Instilling Identity into Your Website

Building Brand Identity

Like most companies, you probably have a goal for your website. It may be to build an audience, generate sales, or provide a service. And like most people, you probably designed your website according to your goals and thought that would suffice. However, one of the big components that you’re probably missing out on is branding and storytelling. Most companies focus too much on getting the desired response from the user and end up looking like the rest of their competitors, loosing a soul of the brand.

So how do you avoid this? While you want to still serve the user, you need to make the brand a big part of your web design. The instinct is to avoid this because most people have been taught by direct response principles that it’s not a good idea to focus on the brand because it takes away from the user. This is not entirely true as it’s more about how you present your brand.

If you go about and talk too much about your brand, you lose connection with the user. However, if you still engage the user with their needs and wants while positioning your brand so that the perceived value is raised, it will create better results than just engaging the user. You need to understand that your competitors are just a few clicks away in the digital world.

Most of them will be trying to use the same or similar message to engage your target prospect. At a certain point, these companies sound exactly the same to the user. But by positioning your brand to support the message, you are perceived as unique. And pulling this off on your website is more than displaying your brand logo prominently. It’s about creating a unique experience based on your brand.

For example, color schemes or design themes associated with your brand can be used as the core of the graphic design that encompasses your website. The content or sales message can represent what makes your brand unique as opposed to the typical message used in your industry. You can also use interactive visual storytelling to convey your message in a unique way and introduce your brand in the story to tie it all together.

This leads to an experience that results in creating a perception in the prospect that he is dealing with a company that has something unique to offer. It distinguishes your company from the competition and you avoid getting pigeonholed as a commodity in the marketplace. Finally, it helps your brand connect to your target market in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to with a generic presentation and message.

You can probably see now why branding is such an important component of your website design. You need to understand that a cookie cutter design gets you cookie cutter results. So think about what your brand stands for and how it should be represented visually. From there, figure out how to instill these characteristics into your website to form a site that has a strong identity.