Brand Strategy will Affect the Success of Your Website

Every great website has a strong foundation in brand strategy. The process of building a powerful brand identity can be a fun and exciting initiative, but it can also be difficult to understand how all of your logos, colors, tone, and messaging apply to all of the physical pieces that allow your audience to understand your brand. Your website is often the first place a potential customer or potential client meets you, so it should be no exception when communicating your brand messaging consistently and confidently. This is where building a solid brand strategy comes into play.

Strong Brand Strategy

The word “consistent” gets thrown around a lot in marketing, and this is because consistency is often proven to be one the strongest ways to stay top-of-mind and get your message across. Your brand should be built on a consistent tone and strong mission to be set apart and create confidence in your audience. Are you casual like a burger chain, or formal like a law firm? Somewhere in-between? Everything you write and every visual you display should share this same tone to build on your brand’s personality.

Your company probably has a mission statement as well. Sometimes this is built on financial goals, spiritual goals, or what the idea of success looks like to your organization. Your brand visuals and words should communicate this as well. Making the visual and verbal segments consistent will help you identify your audience and allow this group to be invested in what you’re trying to do, therefore creating a community of advocates and helping to stand out in your industry.

Brand Messaging & Visual Design

The tone of your brand carries over into all visuals as well. This brand environment includes a variety of elements that is what gives your company an image. When building an online experience, this brand environment should naturally exist everywhere your audience can see your brand.

We often recommend “owning” one or two colors to help generate consistent awareness, whether someone comes across your home page or real-life salesperson on the street. The connection is there to be made, so let’s make it.

The typefaces chosen to represent your brand are just as important as the words written in them. Different styles of lettering communicate different things, for example, a traditional serif typeface might feel like just that, traditional. A modern sans-serif with character might feel more playful and laid-back. Using these existing personality traits is like deciding whether your sales team wears a suit or dresses in business-casual attire.

Since most websites have images, your brand might have a style for these as well. Consider the original brand strategy that was built. How will imagery best communicate your brand message? Environmental photography (see: example) has an organic feeling which is great for communicating your brand’s personality, while product-focused photography is a great way to put the product first and drive sales.

Your brand environment should work in tandem with your tone and messaging to make sure that your customers and clients have a consistent online experience, and allow your audience to get comfortable with how your brand interacts online.

Create with Brand Guidelines

In order to maintain consistency (there’s that word again), you need to have guidelines for how your brand is used online and out in the world. This will ensure that there is no miscommunication if you have multiple people (and companies of all sizes do) using elements in different applications, from Word documents to full websites. These guidelines can take many shapes from one sheet with a few basic elements to a full book that includes your logos, colors, typefaces, and more. When we create brand guidelines, we prefer to assemble a comprehensive book that can be distributed among an internal team or stored online to be sent to a press organization or production company to use in the future. In order to make sure that your online sales team is putting its best foot forward, these guidelines should include elements for the web such as button styles, and other digital layout elements.