Tips & Guides — 09 May 2023
Web Design for Brand Recognition
To become a household name and build a successful brand, you need to create a marketing strategy that is tailored to both your target audience and the kind of brand image you want to create.
Fortunately, there are hundreds of different marketing tactics you can use to build a strong brand and inspire brand loyalty. In this post, we’ll take a look at eight ways to use web design to convince your target demographic that you are just as trustworthy and appealing as the likes of Apple, Nike, or Coca-Cola.
Let’s dive right in and explore some brand recognition tactics:
A simple yet effective way to build brand awareness is to highlight your website’s tagline. This short but crucial piece of brand messaging helps communicate to your target audience, as well as search engines, what your brand is all about. Use the website tagline well, and it will help establish an instant connection.
First, focus on establishing a brand voice that aligns with your core values and the product or service you are selling. It needs to be clear who you are as a brand and what a customer or client can expect from doing business with you.
Test out several different variations of a tagline. Remember, it needs to be short and catchy, so refrain from overstuffing it with power words. Instead, distill your message down to one key takeaway.
To additionally increase brand awareness, you need to ensure your tagline pops off the page. You want it to instantly capture a visitor’s attention. You might go for a different font, a different font size, or animate your tagline. Whatever you choose, your goal is to make the tagline as vibrant as possible without making it too obnoxious.
Take a look at Future Kind and how they have highlighted their tagline:
In only a couple of lines, they’ve managed to incorporate three attention-grabbing words and establish their brand as sustainable and vegan. Thus, they’ve succeeded at clearly defining their brand identity and appealing to a certain kind of potential customer.
Once you’ve established a tone of voice that defines your business best, you also need to ensure that it translates well across all the online platforms where your brand is present.
Your website, as well as your social media channels, email marketing, and content marketing efforts, all need to incorporate this same voice and brand messaging.
In terms of web design, this means that the colors, images, videos, and all other visual elements need to become that one unifying thread that runs through the entirety of your brand awareness campaigns and is incorporated in all your digital marketing efforts.
It will make you recognizable and allow both your existing fan base and the new customers you’re trying to attract to form specific expectations.
For instance, if you use a friendly and informal tone of voice, your fonts are just as laid back, and your brand colors are bright, your audience will feel more comfortable approaching you in that same casual manner. They will understand your core values and what kind of a business you are.
Starbucks does a marvelous job of maintaining a unified and coherent online presence. Whether you’re browsing their website, using their app, or chatting with them on social media, you know exactly what you can expect: a friendly brand that will always strive to make even the gloomiest of days feel better.
Integrating a video into your homepage can be of great help in the process of strengthening your brand name. After all, if an image speaks louder than words, imagine how much information and value you will be able to communicate with as little as a minute of video footage.
Video can boost your brand awareness efforts as well, because it’s super easy to market across different social networks, and it can quickly become an integral part of various marketing campaigns. You can send it out to the influencers you want to work with, for example. You can feature it when doing news appearances and even use it in the material you send out to new audiences.
When incorporating video on your homepage, make sure it loads quickly and that it is of the highest quality you can possibly achieve. A poorly optimized video can lead to all kinds of SEO penalties and even harm your brand-building efforts.
What the subject of the video will be depends on the intricacies of your business. Perhaps there’s a feature you need to explain better or a new product you want to promote. Maybe there are specific objections you want to overcome. Of course, you can always swap out your video on a regular basis.
WhatsGood has done a great job of creating a short video that ticks all the boxes. It speaks to the target audience and highlights the brand’s main selling points:
Overall, it’s a great way to improve time on page as well as communicate their ethos and conversion appeal.
Another brand awareness strategy you should consider is featuring your customers on your homepage. This tactic will again make it easier for visitors to identify themselves with your brand and recognize it when they come across it on another platform.
It can also help you benefit from word-of-mouth marketing, as the customers whom you feature will certainly tell their friends and family. You can expect to see an influx of clicks and possibly even conversions.
You can take things up a notch and even offer a referral program that works with your featured customers. This effort can help turn them into instant brand advocates as well as help you further enhance your online presence and sales efforts.
How you choose to incorporate loyal customers into your homepage is up to you. You can make them a part of your hero, or you can feature a reviews section. You can use their content and their images, and you can even send them out your new products and ask them to take a couple of photos with them. That will save you the time of running your own photoshoot, and it will instantly add a more organic feel to your website’s design.
Gili is a brand that features its customers across all of its pages, thus managing to showcase its products with ease. There are plenty of amazing real-life images up there. On top of that, Gili also incorporates reviews and shares a lot of user-generated content on its social media profiles:
Another great way to get your business name out there is to use a vibrant color on your website. It will help you direct the attention of your visitors to elements that are especially important (such as your pricing, for example), and it will help them remember you more easily.
This can be especially beneficial for small businesses that are competing with large industry names. It can serve to help these small businesses find a way to differentiate themselves and remain etched in the mind of their target audience.
Make sure you don’t end up choosing a color that clashes with the rest of your website or that is not in line with what your brand is all about. For example, if you are eco-friendly, you can go for a vibrant green or blue. Red, on the other hand, might send out all the wrong vibes.
You also don’t want it to be too distracting, so explore a couple of different options before you select the one that best appeals to your target audience.
Mrs. Property Solutions has done a great job of choosing this pop of color:
Her very own shade of magenta serves to draw the eye to all the important elements, most notably her CTAs. Plus, it speaks volumes about the kind of person she is: easygoing, bubbly, and personable.
Creating a community on a social media platform is a fantastic way to both boost and measure brand awareness. It will allow you to share insight and expertise and help you further boost brand recognition.
As always, the platform you choose needs to match the interests of your audience. LinkedIn, for example, might work really well for a B2B business, while Facebook or Instagram will be a better option for a lifestyle brand. You can also incorporate your own hashtags and make sure your community is easy to spot, recognize, and join.
Do make sure you don’t merely use this community for your own marketing purposes. It still needs to focus on providing value and being of actual use to your customers and followers. Minimize your sales efforts, and focus on lending a helping hand.
Aura has established a Facebook group that is one of the best places on the web to swap information and insight about selling on Amazon. They’ve also incorporated it into their homepage, making it super easy for their customers to join in the conversation:
Podcasting is still a popular tactic for boosting brand recognition. By incorporating your very own podcast into your website, you can attract a new audience and further promote your brand.
It also opens up the door for some clever influencer marketing. With a podcast under your belt, you can establish all kinds of beneficial partnerships down the line.
The topics you cover on the podcast will depend on the nature of your business. Make sure that they provide value and unique insight and that you can speak on them intelligently and from personal experience. Don’t just cover what everyone else in your niche is already talking about. Add to the conversation and make your own mark on the dialog.
The Illinois Bone and Joint Institute has its own podcast that shares a lot of valuable information in a digestible format. Plus, the podcast pages also feature a transcript of the conversation. This helps boost a lot of important metrics and allows the page to rank better, at the same time improving user experience.
As with video, your goal is to make sure the listening experience is as smooth as it can be. You will alienate your potential audience if the audio quality is poor or the page is too slow.
Finally, another web design element that you can use in your brand awareness campaigns is the infographic. As long as you brand your infographics and make them not only interesting but also easy on the eyes, you can use them in your guest posting campaigns and across all your social media platforms.
Try to incorporate your brand’s other web design elements into your infographics as much as you can. If you use a specific style of animation across your pages, you can feature them with the infographic as well. The colors and the style should also be memorable and consistent with your branding and online presence. Feature your logo, and, of course, ask those who promote it to link back to your website and credit you as the author.
Unbounce has done a fair few infographics that are helpful as well as unique, but not all of them are branded in the same way, nor do they follow a specific template. However, they all come with a CTA at the end that invites those who have stumbled upon it to check out the brand’s other marketing materials, so it does serve its purpose well.
Increasing brand awareness is a lifelong task. You will need to focus on it continuously if you want to see your business succeed. Don’t allow yourself to rest on your laurels and bask in the success you’ve already achieved. Work on improving your brand awareness strategy continually and in line with everything you learn about your target audience over time.
With this approach, you’ll see yourself become more recognizable than brands that have much larger marketing budgets than yours.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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