Branding is a crucial aspect of your business; it’s how people identify you and your products and services. Your brand is what sets you apart from competitors and determines how your potential and current customers view you.
What can branding do for your business, and how do you do it? Keep reading, and find out!
Why is Branding Important?
Branding affects how current and potential customers view your brand. Why is this so important?
- Branding leads to recognition — Branding is how customers learn to recognize your business and leads to your name becoming known among your audience.
- Branding increases value — Having an established brand makes it easier to increase your business’s value in the future.
- Branding brings in new customers — Strong branding leaves a positive impact on customers, making them more likely to refer others to you.
- Branding creates trust — When your brand gets recognized as an industry leader, customers feel like they can trust you more easily.
Creating a Branding Guide
Most companies have branding guides — it’s a way to ensure that the entire organization understands how to represent the brand. Branding guides typically include things like the different logos used by the company, how to use the logos on different backgrounds, and what fonts to use for certain types of content. Other things to consider including in a branding guide are the size of the logo and which colors to use throughout the website.
Your branding guide should get distributed to anyone who creates content for your brand and include your logo in various sizes, font names and sizes, and color schematics.
Tips for Outstanding Website Branding
Define a Clear Goal
Defining and understanding the purpose of your brand and websites is the first step to having an impact on your audience. Define these goals by asking questions like:
- What value does our brand bring?
- What do we want to achieve?
- How are we unique from competing brands?
Answering these questions helps you begin branding your website for success.
Related: Designing a Website: What to Consider
Show Your Customers Who Your Brand is
There’s more to your website than its visual elements. It’s the perfect place to teach everyone more about your brand. A great about us page can affect how potential customers view your brand and give you a chance to relate to them. Tell your story to customers, share your company values, and use this chance to connect with them.
Stay Focused
What do you want to happen when a user gets onto your website? Set an appointment, send you a message, make a purchase? Show your potential customers what you have to offer and how they will benefit. Don’t distract them with too many options — they’ll likely leave out of frustration and indecision.
Keep it Simple
Your website should have everything it needs, and that’s it. Excessive features and pages may look good on paper, but your visitors don’t want to dig through excessive content to find what they’re looking for. Similarly, too many add-ons can slow your website down — you might lose potential customers if they have to wait too long for your pages to load.
Related: Speed Up Your Website
Your Logo
Your logo is a huge part of brand identity, and it’s one of the first things your visitors will notice. Here are two important things to consider for your brand logo:
- Keep the size consistent; this allows you to reuse the same graphics everywhere.
- Use the PNG format; it supports transparency, allowing you to place your logo over any background.
You want to include your logo in multiple places so that your customers will identify with it—for example, your header, footer, and a contact form.
Use the Right Colors
The color scheme of your website can affect your visitor’s behaviors and emotions. Let’s look at a few colors and what impact they can have:
- Red can create a sense of urgency.
- Orange creates a confident, fun atmosphere.
- Black is powerful and works well for serious, prestigious products.
- Blue can help create a strong, trustworthy connection.
- White keeps things looking clean, simple, and sophisticated.
Stay Consistent
The visual elements on your website should be consistent throughout the entire site. If you already have your logo designed, try to match the coloring on the rest of your site. The fonts you choose also play a huge role in how your brand gets identified. You can choose fonts to represent your brand however you want, whether it be serious, playful, professional, or elegant.
Showcase Your Success
It’s okay to brag about your brand (as long as it’s not excessive). Show off your case studies and customer testimonials. Positive feedback from actual customers can help swing prospects to conversion. You can tell them your brand is the perfect solution for them, but hearing it from people who’ve used your products and services is much more effective.
Your Website’s Layout
When people visit your website, they tend to follow patterns when viewing content. Users typically look at websites starting at the top left, and view it left to right; you can use this to your advantage. Important elements, like your logo and brand tagline in areas that they are likely to view often helps encourage your brand recognition.
Related: Organizing Your Website
Utilize Social Media
What does being active on social media have to do with your website? You can display your social media feeds, photos, or reviews on your site to further engage with your audience and give them an easy way to reach out to you. Someone who is interested in your brand might not want to fill out a contact form, but if they can ask you a quick question on social media, they are more likely to initiate a conversation.
Get Your Content Seen With Mindspun
You can have the most effective branding and best content on the entire internet, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it in front of the right audience. Take control of your content and brand with Mindspun. Getting users to your website has never been easier. You take care of your brand and content; let us do the heavy lifting to get your website to rank higher and begin building an excited, loyal audience.