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By | March 4, 2019

The digital transformation that has reshaped industry after industry has come to professional services — profoundly impacting how a firm’s brand is shaped and communicated. Digital branding is here to stay.

Digital BrandingDefined

Digital branding is the process of creating and promoting the online identity and brand story of a firm or individual. It typically involves using online channels such as websites, social media, webinars, search engine optimization, online reviews, guest blogging, earned media and digital advertising to build engagement and drive greater exposure.

In the context of professional services, you can think of your brand as the visibility of your reputation. This broad concept includes both digital and traditional offline approaches to brand building. So the obvious question is, “How important is your digital brand?”

The Importance of Digital Branding

In our increasingly connected word, it is safe to say that digital branding is more important than it has ever been. But how important is it?

Two recent studies from the Hinge Research Institute shed some light on this important question. They investigate how professional services buyers’ behavior has changed and what strategies are driving exceptional growth in today’s professional services firms. Together these studies demonstrate the central role of a firm’s digital brand throughout the buying process.

Researching Business Issues. The professional services buying process starts well before a buyer considers specific providers. It starts with a business problem. Business issues and concerns arise all the time, so each must be evaluated and prioritized. Is this issue important enough to focus on? What are my competitors doing about it? What are possible solutions?

How does a busy executive investigate these topics? It usually starts with a simple Google search. But if you aren’t writing on the topics that your prospective clients are searching for — and optimizing your content to appear in their search results — you are invisible to a significant portion of your market. And you aren’t building an online reputation as an authority in your area of expertise.

In fact, when we looked at all the information gathering techniques employed by professional services buyers, we found a 70% probability that today’s buyers will use a digital source in the early stages of their research into business challenges. (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. Probability buyers will use each channel type to research a business challenge

Identifying Service Providers. Once these fact-finding executives conclude that their problem is worth solving — and they realize they can’t fix the problem themselves — they become professional services buyers. They begin looking for providers that are well-qualified to address their issue and start drawing up a list of potential vendors.

Now, if during the Google research phase your content helped these executives understand and diagnose their issue, your firm will make it onto that list. You will have established credibility — and will be perceived as an authority on the very problem they have.

If your firm did not surface during that search, however, you will need to be found some other way to even be considered. Traditionally, this has been where buyers turn to a friend or colleague to ask for referrals. But requests for referrals have decreased by 15% in the past 5 years. In the same time period, the use of online search to identify possible providers has increased by 65%.

Firms with a weak digital brand are at a clear and growing disadvantage when it comes to making that list of possible providers. For the lucky firms that made the list, the next step is surviving the evaluation process.

Evaluating Service Providers. What role does your digital brand play in the final selection process? As it turns out, it’s pretty important.

For starters, 87% of buyers have ruled out a firm before even talking with them. Ouch! So if you are counting on your charm and sales skills to carry the day, you may be in for a big letdown.

For most buyers, their first stop is your website. But that is only the beginning. Across all channels, there is a 72% probability that buyers will evaluate you based on interfacing with your digital brand, compared to a 28% probability of evaluating you based on traditional methods.

Figure 2. Probability buyers will use each channel type to evaluate service providers

Your digital brand impacts your business development process in many ways, and it is a critical factor in driving or limiting growth. A similar case can be made for its impact on talent acquisition.

Examples of Digital Branding

Real-world examples of digital branding aren’t hard to find, if you know what to look for. In this section, we highlight three digital brands at businesses of different sizes: an individual expert and a large professional services firm.

Case Story 1: Seth Godin

At Hinge, we call them Visible Experts®— those individual experts that rise to prominence in their fields. And Seth Godin, the guru of marketing, is a prime example of a Visible Expert who uses digital branding to maximum effect. His blog, which was named one of the top 25 blogs by Time Magazine, is read by more than a million marketers. His Twitter account has 672,000 followers. And he’s delivered multiple TED talks.

Visit his website, blog, Twitter page — or anywhere he dwells in the digital landscape — and his brand is instantly recognizable. From his bald pate and distinctive glasses to the egg-shaped headshot that has become his personal signature to the yellow and orange colors that appear on all of his online platforms, there is no mistaking whom you are dealing with. But his brand is more than visual. Seth’s “voice” — his entertaining, approachable style of writing — is as much a part of who Seth is as his face or his color palette.

Figure 4. Seth Godin’s blog

Case Story 2: S&ME

S&ME is an ENR Top-100 engineering firm with over 1,100 employees and 36 offices across the US. As part of a comprehensive rebrand, our firm tackled key aspects of their digital brand, including their website, social media platforms and brand voice. Bringing unity and consistency to S&ME’s brand was a tremendous challenge for such a far-flung enterprise. We developed a new website and matching social media branding. And as part of a company-wide brand rollout, we developed a brand book and video to explain their new positioning, brand personality, voice and other features of their new identity.

You can view the full case story here: S&ME Rebranding

Figure 6. S&ME’s new website is the most widely visible component of the firm’s digital brand

Figure 8. We documented key characteristics of the firm’s brand — online and offline — in a brand book

Developing Your Digital BrandingStrategy

Your digital brand and your offline (or traditional) brand are not two different things. Rather, they are components of a unified whole — at least they should be. They are simply two different ways to communicate your reputation and tell your story.

That means the process you would use to brand your firm applies to both components. But it’s not quite that simple. Many firms have neglected or under-resourced their digital branding initiatives. This puts them in a position of having to synchronize their digital strategy with their offline branding and accelerate digital brand building.

Here’s how to get your digital brand strategy up to today’s standards.

1. Start with your business goals.

Digital branding should not be done in a vacuum. You need to consider your overall strategy: What business goals are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to attract new clients? Reposition your firm in a competitive marketplace? Attract top talent?

Knowing your specific business goals will help you set priorities and make the best use of your limited resources. Once you have your end objectives in mind, you can determine which metrics to watch so you have the intel to make course corrections along the way.

For example, if your top goal is to drive new business, you’ll want to monitor the number of new leads you receive and how many proposals you win. If talent acquisition is your goal, you will want to track how many qualified candidates you get.

2. Research your target audiences.

Skipping this step is one of the easiest ways to get your strategy wrong. Why is it so important? As we discussed above, buyer behavior is evolving rapidly. A lot of firms have an outdated view of digital branding and have little idea how their clients and referral sources behave in the online world.

You need a good grasp of what issues and topics your target audience is interested in, as well as which digital platforms they use in their business. Potential buyers will visit your website and use online search, but what else? As you increase your understanding of your clients’ top issues (to inform the content you produce) and usage patterns (to inform where you reach out to your audience), your digital brand will become more relevant and powerful.

3. Synchronize differentiators and brand positioning.

Differentiators and market positioning are central to a strong brand. At this step, you are trying to ensure that both your digital and traditional brand are in synch. It may seem obvious that they should be aligned, yet at many firms they have drifted apart, sometimes to an alarming degree.

How does this happen? Sometimes, firms ignore key aspects of their digital brand, such as their website or social media. Other times, an individual takes one aspect of the brand in a direction that is at odds with the rest of the brand. Are you serious or fun-loving? What will it actually be like to work with you? Mixed messages are destined to confuse.

4. Build a consistent brand identity.

Is your brand visually consistent? Is logo usage the same in the digital and non-digital worlds? Do you look like the same firm when someone visits you online as when they visit your office?

Achieving and sustaining a consistent brand identity is not easy. The natural pattern is to devolve into mismatched chaos. Don’t let that be your fate. One practical tool is to create brand usage guidelines. They should cover not only the visual elements of your brand, such as logo usage and colors, but describe your brand’s tone and style, as well.

5. Synchronize your content strategy.

Most firms understand that it’s important to keep their visual brand consistent. But when it comes to delivering a consistent content strategy, well that’s more elusive. What issues will you will write or speak about? What tone and approach will you take? These are the sorts of questions you need to answer up front.

It’s one thing to claim that you have certain types of expertise in your marketing collateral or web copy. But demonstrating that competence on social media or in your blog is quite another. The goal is consistency. You should strive to be consistent in approach and competency, no matter where a prospect interacts with your brand.

6. Develop your brand-building plan.

This is the exciting part of your digital brand. Our research on the fastest growing professional services firms has shown that digital brand building is exceptionally efficient and scalable. So it is actually easier and less expensive to increase the visibility of your digital brand than it is to build your brand the traditional way.

And in many ways, it makes intuitive sense. Consider networking on social media versus attending a live networking event. Or consider the expense of a webinar versus an in-person seminar. Cost and convenience do matter. If you have done your research in Step 2, you will have a good fix on which digital channels are the best fit for your target audiences.

7. Monitor and adjust implementation.

There is more good news on this front, as well. Monitoring the impact of digital branding is also easier than its traditional counterparts. Many digital tools have built-in tracking analytics. Want to track website visitors? No problem. How about social media engagement? Clearly a lot easier than tracking engagement at a live networking event.

As with any marketing activities, tracking and adjusting will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing. Since digital branding is easier to track and control, it is arguably easier to improve than tradition brand building activities. This has certainly been my personal experience.

A Final Thought

Your digital brand is central to the success of a modern professional services firm. It impacts the entire buyer’s journey and can be instrumental in winning new business and securing top talent. Getting it right can make all the difference in the world.

Additional Resources

• Get strategies, tips, and tools for developing your firm’s brand with Hinge’s Rebranding Guide for Professional Services Firms.
• Turn your firm into a high-visibility, high-growth business. Download our free executive guide, The Visible Firm®, in which we lay out an in-depth roadmap of this research-based program.
• Uncover your firm’s true differentiators and give buyers a reason to pick you out of the crowd in the Differentiation, Positioning & Messaging Course available through Hinge University.

How Hinge Can Help

Hinge specializes in all aspects of the branding and brand building for professional services firms. Hinge’s Branding Program can help your firm stand out from the competition and build a distinctive brand that drives sustained growth.

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Digital Brandingchâ U Thô Ng Phan Co

November 30, 2020

What makes a brand last? Knowing the answer is what separates sustainable success from eventual obscurity. Almost every company devotes significant resources to defining their brand. But few ask the equally important question: how to protect it?

Historically, brands have risen and fallen in prominence slowly. Look at almost any decade from the 1950s on, and the world’s most valuable consumer brands – from Oreo to AT&T – barely changed in ranking. Even as recently as the new millennium, this trend continued. Between 2000 and 2010 just two of Interbrand’s top 10 brands fell off the list. But only half of the brands on the list in 2010 remained as of 2019.

The internet era makes brands less durable in part because consumer habits have digitized, creating new business models that have blindsided many traditional brands. But there is nothing inherently antagonistic to legacy brands about digital lifestyles. Coca-Cola remains one of the world’s most valuable brands – and it was invented in 1892!

Digital Brandingchâ U Thô Ng Phan Price

What, then, is it that makes a brand durable even as business models, technology, and consumer behavior radically change? They key is that durable brands are adaptable brands — even legacy ones, as we’ll see.

So let me share what I have learned from working for the past five years as an entrepreneur and expert on esports. While esports brands certainly aren’t legacy brands, their rapid explosion holds lessons on the art of adaptability for any company.

Esports has skyrocketed this decade to become a $27 billion dollar industry, more popular than the NBA. Pro gamers number among this generation’s highest earning celebrities. And the primary platform for watching esports, Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $1 billion in 2014), outperforms traditional broadcasters like ESPN.

But arguably esports’ greatest success is the popular game Fortnite. In 2019, Fortnite grossed $1.9 billion dollars. NFL quarterbacks perform Fortnite victory dances in the end zone. And Star Wars announced the return of its arch-villain, the Emperor, by broadcasting his interstellar message inside the game.

Fortnite wasn’t always a hit. In fact, the game launched in 2017 as a me-too zombie shooter that struggled in the face of an entrenched competitor: Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). PUBG sold more than five million copies of its innovative “battle royale” format which allowed one hundred players to simultaneously engage in free-for-all gunplay.

To recover, Fortnite rushed out its own version of a battle royale mode in just two months. But, crucially, Fortnite didn’t slavishly imitate PUBG. Its designers noticed that PUBG’s chaotic battles made hiding more effective than fighting, emphasizing patience over skill. So Fortnite allowed players to erect defensive structures anywhere on its map, favoring strategic thinking. As a result, Fortnite deeply rewarded mastery. Spending the time to learn the game’s unique building mechanics alongside traditional shooting skills resulted in consistent victories.

Secondly, Fortnite made itself accessible, releasing as a free-to-play game, compared to PUBG’s $29.99 price. Furthermore, it employed a cartoony all-ages aesthetic, in contrast to PUBG’s gritty military look. And the game quickly made itself playable on any device: from high-end gaming PCs to mobile phones. Fortnite also recognized that not every gamer wants to shoot things in the head, and so launched concerts and creative play modes to appeal to the broadest swathe of consumers.

Third, Fortnite committed to delivering a fast cadence of new content, releasing new character abilities and weapons almost every week. These changes kept the game constantly fresh and top-of-mind.

Lastly, Fortnite ensnared its customers by introducing social features, matchmaking algorithms to pair players of equivalent skill, and a massive catalog of cosmetic items, such as NFL co-branded uniforms. These locked in its player base with network effects and switching costs.

These four strategies catapulted Fortnite to meteoric success. By the end of 2018, Fortnite boasted 200 million registered users, while PUBG’s player population collapsed by 66%.

The MACE Framework

Digital Brandingchâ U Thô Ng Phan 1

These same tactics — what together I call the “MACE framework” — are not one-offs, but generalizable to all brands. Let’s look at them more closely.

Mastery: Give your consumers non-transferrable rewards for using your products and engaging with your content. Ideally, these rewards require public displays of affinity or small (non-monetary) sacrifices to exploit the endowment effect (overvaluing losses) and familiarity effect (overvaluing affinity). For example, Hasbro’s brand Magic, first released in 1993, grew 30% year-on-year in 2019 on the back of innovative products like Secret Lair, which are short-notice, 24-hours exclusives requiring a “digital queue” to purchase.

Accessibility: Make your brand easily available to as many consumers as possible by following three simple rules. First, make your entry-level products as cheap as you can, and ideally free. For many industries, this means leveraging alternative pricing models (such as deferred payments, leases and subscriptions) to minimize upfront costs. Second, distribute your product or service through as many sales channels as possible. And third, design and market your products to appeal to younger and first-time customers. While older or existing buyers are likely higher margin, focusing primarily here limits the growth of your long-term customer base. For example, Marvel’s superhero films have significantly outperformed rival DC’s at the box office, in part because of a strategic decision to focus on PG-13 ratings and light-hearted humor that can appeal to all ages.

Cadence: Constantly create news and content around your brand. First, frequently release new products (or product updates). Second, maximize promotional assets, such as marketing videos, by editing long-form media into micro-content. Third, encourage user generated content wherever possible. And fourth, communicate everything; even failure. Have a product launch that bombed? Start talking about it publicly. You’ll be surprised by the results, as Apple was during its feud with Taylor Swift. By directly admitting exploitative royalties, Apple transformed bad PR into viral social media praise, culminating in Swift herself advertising Apple’s products.

Ensnarement: Make your brand as sticky as possible by building in switching costs and creating network effects. Two generalizable strategies for accomplishing this — systemization and spawning — involve product development: Systemized product lines are best embodied by LEGO. The brand eschews one-off releases (bricks) in favor of selling entire systems (LEGO model kits). Imagine how vulnerable LEGO would be to low cost brick competitors if all it sold was individual pieces! Spawning products include a built-in reason to share. Consider Coca-Cola’s Share-A-Coke promotion. By printing common names on Coke cans, the brand encouraged gifting amongst friends – helping grow sales from 1.7 billion to 1.9 billion servings a day.

To illustrate the generalizability of the MACE model, let’s apply it to a more mundane world: thermostats. At first blush, you’d think home appliances have little to do with Fortnite’s multiplayer shootouts. But in fact their brand strategies are surprisingly similar.

The success of the original smart thermostat, Nest, is a perfect example of how even staid, CPG products can be reinterpreted as MACE-ready brands for the digital age. Here’s how Nest strategy layered in MACE factors over its lifetime:

Mastery: Nest thermostats reward mastery in a direct way: by saving customers money. The thermostats tracks energy savings, rewarding eco-friendly settings by displaying a Nest leaf. This leaf becomes more difficult to achieve over time, encouraging users to continuously interact with the device to further economize on heating and cooling costs.

Accessibility: This was arguably Nest’s biggest point of differentiation at launch. The thermostat are designed for the digital generation: app-integrated, intuitive, and elegantly styled.

Cadence: You might not think of a thermostat having a content cadence. Traditional thermostats are programmed once; then likely never again. But Nest updates its users, usually via its app. It automatically adjusts routines, such as lowering temperatures at bedtime. It displays time to reach desired temperature. It tracks activity patterns based on the weather. And much more. Smart thermostats don’t need to generate content, but Nest does.

Ensnarement: Finally, Nest locks in its users with switching costs and network effects. As part of a broader Google smart home system of cameras, doorbells, alarms and locks, out-of-ecosystem purchases are painfully isolated. Even more cleverly, Nest leverages network effects by aggregating user behavioral data to create better algorithms for temperature adjustment.

MACE is a blueprint for any brand — even traditional ones — to evolve for long-term relevancy. It is true that brands without inherent, digital connectivity require clever thinking to leverage this framework. But companies that cannot effectively engage with consumers on digital platforms are destined to be dinosaurs. Even the most traditional products, like thermostats can, and must, effectively do this. Manage with MACE in mind, and ensure your brand endures in our increasingly digitized world.