You’re in the process of developing your new website or blog. You’ve got the logo designed, so your branding is complete, right?
The answer is absolutely not. So many businesses and bloggers do themselves a real disservice and hobble their potential success from the outset by not having a complete branding strategy. If you have your logo in place, that’s great, but good branding is about so much more, particularly in today’s competitive digital marketing landscape.
Below are the primary elements that are required for a complete branding strategy for your website and your overall digital presence.
Site Design
Just sticking your logo throughout your site isn’t enough to say it’s thoroughly and effectively branded. Instead, other design elements should also be considered. Some of these include your color palette and the way you use those colors, design consistency across all pages that also carries over to your social media profiles, emails and other marketing materials, and how various brand elements of your design are placed.
For example, your call to action buttons should be consistently branded and reflective of the story you want to tell.
Security
This is perhaps one of the most overlooked elements of strong brand marketing on your website. Website security and trust are essential for your audience to have a positive view of not just your site but your overall branding.
There are different images, such as logos of privacy and security service providers you can include on your site, or if you’re an e-Commerce business, you can add logos of the trusted payment methods you utilize.
You want your brand to reflect the fact that your site visitors can trust that you will protect their privacy and their sensitive information, and adding relevant visual elements is one of the best ways to do that.
Content
Your content is just as much a part of your digital marketing brand as any of the visual elements required.
Your content needs to have a unified tone and voice across your web content, blog posts, and emails. It also needs to have a professional style and layout that’s similar, and a big part of your brand is ensuring you deliver quality content regularly and on a consistent basis.
Keep the colors, imagery, and fonts the same, regardless of the type of content you’re offering.
Customer Service
Today’s consumer operates in a world where everything is on-demand. They expect fast service and responses to their inquiries, and having excellent customer service is a necessary element of branding. Make sure that your website design reflects a dedication to customer service.
Give people multiple channels to reach your customer service team on your site, and keep the design simple, straightforward and easy to complete. If you add forms to your site, make sure the design and style are consistent with the branding of the rest of your site, and always create a design that makes customer service feel accessible and right at the visitor’s fingertips. Don’t create a site that seems like it’s laborious to find access to the customer service visitors need.
When you’re designing your website or blog, make sure that you keep the above essential components of good branding in mind so you can build a story and image for yourself that’s cohesive and valuable in the digital marketing world.