Bring your brand to life through your website

Does your website successfully reflect your brand identity? If not, here’s our essential guide to why and how you can use your website to enable your brand to flourish.

Your brand identity is the absolute summation of who you are and what you do, while your website is your most powerful online presence. It only makes sense for both of these things to ‘work together’.

If the look and feel of your website don’t correspond with the way you orchestrate the perception of your brand, you’re going to experience a massive disconnect between the way customers view your organisation and the way you want them to.

Let’s say, for example, that you provide software as a service. Your brand identity would most likely convey authority in the IT industry. Therefore, it would be extremely disconcerting if your website was not optimised to work across all browsers and devices, or if the navigation was cumbersome and unintuitive.

Likewise, the types of images, words, and graphical elements used throughout your website are an extension of brand representation. Everything you choose to put out there conveys a certain tone and feeling that needs to be right for your brand identity. But really, you should already know this. This is ‘marketing 101’ for any organisation that wants to deliver a consistent brand experience online.

With that being said, thoughtful and deliberate web design can also maximise the impact of your brand identity, bringing it to life in ways you probably never even thought were relevant. That’s why we’ve shortlisted the top changes you can make to your website in order to strengthen brand identity.

Revisit and rewrite your content

One of the simplest ways to change your website for the better is to revisit the words on your website from a different perspective and rewrite it accordingly.

Brand identity isn’t always at the forefront of people’s minds when creating their own website content, often writing from a purely commercial or technical viewpoint instead. Whilst this may include elements of who you and what you do, it isn’t necessarily reflective of your personality and company values.

Zendesk are a friendly brand that focusses on the human-centric side of software usage for businesses. This really comes across in the copy used on their website — it’s easy to read, emotive, and makes benefits crystal clear to customers.

Having a definitive tone of voice throughout your website content (one that should correspond with the tone of voice across all your marketing channels) will help visitors to engage more and connect with your brand. After all, the internet can be a typically anonymous environment, and, at the end of the day, people will always buy from people.

Impactful homepage

The homepage is effectively the first thing visitors will see when they land on your website. Like the front over to a book, or the packaging of a product, a successful homepage needs to be aesthetically pleasing in a way that communicates who you are and what you do.

It’s been stylistically on trend for some time now to incorporate hero images (or a looping video) that fill the entire screen on the home page, with your logo and any key marketing messages positioned on top. This is a great way of capturing people’s attention and giving them an impactful feel for your brand identity. Cap this off with a simple call-to-action (4 Rivers Smokehouse, above, invite you to look at the menu) and you can successfully direct visitors to crucial areas of your website without them having to find it for themselves.

Stand out from your competitors

One of the main functions of your website is to make your unique brand identity stand out, especially from competitors. It’s not enough to slap your logo on a website that looks and feels exactly like every other website out there.

Everything about your website; the way it looks; the structure; page layouts; features and nuances; these all need to be thought out and executed in a way that is on point with who you are and what it is that you specifically want to achieve.

Most importantly, you need to provide an online experience that users will remember positively and associate with your brand, and your brand alone. So make it different!

Thinking about a new website?

Get in touch and tell us all about it.