The Role of Digital Behavior

The ways people experience a brand’s digital behavior have deepened and become more complex as the digital landscape expands. As a result, there are seemingly infinite brand touch points that can strengthen a brand.

On the flip side, businesses have to be careful to behave in a way that doesn’t fragment or dilute their brand, but instead helps to build a more powerful, impactful, and engaging experience that rings true across all platforms – digital and non-digital alike.

Behaving in Line with Your Brand

Because the digital landscape is shifting at the speed of light, it’s especially easy for brands to fall behind in terms of digital behavior. New digital platforms are constantly appearing, and it’s a challenge to know what platforms your brand should live on and how it should behave.

To stay relevant, stand out, compete, and survive in today’s world, brands need to be able to thrive digitally. It’s a requirement.

The Best Digital Behavior is Strategically Informed

Your brand strategy should deliver assets that can help guide and strengthen your brand’s digital behavior. Here’s what to consider:

1. Look and feel

A recognizable and emotionally impactful look and feel that resonates across all platforms helps build awareness, recognition, and eventually, heightened loyalty and engagement.  Make sure your strategy has the guidelines it needs to bring your visual identity to life across platforms. This means that the look and feel of your brand has to be both clear and distinct, yet dynamic and flexible.

Brands that aren’t designed for the future simply cannot compete in an evolving digital landscape. When your brand behavior lives under an unmistakable and future-forward look and feel, people make connections easier, your brand gains traction across touch points, and it can adapt to shifts while maintaining brand equity.

2. Emotional impact

The emotional impact of your brand is one of its strongest, most reliable assets. The digital landscape and its platforms will always be changing and shifting, but emotions will always ring true. Brands should emote their core emotions on every digital platform. Digital behavior has to have emotional impact for it to do its job for your brand.

3. Trust infrastructure

With the complexity of the digital landscape comes the challenge of overcoming digital distrust. It’s easy to lose your brand’s humanity online. It’s also easy for people to feel like their privacy has been violated or that marketers aren’t valuing their time. A digital strategy should add to a brand’s meaning, not take away from it. And building trust is key. Fostering digital engagement, showing empathy, and working with transparency and authenticity are all critical to unlocking the full power of trust.

4. An authentic brand promise

Bring your brand promise to life through digital behavior that breathes that promise across every platform. And remember your promise when deciding if platforms are in line with your brand. It’s a good test to see if the promise of the platform and the promise of your brand are aligned. Digital platforms, when used correctly, can help reinstate your promise through every interaction and create deeper meaning in the hearts and minds of your key audiences.   

5. Cross-channel planning

Since forward-thinking brands always have their eye on what’s next in digital, it’s necessary to create a strategic plan for how to use each of your channels to reach customers and how to behave cohesively on those channels. Budget accordingly and always allocate resources for unexpected channels to emerge. Create a strategic plan that fosters internal alignment and clarity, yet leaves room for your brand behavior to develop and compete if the situation shifts.

6. Brand interaction

A brand is not a two-dimensional thing, it is a living, breathing, engaging, and interacting entity. Make sure you have a strategy for how your brand interacts digitally. How does it speak? Who does it engage with? How does it interact with these people? How does it interact with other brands? What kinds of interactions does it foster? Successful digital brand behavior requires that your brand can dynamically interact and integrate into your audiences’ lives seamlessly.

7. Competitive analysis

By identifying your competitors and seeing how you line up, your business can map where your brand needs to go. And digital brand behavior can help you get there. See how other competitive brands are behaving and see how you can compete, stand out, and stay ahead of the digital curve.

8. Constant brand reassessments

Staying relevant hinges on keeping your digital behavior strategy up to date. Learn from customer behavior. Frequently reassess your brand and whether it’s behaving in a way that moves your business forward, making changes as necessary.  This means moving fast and being smart about every small and big decision.

In today’s digital world, successful brand behavior hinges on brands being able to adapt and adjust quickly while staying true to what makes them different and meaningful. This rings true with digital behavior. Use the strategic tools in your brand’s toolbox to bring your brand to its full potential. Brand behavior is what brings strategy to life. And brands need to be able to live digitally in order to survive, grow, compete, and position themselves for the future. Approach your digital behavior strategically and ready your brand for success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.