While Social Media accounts are an important tool in building your brand and ultimately customer loyalty, your website by far, is your most important marketing tool. SEO, PPC, and social media are all conduits to drive customers to your site. While it may seem an antiquated concept to use your website as a vehicle to promote your brand in the age of social media, the importance of a site in branding cannot be understated. Here are a few things you should consider when designing your website: When a potential customer visits your website, what will their take away be regarding your company? Does your website convey your company’s core values? Does it say through imagery and content what your company’s mission is all about? Do you seek to entertain or inform with your website? If you are not sure about any of these questions, here are some ways that you can improve your branding on your site.
Know Thy Brand.
The first step is to improve your branding on your website is to understand your brand. What does your company stand for and who are its primary customers? Is your company buttoned up and formal, or is it relaxed and casual? Will your company use humor to convey things, or does it want to take an authoritative tone? Consider what your company does and what type of impression is appropriate. If your company manages funeral homes using humor would be a bad idea.
If your company is struggling to find its brand identity, then it would be wise to employ a marketing agency to create a style branding guide. A branding style guide is a beneficial tool that you can use across all media from digital to print. It helps make sure that all language used by your company from web content to social media, to press releases will conform with criteria that best relays your company’s brand. It dictates things such as fonts that your company uses, color schemes, Iconography, imagery, the composition of content, and composition of photography. When designing your website, a branding style guide will keep it from straying too far from your branding.
User Experience Design (UX).
Remember that part of your branding is if your company is how customer satisfaction focused it is or not. Most successful companies are known for their exemplary customer experiences and to build brand loyalty, your website should follow that example with UX design (user experience). UX design is predicated on making the interaction between a given product or service a satisfying and pertinent experience. With regards to your web design UX means:
- Quick Load Times.
- Easy Navigation.
- Vibrant and Pleasing Colors.
- Understandable Language that Avoids Jargon.
- Engaging and Interesting Content.
- Clean and Elegant Design.
Be Confident, but Humble.
It is unprofessional and annoying to customers when they visit a website, and it brags about how great the company is, especially when it is a little known or recently established company. Your goal in your company’s website design is to build customer loyalty. You undermine that goal when your site’s language comes across as braggadocios, or a customer buys your product or service, and the reality of what they purchased can’t live up to the hype on your website. You damage your brand when you over-promise and under-deliver. State why your product or service is high quality, but don’t make promises that are impossible to keep.
Putting it All Together.
When you combine a clear company identity, quiet confidence, and UX focused web design, you are expanding your brand while increasing the chance that visitors to your company’s site will convert into loyal customers.
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