You’ve worked hard building your business. The image you work so hard to build up and maintain is called your “brand”. All a brand is really is a symbol that represents everything you want your business to mean to the public.
Every aspect of your business evokes some kind of feeling in your customers or potential customers. You can elicit the feelings you want to come to mind when someone thinks of your business by controlling the sounds, phrases, and images that you use to represent your business.
One way to build your brand is to build a website. A website is just another piece of marketing collateral. It’s a powerful piece, but it’s still just another marketing tool. When you build a website you don’t want to start from scratch – you want to maintain the look and feel of your other marketing collateral in your website.
You want to continue the representations that you’ve already created in your logo, business cards, mission statement and even the decor you use in your office. All of these things evoke feelings in your clients or potential clients. Eventually, those feelings represent your image or brand to your clients.
Here are three tips for building your brand with web design.
1. Use Color to Stimulate the Mind
There is a reason why most restaurants use red or orange in their color schemes. These colors are known to make people more hungry as well as encourage people to move faster. The faster they can get you in and out, the better. The hungrier they can make you, the better too.
You can use colors on your website to symbolize other aspects of your brand. For instance, if your business is geared toward helping people with money issues, you might consider using the color green. This color symbolizes money and profit.
2. Use Graphics and Images to Personify Your Website
The graphics and images you choose for your logo and your website will bring personality to your website. A great example of bringing personality to a website is Twitter. The little blue bird has character all of its own. They can make the blue bird show different emotions, but it is still recognizable no matter where the little bird is.
Whether you want to demonstrate a fun side, or a serious side, you can do that with the images and graphics that you use on your website.
3. Use Your Websites Aesthetics to Inspire Emotion
What do you want your customers or potential customers to feel when they view your website? It depends on what type of products or services you’re promoting, but you can combine color, images, and even fonts to bring about certain emotions to your visitors.
First, choose the emotions you want to inspire, then build your site around that feeling. For instance, if you want your visitors to feel calm when they visit your site, choose calming colors and calming imagery, and keep your site uncluttered by allowing for plenty of whitespace. If you want them to feel hurried, and rushed, make the site more busy.
It’s important to combine all of these elements to expand your brand to the internet with your website by being consistent throughout all your marketing collateral. Whether it’s using the same font, the same colors, and the same logo throughout, it’s important that when someone views your website they realize it’s the same company they are dealing with who produced the business card they collected at the chamber networking event.
By maintaining consistency in all your marketing media with all your visuals you’ll create a memorable brand. Some recognizable business branded websites include:
- Macdonalds – the red and Yellow “M”
- Target – the red “Target” and of course the hip name
- Apple – the iconic “apple” logo
- Coca-Cola – red and white logo with a font that is “ageless”
