Four Key Points and Six Diagnostic Indicators of Building an Online Brand

GUANGZHOU, China, Oct. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- When running an online brand you need to do more than just take appealing photos of products and make your store as attractive as possible. That's a skin-deep approach and you can't ask for higher prices that way. To build a profitable online brand, you should take the following four key points and six diagnostic indicators of online brands into consideration and execute them well. Let's start with the four key points:

Be Creative

The loyalty of online shoppers is considerably low. Without gripping originality, you won't be able to catch the eyes of customers within one second, and you will waste traffic and lose conversion rates.

It takes very deep knowledge to create breathtaking products with creative photos and descriptions. Beautiful photos are nothing but one of the most basic requirements. What is more important is that photos have soul and creativeness. Remember, the core of creativeness is soul rather than artificial things. Yet, creativeness is not as simple as an idea. It is, instead, a whole package of rationality and sensibility, which requires for a team work to pull off. And the team is like the dual core CPU of an e-commerce enterprise. You've got to make the team work together and work creatively as only in this way can your enterprise incubate possibilities of higher pricing at the very beginning.

Act Fast

Speed is the lifeblood of e-commerce, and also an important element of online brands. When a tradition brand screws up online, it is always because it fails to act fast. An online store needs to update products every day just like a blog needs regular updates. Without new bragging points, an online store is unsustainable.

To act fast, you need a passionate and dynamic team with a flat organizational structure. This team must be able to collect complete information, respond quickly, and handle emergencies quickly.

Be Flexible

Speed means flexibility. To act fast, an online brand can not just rely on product drives. It should go the upstream of product production and reform production technique and process so as to build the flexible model of "low-volume + multi-batch". Take SooBest for example, with years of brand management, it has established a stable yet fast supply chain with upstream suppliers, and thus it has been able to provide the latest products in its flagship categoies - charm jewelry, men clothing, women clothing and digital watches.

Be Intelligentized

Intelligentization relies on data and technical systems. Networks can track and record every behavior of online shoppers, which provides online brands a powerful weapon with which traditional brands can not compete. The weapon is precision marketing and accurate CRM services.

Without data analysis online brands won't survive. Data analysis can position the market and customers more precisely, and extract the core of customer needs for product departments to source flexibly. Then, the creative stage starts, where, just like TV shopping, the team creates scripts, plans images and writes copy. The fruit of the team work will be submitted to a marketing team for finishing touches. In the end, precise ads will be run along with real-time monitoring.

And here comes the six diagnostic indicators of online brands.

Profit Margins of Commodities

If an online brand can not get a 50%-100% gross margin, it could hardly be called a online brand. To some extent, a brand is tied to higher prices. Since a lot of time has been invested in designing, quality improvement and creative planning, a higher profit margin must be reached, otherwise you are doing charity rather than a brand.

Internal Structure of Company

If the staff of an online brand is simply consisted of customer service, warehousing personnel, buyers, sellers plus several mediocre designers, the so-called online brand is purely a cover. An online brand must have a senior marketing team and the requisite talents to manage it. Otherwise, the branding is water without a source.

Integration Ability of Upstream

If you are not able to integrate upstream, you will likely end up in a passive position where products drive you, which means you sell what others give you. Only when you reversely influence upstream and control upstream factories and production, can you build a flexible, fast production and you thus can respond to the changes of front-end needs quickly. If you can not make that, your online brand will lose its roots.

Discourse Power of Pricing

A real online brand always has its own attitudes. Your brand is not ready to take off until you get pricing discourse power and deterrent power.

Stability of Transaction Volume

A healthy online brand must have a transaction volume that is good and stable rather than ever-changing.

Customer Loyalty

A brand is healthy if 50% of its transaction volume is generated by old customers. And it is close to perfect if customers' words of mouth further brings it 20% sales. A real brand is of charismatic power. It can make customers its brand messengers who make free advertisement for it. In other words, with unique brand idea and product traits, a real brand is able to foster a good customer relationship that never feels like a cheap one-night stand. - It lasts long，instead.

The above are test stones of online brands. Not complete though, they open the start for more thoughts of building online brands.

SOURCE Soobest.com