One of the ways that you can help to establish a brand platform is to teach an online class or training course. Through sites like Udemy, it’s easy to get started. If your goal is to build up the brand and trust, then you need to offer the course for free. Many of these sites allow you to set the price, even permitting free offerings. Make sure that you make it clear from the beginning that this course doesn’t cost people anything. You can then promote it, including information on the lessons you’ll teach and the benefit that your customers will receive.

The added power of providing a free training course is that it not only establishes you as a bigger expert in your primary focus, it also gives the customer something that they will perceive as having a very high value.

Giving them something of value can be quite important in making it likely that they return. People tend to feel that they owe something to those who give them something for free.