As you ramp up your marketing plans for 2015, follow these important brand protection strategies to safeguard brand health and marketing performance in digital channels.
- Keep Brand Impersonators and Counterfeiters from Intercepting Your Web Traffic
Online brand impersonators and counterfeiters create brand confusion by interfering with your digital promotions, intercepting your Web traffic and threatening e-commerce revenues. Be proactive and keep fraudsters from coming between you and your customers. By addressing their deceptive tactics, marketers can reclaim Web traffic and revenues, and improve ROI on digital marketing initiatives.
- Make Sure Your Partners are Compliant with Your Brand Guidelines
Partners are key extensions of your brand, driving online traffic and revenue. To maintain a consistent brand experience across digital channels, it’s critical to ensure that affiliates, resellers, franchisees and even employees, understand and comply with your brand guidelines.
Putting together a clear compliance policy — and monitoring digital channels to ensure all internal and external partners align with these guidelines — will help you avoid customer confusion, reclaim your rightful Web traffic and minimize unnecessary commissions.
- Optimize Your Domain Portfolio. Maximize Your Web Traffic.
Now is a good time to reach out to your corporate domain administrator and make sure your company’s domains are serving their purpose. To maximize web traffic, you’ll want to ensure that every domain your company owns points to appropriate content. When consumers type in one of your domain names, where do you want that potential customer to go? Should they be directed to your primary corporate site, your e-commerce site, a promotional microsite? Consider matching foreign-language domain names (IDNs) to language-specific websites, or domain names that contain key brands to dedicated content.
Take advantage of a quick win: uncover quality web traffic and improve your digital marketing performance too.
- Protect Brand Reputation Across ALL Digital Channels – Social and Mobile
Digital channels, including social media and mobile apps, are becoming an increasingly important part of people’s personal and business lives. Don’t overlook the threats of brand impersonation, brand fraud and counterfeit goods in these rapidly evolving digital channels. With marketing ROI at risk, marketing executives must make social and mobile essential components of their brand protection strategy.
- Develop a Product Launch Checklist that Protects Your Brand
As you put together your product launch checklist, be sure to avoid the common pitfalls that can have a negative impact on your brand. Work with legal and other internal teams in advance to secure all the right domains – in the right countries – that are essential to effectively promoting your new product or service.
Be sure to keep those domains under wraps until you launch, so you don’t tip your hand to competitors. Also, you’ll want to make sure your partners don’t start their digital promotions ahead of schedule. Monitor for errant partner promotions in key digital channels to ensure a coordinated, on-time launch.
