7 Best Branding Techniques for Your Website
Article by John Cyril Yee
Graphics Design by Kirsten Tumbokon
What is a Brand?
A brand is what the audience thinks of a company. It is not just a company’s visuals and name; it’s the story, experience, and emotion that a business imparts that make up a brand.
This is the reason why when people think about the word “brand,” the first things that come to mind are the companies with big names — Apple, Google, Nike, etc. because they understand their customers’ needs and wants. They are titans in their respective industries because they are successful in making a lasting impact on peoples’ way of life through products that provide meaningful experiences.
Your Website’s Role in Creating a Distinct Brand Experience
To be successful in building a strong website branding, you must determine how you can reach your customers in the first place. Successful branding lies in creating an effective relationship between your company and your target audience, but in starting such a relationship, you might begin to wonder: how are you going to start such as relationship?
Why Branding is important for Website
A website is not just a portal of information — it is a business’ online backbone. It is your salesperson that works 24/7 in order to provide potential customers with meaningful and productive experiences. As such, it has the potential to be your business’ most powerful tool and the cornerstone of your online efforts.
In this growing sea of competition, having a unique and relevant brand has truly become more important for businesses that want to stand out in the industry. Which is why in this article, we list down the 7 proven techniques on how you can create a strong brand with your website.
1. Invest in good copywriting
Good copywriting makes the brand stand out. Without it, no person will engage your business. It’s the one thing that can save a well-designed ad from being ignored, and the key aspect that can make visitors of a corporate website to stay.
In the online world, having great content through web copywriting is a surefire way to add value to your business as it enhances your brand’s reputation in the industry. People who find your copy engaging are also more likely to tell other people about it, resulting in more traffic for your website as well.
Websites with a distinct and effective tone of voice tap professional copywriters because they can create content that is digestible yet truly reflects what the brand’s story is all about. Usually, a web copy’s tone of voice falls under the categories of formal, casual, elegant, or dependable, depending on the industry the business is in. If it’s a corporate brand, you’ll observe that their voice is formal and authoritative; if they are a more casual brand or an eCommerce website, you’ll see more fun and casual tone.
We provide best copyediting service in Philippines. We delivered for JSLA Architects. Since they are an architectural firm, their web copy is clean, concise, and straight to the point. After they gave a brief about what they are as a company, our professional copywriters ensure that the copy will establish a sense of trustworthiness and credibility, without sounding too corporate.
Learn more about finding your brand’s tone of voice by reading this article.
2. Stimulate emotions with the right colors
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that humans have a universal and bodily response to the color stimulus. This is why banks and software companies use blue as their primary color to evoke the feeling of trust and reliability. It’s also the reason behind the upper-class market’s association with black-colored brands because of the color’s relationship with sophistication and exclusivity.
In choosing the right color for your brand and your website, you must consider factors such as:
- Appropriation. Determine the story, feeling, and context of your business.
- Target market. Understand your target market for a color scheme that would trigger the kind of encouragement they need.
- Consistency. Think long term: do you see your business using the color palette for a long period? Once you find the colors that stimulate the right emotions to your company and your market, it would be easy for you to stick to it for years.
Although choosing the right colors that would make an emotional impact online is a difficult task if you don’t have a professional web designer. Our skillful website designer has the skills to represent your brand uniquely. Therefore, Gotafflair is the leading web design & development agency in the Philippines. Contact Us for more information.
3. Use the right fonts
The secret to having remarkable typography on your website is in the proper use of hierarchy, contrast, and space. Your brand’s typography represents your tone and values similar to how colors stimulate emotions for your audience. Which is why in choosing the most suitable font for your website, always go beyond its aesthetics; consider the character you want to portray to exude the personality that relates with your audience.
Typefaces nowadays are definitively categorized for professionals to easily determine which fonts complement each other. In fact, there is a hybrid system of around 15 font styles that you can use as a reference for your website. However, it would be better to be familiar with the meaning behind each styles first before going over them. Doing so will let you understand how they can work properly for your brand.
Even then, serif and sans serif fonts are the most common style types that you can use for your website. When in doubt, always consult with capable graphic or web designer who can implement font pairing effectively.
Take a look at the web design singapore services we handed out to Gong Cha Singapore wherein we used a harmonious combination of Serif and Sans Serif fonts to match the famous milk tea company’s warm and elegant branding.
4. Customize your website
With the ever-increasing number of businesses online, it’s highly important to be different. And the key to being different is to customize what you have according to what you want.
Having a custom website guarantees that it’s tailored towards your branding elements. It also gives off a personalized brand experience that can attract and impress more people. If you’re a business that solely relies on templates or themes, then you’re leaving the impression that you’re just another typical commodity in the market.
After all, customization enables you to focus on the most important parts of your site, like for example, a resources page. Since this kind of webpage has a feature that asks for a user’s email in exchange for helpful content, it will give you the opportunity to improve and fully customize the page’s interface. Done right, it will result in more visitors, more leads, and ultimately, more sales.
You need the skill-full team for the custom web design. In the Philippines, our master website design & development team can customize your website, help to provide a professional view.
5. Focus on what makes you unique
If you want to build a strong brand online, then you have to ask yourself this one thing: what makes you unique? Having a unique selling proposition (USP) is the only thing that will set you apart from your competitors. In the digital world, companies demonstrate their USPs through their ‘Why Us?’ pages. And in starting to know what your USP is, you must first:
- Know what you do well. What’s the thing that you do that is better than how others do it?
- Identify essential problems that require your solutions. This comes alongside knowing who your customers are and what they care about the most.
- Test your USP. Examine if your USP resonates with a target audience. Study the things that can be improved before making it official.
Creating a USP requires time. One can focus on it when design & develop the website as it requires research and understanding to make it memorable to visitors. You can tell if a company has a good USP if it has loyal customers that associate themselves with the brand. Tesla’s USP, for example, is their ability to build electric vehicles in-house and their commitment to eradicate global warming. This USP strikes a chord with their audience in a way that they buy Tesla vehicles in order to do their part for a sustainable environment.
6. Establish a visual identity
Whereas good copywriting is about making your brand sound good, an established visual identity is about making it look good. A well-designed website can capture your audience’s attention easily. People in this digital world has become increasingly visual, which is why you must capitalize on this change in behavior towards your website’s successful branding.
Having a strong visual identity goes beyond the use of fonts and colors as mentioned earlier. More importantly, it revolves around the proper use of images, illustration, and the layout that collectively delivers a visually captivating brand experience for your audience. Often, it stems from factors such as:
- Uniqueness. Your visual identity must stand out from the rest of the competition so for easy recognition.
- Harmony. Each visual element must effortlessly complement each other.
- Consistency. You must stick with your components and apply them in every marketing collaterals in order to be memorable over time.
Let’s take National Geographic’s yellow rectangle for example: simple, unique, and pleasing to the eye. Since it’s been used for decades, it’s so easy for any to recognize what the yellow rectangle is, even without any context. It’s a good example of an established visual identity, wherein people find the brand easy to recognize even in just a glance.
7. Aim for the best user experience
Since your website is the core of all your digital marketing efforts, the best way to fully unleash its potential is to bring positive user experiences for the people that go in and out of it.
User Experience (UX) pertains to what a person feels when they are interacting with your product. It is the product of User Experience Design, which is the process of improving user satisfaction by making a website intuitive, memorable, and enjoyable to use.
Having a good website experiences stems from achieving all the factors mentioned above, wherein visual components and navigation aspects like speed, responsiveness, and cohesiveness are put into consideration. A lot of companies nowadays focus on their website’s interface at the expense of great UX, not knowing that even the most minor hiccups can result in negative impressions that can ultimately be a reason for anyone to never visit your site again.
It’s important to get the most out of making a website user-friendly because it humanizes how your website communicates with your audience. To achieve a great user experience with your website, you must have it designed with the user’s journey in mind. Your web designer must have a deep, practical knowledge of the target audience behavior and their goals in order to build an online brand that generates lasting impressions.
Know more about the importance of UX Design here.
Establish a Strong Online Brand with Gotafflair
Strong website branding is a meticulous process that requires a lot of creativity and strategy, which is why you should have enough time, patience, and understanding in order to achieve it.
With a roster of thousands of clients under our belt, Gotafflair prides itself on creating captivating websites that make people stay and come back. As a professional web design agency in Manila, we can help you start in branding your website the way you want it to be.
Call us at 798 8195 or email us at sales@gotafflair.com for a free consultation!
