This week, Active Community wants to bring your attention to the importance of building your local brand. A crucial element of this is deciding what you want your message to be. Because there are so many ways to communicate, it’s necessary to develop a strategy for how you’re going to attack this.

In order to successfully build your brand, there are a few things you need to consider. First of all, you need to create an online presence. In today’s competitive market, what you say online is just as important – if not more – than what you say offline. In order to better position ourselves on the web, we need to take a closer look at our offline networks. This is a great resource to tap into, but is often times overlooked. Reach out to your local community groups, trade groups,etc. and bring these people online with you. It’s not just important to build a global online community -  it’s important that you’re communicating with the the right people.

To do this, we need to lay the foundation. How do you position your brand in order to bring awareness to your company? With so many tools at our disposal, we don’t lack the resources needed to get the job done. Through the local, regional and international groups we belong to, through social sites, our blog, etc. we can spread our message. Also keep in mind what syndication outlets you can utilize not only for your properties, but for your news content as well.

In this week’s video presentation, we take a closer look at how to incorporate all this into building our local brand while increasing the amount of quality traffic to your site. You may not have “Googled” yourself lately, but you can rest assured your customers have.

Related blogs:

Active Community: Key Components to a SEO Strategy

Active Community: Understanding the Search Demand Curve

Active Community: Understanding Duplicate Content

By John Sable