When you create your brand, eventually you’ll want to create a website that embodies the home of your brand. The website is the hub or storefront or center of your business. The content you create should live first on your website and then shared to other mediums from there. The products you sell and the services you provide all live on your site and your job, when marketing, is to drive targeted traffic to your site and offers.
You drive the right traffic by ensuring that your branding, your message, and your objectives all align in your branding efforts. Even the smallest thing can make a huge difference. Let’s look at ways to integrate branding into your website design.
- The Colors You Pick – When you choose the colors for your website, of course, they should blend with your choice of logo design, which should align with and enhance your business objectives. The way you know that the colors work for your audience is by studying how color affects people so that you choose and test with a goal in mind.
- Your Brand’s Personality – You may not have thought much before now about the personality of your brand. The character that plays your brand is as important as the design because the design is like the clothing for the persona of your brand.
- Your Brand’s Tone of Voice – Since your brand has a character, that means it also has a voice. Your brand’s voice also needs to align with its message and objectives. For example, if you are serving young single professional women, your tone and voice will be very different than if your audience is a young, stay at home, homeschooling mother.
- The Images You Use – When you develop your brand, it’s a good idea to decide what type of imagery you’re going to use for blog posts, newsletters, social media, ads, and so forth. You need to be consistent. For example, vector images versus photographs, stock photos versus more personal photos.
- The Emotions You Evoke – Based on your brand’s personality, the problems you solve, and the content you publish, you can evoke specific emotions from your audience. What emotions do you want to evoke? You can design your content marketing strategy to ensure you make them feel the way you need to make them feel.
- Your Logo – This mark that you create needs to appear in some measure on everything you do. You can make it stand out or blend in more, depending on the mood you are trying to elicit from your audience.
- The Fonts You Choose – Even a font can be seen as having an emotion. This is awesome because you can use that knowledge to choose the fonts that help evoke the feelings you hope your audience will feel.
- Your Value Proposition – What do you offer to your audience that is different from the competition? Spell that out as much as you can via your content, the labels you choose for your website’s navigation, and your overarching message. It should all be clear upon first glance.
- Your Mission Statement – Your mission statement is an important part of your branding strategy. You can look at that mission statement any time you are creating something – whether content marketing, new products, or services to help guide you so you can stay consistent.
- Your Tagline – Adding your tagline to your website is an important way to give your audience a lot of information in a small amount of space. Think of the other taglines from other businesses and how that defines the business’ objectives for you.
Your website is very important to your success, but if it’s not branded properly and doesn’t seem consistent with what you do on social media or elsewhere, then it won’t work as a trust-building tool with your audience enough that you make more sales and grow your business.
