A marketer’s job is to capture the value of any individual brand. They first identify what assets a brand has already acquired and then determine how much value they hold. The more value a brand’s online presence has, the higher the price tag that can be placed on it (for gaining profit from consumers using marketing strategies, that is.)
This process can be very eye-opening for some business owners who don’t realize how much potential value there is to be gained for their brand. Any channel, listing, blog post, advertisement, and many other digital assets are counted as online capital, for they offer a measurable return on your investment.
Every year, our ability to complete more tasks, communicate in more dynamic ways, and gain more resources online increases substantially. People are becoming more and more able to turn to the internet to achieve their goals, drastically decreasing the time it takes them to get things done and increasing their quality of life. This reality is causing a shift in value for many commercial businesses.
The law of thermodynamics helps to elaborate on this topic by stating the principle that energy can neither “be created nor destroyed.” So goes the same principle for the value of your brand’s online presence. There are millions of people searching the internet each day with the intention of purchasing a product or service like yours. This places a lot of value on the capital your brand secures online, for the greater your presence becomes, the higher your chances of being found!
It is important to also understand that it takes experience to identify where this value exists and what investments will make the most difference. As consumer expectations evolve, so does the impact of the assets that businesses use to communicate and interact with them. The team at your Online Capital Group has the ability to follow where the value is shifting to and work to capture it for the benefit of your brand’s reputation.
Trends can also cause a shift in value, like when a particular product has suddenly become popular or when a certain service was discovered to cause a concerning outcome. This kind of monitoring takes work- the kind of work our team of professionals has gained both the experience and equipment to do effectively for you. The digital landscape of online capital is evolving every day and it is easy for your brand to fall far behind.
That being said, it can help to look at an example of the previous principle at work in a parallel business model that has diminished over the years (especially while online assets have been rapidly growing to new heights!). This model utilizes more traditional capital, or physical real estate assets. Not long ago, material assets carried most of the weight of a brand’s reputation. Aside from television or radio commercial advertisements, it heavily relied on a brick and mortar presentation. But how has a major shift in securing online capital affected this prestige today?
For starters, there is no denying that brick and mortar locations have unmistakable proof of value. When a customer drives by, they have an immediate visual experience of that business’ brand awareness, from the lit-up signs to the window graphics and to everything in between. But what about the customer that lives too far away to drive by your location, say, in another state? The value of that particular brick and mortar presence suddenly becomes much less important to that audience.
They would receive much more benefit from being able to interact with that brand on their smartphone and shop their website to avoid driving hours away to purchase their product. Not to mention there are many more possibilities for engaging with brands online than just shopping!
Consumers aren’t the only ones to notice this, as brick and mortar businesses are also taking heed to the shift in the value of their physical locations. A company well known for its Belgian chocolates, Godiva, closed 117 of its locations across North America last year with plans to grow its online presence. As the opportunities for securing digital assets steadily continue to grow, it is only natural that a brand would seek to adapt to a much more dynamic space to increase their reach to their customers.
Despite this reality, there are too many businesses out there today that have not claimed the value they could otherwise be claiming online. Every social media page, listing directory, customer engagement video, and the like is one more place on the internet a consumer can go to engage with your brand and ultimately be exposed to the benefits of purchasing your product or service.
Now, some of you who are reading might be questioning the integrity of the investments you have made into your business! As a business owner, you know you have to invest in making a profitable return. It is the only reason there are large signs, full-page ads in the directory books, newspaper ads, radio and TV spots, or billboards!
Rest assured, when your assets are managed properly, the value will remain intact. Consider this:
If you were an entrepreneur and were setting out to develop a bakery in your local community, you would most likely prefer to find a building that was previously utilized and equipped for food services, if not already having been a bakery itself.
Essentially, a building like that has more value to your business than a much less developed building (this value is no doubt reflected in the price tag the realtor has put on the property!).
Your brand shares a lot of the same characteristics. The name, design, personality, voice, and development of your brand all contribute to the amount of value it carries.
This value is so tangible that people will pay to purchase the capital that you have obtained, just like they would with a more traditional asset like a building! A high price tag can be placed on a foundation of online capital that has been cultivated enough. It is possible to bundle together an expensive logo design, website design, and archive of social media content designs for a pretty penny.
This is because your brand has earned credibility with your audience through these means and is capable of providing a positive return on the investments that were made. Every one of those designed materials or pieces of content acts as yet another asset for the brand. Quite simply, these investments have a continuity of value that can be returned to you in another form, like when someone purchases them from you.
The same concept can be seen when working with website domains, for example:
A “website score” provides a measurement of the value of your website. Some of the characteristics of a website that are assessed during a website check include the number and quality of backlinks, whether or not it is mobile-friendly, and how organic the search results for the site have been.
The healthier these variables are, the higher the website score will be. The higher your website score, the greater ranking your website will have with popular search engines. This means you gain more exposure to potential customers by placing higher on the list of search results for keywords that are related to your business. A website is one of the most substantial forms of online capital and presents a tremendous amount of value to be captured if done properly by professionals in the industry!
One display of a return of capital is when a business sells its website to another.
As a result, the logos and brand names are changed throughout their content (among other things) while the ingoing and outgoing links, SEO, and page traffic variables continue to hold their value. You can effectively manage your online capital assets with a similar organization as hard assets!
A hard asset is a tangible asset that “holds its value and is usually retained for the long term.” In finance, this can refer to coins, mechanical equipment, or real estate properties. Your online presence is relevant to this subject because of the likeness it shares with physical real estate! Your website, directory profiles, customer reviews, and so much more found online that link back to your brand all hold their value.
A website is not the only significant “hard asset” your brand can obtain, though it is considered one of the most powerful. Allow us to explain:
Your website is an entity. Its structure could rival that of an astute building on Main Street if built properly. A regular contractor would consider the construction materials it would typically take to construct a building, while a website builder would consider the proper content needed to fill out a website, like high-performing keywords, for example.
The larger your website grows, from page after page of optimized content, the more valuable it becomes! An increasing amount of links coming to and from your site gains your site more authority. Imagine a hotel with only a few rooms filled with a nice furniture arrangement to a hotel with many stories of rooms filled with elaborate interior decorating. Which one would have more authority to charge a higher price, right?
The same is true for online capital, assets that are earned, grown and managed (with tangible value!) online. This fact is also why some domains are much more costly than others. For example, you can expect to pay thousands more dollars for a shopbigsales.com domain than for a shopinexpensiveprices.com. This is because certain SEO keywords that are being searched for more heavily provide a much stronger search ranking. A properly built website threads this concept through every page and paragraph of content to maximize the amount of value that one can achieve with their digital presence.
When your brand has accumulated a network of online capital (of which some assets you may never even have known existed!), things can start to get difficult to administrate. This is where your Online Capital Group comes in!
There is a large scope of online assets that can be created for a business, with new ones emerging every year. Our job as an Online Capital Group is to identify where there is value to be captured as the online landscape evolves. We break down the values of a brand’s assets into a comprehensive portfolio that the general entrepreneurial public can use to help manage them more efficiently.
Some marketing agencies and other online programs promise this benefit with “checkers” and scoring systems that essentially measure the value of any given asset your brand possesses. This, however, addresses only a fraction of the total value of your online capital, say, a website or a total number of backlinks therein, for example.
Our mission is to collect the total sum of these assets into one portfolio of information that can be analyzed, managed, and grown by way of a much more focused and inclusive reference. Not only does this construct help our clients gain more autonomy in their relationship with our services, but with their own brand. (This transparency significantly increases our accountability to your investments, which we consider a win-win towards positive outcomes!)
Instead of receiving only a performance report or weekly SEO update, our clients receive a total bill of health of their online capital. As a business owner, it is imperative to have a strong, working relationship with the assets that make up the value of your brand. Our industry expertise helps convey this sometimes complex structure in a portfolio-like format with variables you can grasp with ease and begin to move forward to achieve growth in your business. Allow us to help you make your next move toward entrepreneurial success.
