Digital Branding vs Digital Marketing: Why Both Matter

What’s the difference between digital branding vs digital marketing and do I need them? Absolutely. Both are integral to your business's success.
digital branding vs digital marketing

Digital branding vs digital marketing are often confused for one another but the cold, hard truth is that they are different and yes, you need both to progress your business from “getting by” to the stage of profitability and beyond. 

What is Digital Branding?

Digital branding is a complex ideology that could be described as a culmination of your business’s values, credibility, and principles announced and continually posted using digital means like a company website, blog articles, podcast episodes, and social media channels. Your brand aims to resonate with leads and create an emotional connection between the company and its potential (and current) clientele. 

What is Digital Marketing? 

Massively different from the definition of digital branding, digital marketing is the act of bringing brand, company, and product or service awareness to customers through electronic devices including smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktop computers. It urges interaction between the company and its patrons while allowing potential customers to learn more about the organization’s offerings from anywhere in the world. 

Digital Branding vs Digital Marketing – Do You Need Both? 

While both terms are used in the marketing realm, one can exist without the other, but in order to be successful, they shouldn’t. An organization needs a strong persona (digital branding) to connect with their target market but they can’t identify with anyone if that ideal client doesn’t know they exist (digital marketing). 

Read More: Brand Identity Marketing: Building Brand Identity

Digital Marketing 

Digital marketing works to increase brand awareness, sell products and services, and promote the ideals of the company to foster an emotive bond with potential and present clients – thus developing a sense of brand loyalty over time. This loyalty often ensures an increase in a company’s bottom line and potential firm expansion.  

With a vast number of digital marketing agencies in the industry today, many can evolve your current online strategy and optimize a collection of interlocking methods that produce exceptional results. 

Hiring Tip: Review These 7 Metrics Before Hiring a Digital Marketing Company

Digital marketing strategies vary and depend on the industry, objectives, and preferences of each specific business. It can even be conducted differently between companies within the same niche. Common digital marketing tactics include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising methods, integrating Search Engine Optimization (SEO) within digital content, and social media marketing approaches to meet many clients where they spend time.  

Digital Branding 

Digital branding, on the other hand, has very different procedures under the same “company-forward” umbrella of end goals. It’s almost like digital marketing and digital branding are two paths that lead to the same location – and are most effective when traveled together. They both work to build that coveted connection with the ideal client persona and work to build a reputation that any organization can be proud of. 

Digital Branding finds your company’s voice online and promotes its core values, what it stands for, how it works to help clients, and encompasses messaging and visual elements to relay that information to the world. It demonstrates what you want to say, how you want to say it, and in what ways. 

Some business owners attempt to create a brand on their own but many entrust a creative branding agency to develop their brand properly from the start. Those agencies with massive amounts of experience creating brands that produce profitable results are well-versed in what is required from the branding design process. 

Traditionally, digital branding strategies develop elements including a logo, brand messaging, fonts, color palettes, and website and mobile designs that stimulate their viewers to feel something and draw them closer to the company.  

The Digital Branding Strategy Fuels the Digital Marketing Outcome

Digital branding gives your company an identity that pulls the desire for a professional relationship with clientele through visual and copy-centered messaging while digital marketing strategizes a way to get it in front of the faces of potential and existing clients on online platforms. An organization’s strong branding feeds digital marketing tactics and boosts the performance of its strategies. 

While digital branding works to identify the target market and create a connection with them through visual graphics and on-point messaging. Digital marketing increases company recognition, improves lead generation, creates a sense of credibility in the industry, and boosts return on investment (ROI). 

Both of these strategies, digital branding vs digital marketing, are integral to online success and let’s be honest, statistics show that a whopping 92% of adult-aged global internet users are using search engines with 59% of them searching up to three times per day. When your company is positioned toward the top of those search results, and the lead clicks to learn more – you have the combo of digital branding and digital marketing to thank. 

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