Your brand is a symbolic representation of your business.
When developing a brand image, what you are really looking to do is gather an almanac of symbols, fonts, colours, shapes, wordings and stylistic choices that cohesively come together to encapsulate your businesses identity. This is hugely important, as it also acts as the connecting factor between you and your audience.
Quite often, the only difference between a major brand and a generic one is how it has been packaged and marketed to the world. This should give you an idea of how vital a consistent, engaging brand image can be for success. Additionally, considering that more consumers than ever before are heading online for their shopping needs, ensuring that your online presence reflects the aesthetics and values of your brand is an absolute necessity for building an audience.
But how do you begin? Working with Melbourne-based web development experts, Pixelstorm, we have compiled a brief introductory guide to cohesively incorporating your brand into your web design.
The Consistency Edge
Possibly the most important aspect of marketing is familiarity, as it is an enormous factor in the decision making process of consumers. Referred to as “Choice-Supportive Bias”, this psychological phenomena dictates that people are more likely to purchase products and services that they are familiar with, while also placing more trust in information that supports that decision.
This is why brand consistency is so important when attempting to cultivate an audience, as a considerable portion of the decision-making process is based in whether or not the potential customer has a personal attachment to your brand.
Because of this, while not necessarily as prevalent in SMEs, Larger companies will often keep a style guide that dictates what colours, fonts, adjectives etc. can be used to represent their brand. This allows them to remain consistent across all marketing mediums, which has led to many brands being identifiable by colours alone.
How Do I Achieve This Online?
Online Style = Offline Style
When developing your website, it’s important that the user experience of your website is familiar to those that have interacted with your brand offline, such as through merchandise or a brick & mortar location. Consider the emotions that you are trying to elicit when individuals enter your store and keep this in mind throughout the web development process.
An excellent example of this in practice is highly-popular fashion website ASOS, which boasts more unique monthly visitors between the ages of 18-34 than any other fashion-based company on the internet. An important part of their success has been through consistency of tone across a wide array of mediums, including:
- A Social Media Presence Which Boasts Over 19 Million Followers
- An Online Store With 13.4 Million Active Customers
- An Enormously Popular Print Publication, Which Has Allowed Them to Remain Relevant Across the Online and Offline Fashion Landscape
- An iOS App Which Has Been Installed By Over 10 Million Mobile Users
Offering a sleek, minimalist design across all platforms, ASOS has become a global style juggernaut that has managed to dominate their competitors in both financial success and influence. This has been achieved throughout their online platforms and offline marketing tactics, providing them with the widest possible net in regard to drawing in new customers.
By reading, watching or interacting with any of these mediums, you can immediately identify the ASOS brand solely by its style and tone, which has been an intrinsic influencing factor in their many triumphs. This has allowed their brand to stick in the minds of customers and cement themselves as an iconic trend setter of the 2010s.
Values
How are your customers supposed to put their faith in you if your business’ values differ from platform to platform? While we have already briefly discussed the importance of tone and a consistent voice, the ideologies behind your tone must also remain uniform across all marketing platforms.
Remaining consistent in your core messages and values as a business allows consumers to create lasting impressions of your company or service. As more and more consumers go to the internet for their shopping and informational needs, this means that having a website that reflects your business’ main objectives has never been more necessary.
However, unlike advertisements and marketing portals, a website is a space dedicated specifically to your business, with few constraints regarding what you can and cannot achieve through it. So, dedicated pages that specifically target key areas of interest between you and your audience can be fortuitous in solidifying these areas as part of your brand image.
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Whilst there will always be more to learn and discuss in regard to developing your website alongside your brand, hopefully we have managed to provide you with a simple insight into the perks and benefits of maintaining consistency when it comes to your online presence. However you decide to pursue online success, the benefits of effective website brand cohesion are wide-reaching. Good luck!
