Companies in the internet industry span a broad range of services related to online activities and computer use. They face stiff competition in an arena where there are millions of websites to compete with – and billions of users who might be potential customers. The challenge is to differentiate themselves from other companies and hone in on a target audience for marketing purposes.
One of the biggest issues for internet companies is that, in many cases, they are competing for a global audience. It’s neither practical nor cost-effective to market to everybody, so the trick is to narrowly target the people most likely to buy what you’re selling.
Logo Design for Internet Companies
One of the most important elements of branding is choosing the right logo for your company. Your logo can and should represent you everywhere you go online, including on your website and social media pages.
Challenges of Internet Logo Design
Designing logos for internet companies is particularly challenging because in most cases, a company’s logo – which often incorporates its name – is the first exposure a potential customer will have to the company itself. For that reason, internet companies must have memorable logos that speak directly to their target audience.
As is the case in any industry, there are logo conventions to consider. There are certain shapes and ideas that repeat themselves in internet logos.
For example, many internet companies have names that are composites of two or more words. Examples include WordPress and HootSuite. Such companies sometimes use logotypes – fonts that double as logos.
Other shapes that appear repeatedly include badges, clouds, buttons, and speech bubbles. You may decide to use one of these, but if you do, it’s important to make sure that your logo stands out from others in your niche.
Once you have selected a logo to represent your company, you can and should use It consistently online. Using your logo as an avatar is a good way to build brand recognition.
Logo Analysis
It can be helpful to look at one company logo in depth to understand what matters when it comes to designing a logo for an internet company. Here is a logo we designed as an illustration:
What you can see in this logo is the use of a unique font to illustrate the company’s name. It incorporates a circle, a very popular shape for internet companies because it can be used to symbolize the worldwide web, with a rectangle, which represents security and solidity.
The colors chosen are notable too. Blue is a color that represents trustworthiness and conservatism, traits that are important for a company that wants clients to trust them with their data.
Orange presents a contrast. It’s a strong color, one that is sometimes used to represent creativity and forward-thinking. The combination of blue and orange makes sense for a file storage company because it sends a message of capability combined with innovation.
Branding in the Internet Industry
Branding a company in the internet industry requires finding ways to differentiate your company from the thousands of other competing for your target audience’s attention.
Finding Your Target Audience in a Global Market
The first job of any internet company trying to brand itself in today’s marketplace is to hone in on a target audience. The truth is that company that sells an internet-based product or service might, in theory, be able to target almost anybody on the planet as a potential customer.
Having a large potential audience might seem like a good thing, but in the world of marketing it can actually be the reverse. It’s neither practical nor possible to target everybody at once, and so you have to narrow your choices and find a way to reach the people who are most likely to want your products or services.
Even if geography isn’t a factor, you can use your things like gender, age, income level, occupation, and interests to help carve out a manageable audience. You may want to create a customer avatar to help you find-tune your approach.
Evaluating Your Competition
The next step is to evaluate your competition. Here again, the challenge may be a global one. Which companies are your biggest competition, and why?
Researching your audience may also help you to find your competitors. Once you do, you should look at how they define their products and their audience, how they market themselves, and what they do (and don’t do.)
The information you gather can now be used to make sure that you stand out from your competitors no matter where they are.
How to Make Your Brand Memorable
Once you know who your audience is and who your competitors are, you can find ways to make your brand memorable. Here are some questions to ask.
What is my product or service, and how does it differ from what other companies have to offer?
What specific benefits can I offer my customers that my competitors can’t?
Can I do something better, more quickly, or less expensively than my competitors?
The answers to these questions should help you carve out a space for yourself that’s unique and separate from your competitors.
Marketing Ideas for Internet Companies
While establishing a strong brand is important, it will only work if you also take the time to work out and implement a marketing strategy. How will your audience find you?
Beyond SEO
It isn’t uncommon for tech and internet companies to focus on SEO as a way of finding their audience. Search Engine Optimization can improve your company’s rank on Google and other search engines and make it easier for potential customers to find you.
SEO still has its place, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it’s not enough. More than ten years ago, Bill Gates famously said, “Content is king.” Those words, seen in retrospect, were truly prophetic.
Your marketing strategy must combine SEO with other tactics if you hope to reach your audience through all of the noise and distractions of the internet.
Mobile Marketing
One way to get through to your followers is to target them on their mobile devices. As of 2015, more internet searches were conducted on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets than on desktop computers, and the global mobile audience is bigger than the computer audience.
How can you use mobile marketing for internet customers? For starters, you should be optimizing all of your online content, including your website and email campaigns, for mobile users.
Next, consider collecting mobile numbers from your customers if you plan to use SMS marketing as a way of reaching out. Even for global companies, SMS marketing can be affordable – and text messages have an open rate of 90%, making it a cost-effective way to get through to your customers.
Finally, if your product is software, you should strongly consider developing an app or mobile option so that people can use it from their mobile devices.
Social Media Content Marketing
No company can afford to ignore social media as a way of connecting with potential customers, and internet companies are no exception. Social media use has continued to rise steadily. Facebook alone has 1.7 billion active monthly users.
The chances are very good that the majority of your customers use social media at least some of the time.
Here are some suggestions to help you market your company on social media.
1. Create videos to show people how your product works. Video marketing is still underutilized on sites like Facebook, and live video is available now. A live product demo, whiteboard video, or Q & A can be a good way to connect with your audience.
2. Remember that visual content is more popular than any other kind of online content. Even if your product doesn’t lend itself to photography, you can consider screenshots, memes, and infographics to entertain and engage potential customers.
3. Boost your social media engagement by including a clear call to action asking your followers to like your post, share it, or comment in it. You can encourage comments by posting a question or taking a controversial (but supportable) stance on an issue that’s relevant to your niche.
4. Give your content time to catch on before deciding what to boost. Boosting a post on Facebook is a great way to expand your reach, but you’ll have a better chance of success if you use your budget to boost posts that have proven themselves first.
Social media marketing should aim to entertain and inform your audience first and sell to them second. It’s a good rule of thumb to post four items that are purely providing value to your audience for each one that makes a direct sales pitch.
Conclusion
Marketing internet companies can be a real challenge because the competition is fierce and global. However, if you take the time to identify your target audience and differentiate yourself from the competition, you can stand out even when you’re competing against hundreds of other internet companies.