Decoding the relationship between digital marketing and branding for agencies

Digital marketing and branding are distinct but interconnected components of any contemporary business’s strategic framework for getting its product or service into the world. Branding covers a business’s identity: how it visually and textually represents itself, its values, and its personality. On the other hand, digital marketing encompasses all the strategies and tools used to enhance that business’s visibility, engagement, and ultimately, sales. This includes things like social media campaigns, advertising, search engine optimization (SEO) activities, and reputation management.

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Both branding and digital marketing are indispensable to success in today’s noisy digital business landscape, but understanding the distinct role of each—and how they work synergistically—can help you optimize both for your clients. That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this blog.

How are digital marketing and branding related?

Digital marketing and branding are related in that they’re both ultimately used for the same end, to create a positive impression of a business to many potential customers to convert as many business leads as possible to paying clients.

One promotes the other

digital marketing is a tool used to promote and enhance a brand’s image, which is established through branding practices. Another way to think of the relationship between digital marketing and branding is to consider them as a message and a megaphone. The brand is the message, and the digital marketing strategy is the megaphone that amplifies that message to its target audience.

Awareness

Once a brand is established, digital marketing strategies can be employed to build brand awareness. In turn, when audiences have strong awareness and recognition of a brand, they’re more likely to feel loyalty toward it. Recognition also bolsters recall: if customers are ready to buy a product or service, they’re more likely to go with the brand they can remember that provides what they’re looking for.

For example, imagine a home cook notices their non-stick pans are getting scratched up and begins thinking about how cast iron might be more convenient. They might start deep diving into different cast iron pan brands, but if they’ve seen lots of positive messaging about an attractive cookware brand that makes this very product, they’re more likely to buy from them because they already have the message—thanks to effective branding and digital marketing—that the brand’s products are a reliable choice.

How are digital marketing and branding different?

Understanding the differences between digital marketing and branding can help your digital agency tease out the most important facets of each, so you can deliver better, more effective services to your clients.

Anatomy of a powerful brand

Let’s return to our analogy of the message and the megaphone for a moment. A brand is, in essence, a well-crafted message. The basic components of this message are:

• Brand personality and tone: A brand might be serious, sultry, playful, technical, nerdy, joyful, or a wide range of other adjectives. Establishing the brand’s personality helps inform other practical aspects of how the brand is deployed.
• Brand storytelling: A strong story about how the brand came to be or which values inform it helps to round it out and make it feel more convincing and robust to audiences, building a strong emotional connection.
• Visual identity: The visual language used by the brand, including its logo, colour palette, design elements, photography guidelines, and font pairings all help to bolster its identity. These should reflect the brand’s personality.
• Brand voice: The messaging and copy put out by the business should be aligned with the brand. For example, a playful kids' clothing brand will have a different voice than a business consultancy.
• Consistency: Using the above elements consistently throughout all touchpoints helps to fortify the brand in the public eye. The more the same elements are encountered by audiences, the stronger brand recognition and recall will become.

Creating an effective brand requires preliminary research to understand the target audience’s preferences and the competitive landscape, as well as creative muscle: making memorable brands is part science, part art. If you’re thinking of starting up an agency and have limited experience in this area, consider creating some brands as personal projects to include in your portfolio.

Anatomy of an effective digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing, on the other hand, is all about the tactics and channels used to reach target audiences, engage with them, and compel them to become paying customers. The branding process should take place first so that digital marketing efforts are reflections of the brand.

While there is also creativity involved in putting together effective digital marketing campaigns, they tend to be more technical and data-driven. Agency skills in this department include:

• Choosing the best marketing platforms: Agency owners need to know which digital marketing platforms are ideal for a client’s specific needs. This requires an understanding of the target audience and where they likely spend most of their time online.
• Establishing appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs): Marketers need to know what to measure when running digital marketing campaigns. KPIs can include website traffic, followers, sales, cost per acquisition, newsletter signups, and more.
• Budget allocation: Clients have limited budgets, and part of the skill of digital marketing is knowing how to deploy funds for the best results.
• Tracking analytics data: Digital marketing involves constant monitoring of analytics to identify if a strategy is successful. It also requires effective decision-making to pull the plug on ineffective campaigns before more money is wasted.
• Iterating for better results: While consistency is beneficial in branding, the reverse is true in digital marketing. Constantly iterating in response to signals in the data helps marketers deliver better results. Marketers need to follow the data rather than their emotions when it comes to digital campaigns.

How do digital marketing and branding work together?

The relationship between branding and digital marketing is synergistic. One amplifies the other: a strong, expertly crafted brand leads to more successful digital marketing campaigns, while digital marketing efforts can reinforce a brand’s message and values, spreading it to a wider audience. Let’s check out some ways digital marketing channels can be used to strengthen brand presence.

Unified cross-platform messaging

When a user sees a brand represented consistently on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google Ads, and in email campaigns, the overall message of the brand becomes easy to identify. From the visuals, like the brand colors and post design, to the language used in the accompanying copy, the personality of the brand feels more real and convincing when deployed consistently through effective digital marketing.

Social media engagement

Social media is an important pillar of digital marketing, and it provides an important avenue for strengthening a brand’s engagement with its audience. In turn, this fosters greater loyalty and trust. Marketers can use social media to communicate with audiences in the brand voice, demonstrate transparency, and foster authentic relationships through two-way communication rather than just one-way advertising messaging.

Content marketing for deeper brand understanding

Content marketing, such as blogs and videos, can be used to go beyond the bite-sized messaging enabled by social media and PPC ads. This more in-depth type of digital marketing can help make audiences feel more invested in a brand, by understanding things like its founder’s story or its behind-the-scenes process. Short-form content might capture a prospect’s attention, but content marketing can move them along the customer journey. Here’s more on how to ace brand storytelling from Vendasta:

SEO

SEO works to amplify brands to audiences who are already most likely to be interested through organic search. While other digital marketing strategies like advertising can deliver quicker results, SEO enables businesses to optimize their brand websites for their ideal customer, bringing more business organically.

How to blend digital marketing and branding for your clients

Whether you’re starting a digital marketing agency or switching up your offerings at your existing agency, offering both branding and digital marketing services can help differentiate your agency and enable you to deliver better results to your clients. By handling both sides of the equation, you can better align digital marketing tactics with brand identity and goals. If you’re a niche agency specializing in a single industry, your expertise in a particular area can help you deliver scroll-stopping brands and campaigns that get those brands in front of the right audience. For example, consider Dove’s well-known 2019 Project #ShowUs campaign. Dove leaned into its brand message of inclusivity and self-acceptance with a viral digital marketing campaign inviting users to showcase women and non-binary individuals showcasing their beauty on their own terms using the #ShowUs hashtag. The role of branding in digital marketing is clear here, with Dove’s brand ethos directly informing the design of the campaign.

Dove

Conclusion

Small and medium-sized businesses today don’t have it easy: they lack the in-house resources their larger counterparts have, but they still must compete in the same attention economy as everyone else. Agencies offering branding and digital marketing can help them cut through the noise by delivering a strong brand message through effective digital channels to target audiences.

These two components—digital marketing and branding—are essential pillars of business success. Agencies that master the art of deploying branding and marketing strategically and synergistically will stand out. Leveraging the power of digital marketing to enhance brand visibility and bolster online reputation enables marketers to create a meaningful impact in a competitive digital world, and find more clients in the process.