By: John Yee, Henry Ng, Bernard Chen
|08 Jun 2018
What is a Brand?
A brand is what people feel about your company and your services.
A brand is more than visuals and a name; it’s everything about your company. It’s a story, an experience, and an emotion brought together as a part of your identity..
When people think about a brand, the first things that come to mind are companies with big names. It’s common for these brands to have common high-impact capabilities associated with them – they deliver a reassuring sense of credibility, trustworthiness and lasting connection with their target markets. Having a clear identity enables these brands to continue conveying a distinct and effective voice in communicating with their audience.
Successful brands live in the hearts of customers because they understand their needs and wants. To reach your customers in the first place, it is crucial to bridge the purpose and value of your business to where your market’s demands are. The importance of a unique but relevant brand shines even more as the competition for loyal customers gets tougher by the day.
Creating a Unique Brand Experience on Your Website
Creating an online brand experience throughout your website is akin to a spokesperson showing your visitors what you have to offer.
Everything about your brand will be communicated through your site’s design and content. As a vital touchpoint of your online presence, your site defines your brand and what people can expect from you.
As most websites act as the starting point for potential customers, their main goal is to stand out and become memorable across all platforms. Websites have a wide variety of elements that can be used as evocative branding tools when properly utilised. In this article, we explore 7 essential strategies accompanied by tips on how to get the most out of them.
7 Strategies to Consider for Branding Online
1. Good Copywriting makes the Brand Stand Out
Similar to making a sales pitch, every word you use on your website should deliver the right impact to your visitors. Copywriting is all about writing the right words to convince your visitor to stay on your site and eventually engage your services. People often overlook the importance of copywriting, not knowing that their site’s effectiveness depends on the allure of their content.
A copy that speaks your brand’s language is not only about what you say, but also how you say it. The tone of voice that you use on your website will emanate from your brand’s personality. If it’s a corporate brand, then a formal tone is prim and proper; if it’s a more youthful or casual brand, then a fun and creative tone will be more appealing. A web copywriter knows how to structure your site’s content in a way that suits your brand and engages your audience online. As we’ve said before, a good design attracts, but a great copy sells.
You can learn more about defining your brand’s voice by reading this article from ABC Copywriting.
2. Be Consistent with the Right Colours
Hideaki Chijiwa in his book, “Color Harmony”, said that a colour scheme should always reflect the purpose of your design as well as its intended audience. Researching on colour palettes and their symbolisms when building your website enables you to envision an appropriate fit to represent your brand. According to Chijiwa, it’s also helpful to ask the following questions whenever you start choosing colours for your brand:
✔ What kind of effect do I want?
✔ What colours will best convey this effect?
✔ Are these colours overused? What are the alternatives?
✔ Are they appropriate, legible, and eye-catching?
Once you’ve chosen the right colours, make sure that you preserve its palette throughout your site and on your marketing collaterals. By doing this, you are projecting a uniform image and highlighting familiarity and recall for your brand. Cliché as it is, but consistency really is the key.
3. Stick to a Consistent Visual Identity
Research says that putting your website’s visual identity into context helps visitors form a solid impression to stay longer. The consistent provision of visual cues such as images, colour, or space lets the visitor recognise the message your website wants to deliver.
For example, if your website wants to project a fun impression, then you may consider having youthful colours and dynamic images of children throughout your site. Visual identity is all about how you look. It reinforces your brand’s message as the creative backbone of your website.
To have an understanding of how a Visual Identity looks like, you may refer to our own by clicking here.
4. Choose the Right Font Type
Filmmaker Gary Hustwit in his documentary, “Helvetica”, showed people’s strong awareness of typography in the digital landscape. It recorded how the world looks at fonts and how they generate an impact in branding and in design.
When choosing the right font, it’s important to consider the character you want to portray to your audience. The right fonts help deliver your brand’s personality as you use them to communicate with a customer. You can explore various font classifications such as Serifs, Sans Serifs, and Modern, to create the necessary perception from your target market. Fonts generate first impressions, and first impressions make a lasting impact.
The heading font we used for posh brand Equevo, for example, is Playfair Display. It features elegant and sophisticated characteristics that are complemented by another font, Raleway, showing a modern and clean look. This kind of font hierarchy can be associated with the company’s line of service: Redefining luxury living.
You may also read our article about Sans Serif fonts here.
5. Get a Professional and Custom Layout
The most apparent feature a visitor would recognise among custom-made websites is its sheer uniqueness in design. Custom websites are always tailored towards your branding elements, without the constraints of structured templates or themes. It guarantees that every page is designed according to what you want. It also allows you to fully incorporate a personalised brand experience on your site, attracting more people as well.
Furthermore, customisation enables you to bring focus to the most important components of your site. These components can be identified through website heat mapping, a method that tracks and displays the specific areas that generate the most clicks from your visitors. By identifying and enhancing the key sections of your site, you’re able to drive visitors to convert and engage your services. It mirrors the concept of a good restaurant menu, featuring or presenting top-selling dishes with pictures, enticing customers to buy them immediately.
Click here to learn more about heat mapping and using it for your website.
6. Showcase your Unique Selling Proposition
“Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage.”
So says Harvard professor Theodore Levitt in his book, “The Marketing Imagination”.
True enough, establishing your brand goes down to one thing: What makes it unique? Identifying your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) sets your brand apart from your competitors. Consumers expect this from you as they actively look for specific reasons for choosing your products and services.
It’s impractical to create a USP for your brand with a one-size-fits-all approach. It takes time, intensive research and analysis for your brand to strike a chord with your audience. Skipping over that is a recipe for selling just another typical commodity in the market.
Companies demonstrate their USPs by creating their “Why Us?” pages on their website in a way that boldly resonates with their visitors.
We at Verz Design, for instance, highlight our standards and formula for achieving web excellence — Awesome Design, Compelling Contents, and Qualified Traffic. We showcase this in a way that anchors ourselves as an effective web design agency, because this embodies our experience in creating a site that converts.
With the right amount of time and research, you too will be able to make your brand memorable to visitors through giving them compelling reasons to place their trust in your service.
For more information about identifying your USP, you may read this article from Marketing Donut.
7. Consider Overall User Experience
Branding in the web design process is incomplete without user experience (UX) in mind. UX pertains to a site’s usability, which ensures visitors have a seamless navigation all throughout. Maximising it allows viewers to engage the key components of your site, such as your services, and easily access the next course of actions.
UX should comprise a great component of the design process. In today’s standards, an excellent site experience is the sum of the above strategies, including visual components like layout and photos, and navigation aspects such as site speed, responsive design, and coherent sitemaps.
It’s important to get the most out of making a website user-friendly because it also humanises the communication of a brand to fulfil a visitor’s needs. As such, you should have a profound understanding of how people would navigate around your site, designing it from their perspective, and thinking about the feeling you want them to have.
How Verz Design can help
In many ways, website building with branding in mind enables you to promote your business. Just like designing an excellent website, successful branding requires a meticulous process that involves a lot of creative and strategic thinking; which is why you should always take the high road in achieving it.
Successful web design agencies like Verz Design know the fundamentals of putting a premium on user experience. As people’s attention spans get shorter by the day, we are more determined in designing captivating web elements that will make them stay.
It takes professional creativity and an exceptional understanding of a company for web design agencies to execute the correct branding when building a website. Verz Design is endowed with this expertise, having pushed thousands of companies’ web presence towards excellence.
Need help in creating a website with a clear brand in mind?
Call us at 6841 1680 or send us an email at enquiry@verzdesign.com for a free consultation!
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