Online Brand Building: The VCP Process

As people continue to use the internet to find products and services, the principles of VCP (Visibility – Credibility – Profitability) are always becoming more important to online brands. By offering a service that is visible, credible, and profitable, brands form a strong foundation from which to grow their online ventures.

Here we have an analysis of these three principles and how they apply to online businesses, specifically those that prioritize offering digital products and services. When your product only exists online, you rely wholly on VCP as you try to stand out from the crowd, making it even more important.

Visibility

Visibility online is often achieved through backend solutions that help with branding. However, successful brands make proactive, front-end efforts to draw in audiences. This includes customer-friendly offers and putting the most attractive selling points front and center. Jackpots at Paddy Power, for instance, can be seen advertising the rewards that users can win for each game they offer. Naturally, the jackpots drive more audience engagement, which is great for SEO ranking.

Search engines and social media encompass most of the visibility online. Google dominates the search market to the tune of 93%, as per the numbers from StatCounter. SEO helps tame search engine algorithms, so online businesses should invest in that to improve visibility. Many best-practice SEO strategies aren’t costly, so even small companies can compete with larger competitors.

As for social media, every business should have a social media presence from which they communicate with audiences and project their brand. When your business is online, your sales and product pages are just one link away, so effective social media posts are great for driving engagement from sites like Instagram and Twitter to your website.

Credibility

Once visible, it’s important that your brand and its services are credible too. In business, there is such a thing as a bad reputation and on the internet, word spreads fast. Start with consistency in your brand and its messaging, everything from fonts and colors to the tone of voice in social media posts. Consider this the equivalent of showing up to work in a suit and tie, a basic standard of professionalism that surrounds your brand and its output. That doesn’t mean your branding can’t be down to earth and casual, of course, just make sure that it’s consistent.

Following that analogy, your office is your website. It should be clean and ready for work. That means it should be functional but look good to consumers and have a wealth of information for them. That includes contact information, so customers can break through the online barrier by getting in touch with their queries or complaints. If your website looks like an artifact from the 90s, it will scare prospective customers away from the brand. Having great reviews is a surefire way of building credibility as it shows customers that other customers have had a good experience.

Profitability

Lastly, but most importantly, online brands need to be profitable to stay on the internet. Businesses that have nailed visibility and credibility may find profitability easy, sure, but it’s common for costs to get out of control or for businesses to chase growth that may not be worth the investment. A healthy share of profits gets reinvested into attempts at visibility and credibility too, so think of VCP more as a cycle.

Fortunately, online brands that deal in digital products and services have an easier time achieving cost efficiency. Once web hosting and any business-related services, subscriptions, or distribution costs are covered, the remainder of earnings is profit. Reinvestment areas are typically marketing, infrastructure, and employees if you have any, as explained by Hiscox.

Online brands have a much lower bar to profitability than others, enabling entrepreneurs to choose how much they dedicate to it. You can treat it as a side income or snowball it to become a career, the choice is yours from here.