Your website can be a platform used to achieve many different goals. From acting as a direct ecommerce storefront to generating leads for your sales team, or just as a trust piece for your clients, there are plenty of ways to utilise your own personal online presence. However, to ensure you’re making the most out of this far-reaching platform, branding comes into centre stage.
At Squarebird, we help businesses develop both their brands and their websites – combining the two to achieve the greatest impact online. In this article we’ll help you understand what your brand truly is, and how to think about your brand in a strategic way to tell your story effectively online.
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“The most important thing about branding is that it should be customer centric. It is the strategy in which you choose to make a connection with your customers, to tell the story of why your brand is the right match for their needs. Your brand is a tool, and the more relevant it is to your customer, the stronger the connections will be. Investing in your brand strategy is investing in your growth strategy.” – Dan Collings, Head of Design
The question on everyone’s mind – what is a brand?
At its base level, your brand is an expression of your company. It can also be an expression of a person, or an expression of values, services, and offerings which all define the way you approach things.
‘Branding’ is a word and concept, designed to effectively communicate what the facets of your business stand for as a collective. It represents how you want to make a difference in the world, and presents something that other people can connect with, get behind, and believe in.
While it is a belief system in a way, the reality of a brand is less grandiose, so let’s bring it back down to earth a little.
How does your brand relate to your company?
Within your company, a brand is a tool used to structure and align a collection of people – in this case, your employees – who believe in and are working towards the same thing. With the same vision and mission, your team can work together more effectively to achieve it, and a brand helps distil messaging down so everyone can understand what they should be believing in.
A brand represents how people should feel, and acts as an expression of the collective. It is an incredibly powerful tool, and can create strong internal ethos’ where companies and their employees develop unshakeable bonds.
You see this in cases like Google. While Google is a large corporate organisation with its own internal challenges, the ethos of the company promotes creativity, freedom, flexibility and innovation. They have such a powerful internal brand that those who work there actively promote the brand to friends, family and on social media. It’s a way of thinking that aligns with personal beliefs.
“The only way you are going to have success is to have lots of failures first.” – Sergey Brin, Google co-founder
Your brand and the outside world
To the outside world, a brand stands for something. What this something is can vary – from political parties to products, from advocate brands to those operating in the background, brands make impact across all ranges of services and public perceptions.
There are people who interact with brands, and therefore the companies they represent, because they believe in them and align with them on a personal level. This becomes associated with self-identification, leading to a continued respect and support for the brand that goes beyond normal customer engagement.
How do you create a brand?
Creating a brand is all about strategy. Often times, people get confused about brands, thinking they’re entirely visual. Sure, visuals are part of the toolkit, but supply and demand are the overarching principles which determine your brands direction.
Is there a market for your brand?
There needs to be a market for your brand, and some kind of reason for it to exist. Without an audience, your brand wouldn’t ever be interacted with, and if a tree falls in a forest without anyone there to hear it, what impact could your brand have? Butchered metaphors aside, your brand must facilitate communication with your audience, employees, and the wider world.
Who is your audience?
Once you’ve discovered the need, next is trying to distil who your audience is. This means target demographic, age, location, and all the other information that helps you refine your marketing to what your buyers truly care about.
What pain points do you solve?
Now that you understand who you’re speaking to and what they need, you next need to understand the problem your brand solves, communicate what that problem is, and show people exactly what you can do about it.
A good example of this is Coca Cola with their “Taste the Feeling” slogan. This targets copycats and Coca Cola impersonators, putting an emphasis on the authentic taste and feeling you get from Coca Cola while building up a brand identity that is larger than the product they sell.
Identify your audience, understand their needs, and position your brand in a way that resonates with them while solving their problems. Only then can you begin the process of communicating this brand via your website.
Elements of your brand identity
1. Logo
While a brand is more than visual, you shouldn’t ignore these elements. They’re one of the most noticeable, customer-facing aspects of your brand that should reflect everything about it, from the values and ethos to the service you provide.
Because the visuals are so integral, especially the logo, they end up being one of the final components you end up designing. Your logo and visuals are a manifestation of the strategy for your brand and how it communicates.
A brand tends to be thought of as just a mark, but it is more than that. While it doesn’t need to fit in all your products and services, it does need to be instantly recognisable, memorable, and different (and, from a designer’s POV, it needs to be aesthetically pleasing too!)
If you have all these factors, then your logo is successful! You won’t often see it in isolation, as it will traditionally accompany your strapline, messaging, or imagery which further communicates your offering. However, over time, it will show that your brand can be recognisable, and eventually grow into something of its own.
2. Name
Your company name is part of a versatile toolkit, sat alongside things like your strapline, value positioning, product proposition, and imagery.
Getting the right name for your brand and business can be incredibly difficult. The digital marketplace is incredibly saturated, so you may find you’ve finally come up with the perfect name only to discover it has already been registered or the .com domain has already been taken.
Naming your company is also an opportunity. There are many different trends you can follow – or you can even create something that doesn’t exist. Some examples include:
- Descriptive names which make the product, service, or company purpose explicit e.g. Toys’R’Us or Pizza Hut.
- Unique names that are fully made up e.g. Spotify, Xerox, or Hubba Bubba.
- Compound names made by combining parts of existing words into a new term e.g. PayPal or Facebook.
- Metaphorical names that reflect symbolic imagery or emotion which relates to your brand identity e.g. Tesla or Innocent Smoothies.
- Using these methods to name your brand can help you get quite creative, and come up with a name that both you and your customers can resonate with.
3. Values
Your values help to align people with your brand, and help to direct the strategy for your communication tactics. They may even steer how the tone of voice comes into shape, and what types of audiences you go for. As such, values are a foundational part of your brand that should be established from the very beginning.
Discover why your brand tone of voice is important >
Values don’t necessarily materialise themselves as words – they may just influence the types of words you use, the tone of your copywriting, and the way you deliver your visual brand identity.
By aligning your values with the values and needs of your audience, you can influence people to engage more with your brand – creating a level of personal identification that may otherwise be impossible to achieve.
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Other considerations for your brand and website
Setting a vision for the brand
Because a brand is such a powerful tool, it has the capacity to change the world. World building, a common piece of brand terminology, is all about that – setting a vision for your brand, and thinking about what you can do to invoke change. Think of the world you wish to be in, and see how your company, brand, and operations can align with that through your audiences, user experiences, and brand vision. Then, change your company to match.
This can help you create a trajectory to plan your growth and messaging for current and future audiences, preparing you for demographics and business you might otherwise not have considered. It results in being geared up and ready for your own growth, having the agility to adapt with the times, and planning for a brand that spans ahead with a long-term plan.
Ensuring you are approachable to a wider audience
Sometimes, it’s easy for a company to fall into the trap of thinking inside out, not outside in. Because you know your business so well, there’s bound to be information you’d consider assumed knowledge. Equally, there’ll be things that are important to know internally, but not externally.
A brand is an external communication tool. Thinking outside in means putting the customer first – thinking about how they will interact with your brand and uncovering the right places to invest in your image and business.
Investing in your brand doesn’t mean spending a fee, either. It means positioning your business to excel in your market, discovering new places, introducing new products and services, and evolving as both a brand and a company.
When you invest, you’re employing the experts that allow you to do that. The more you put aside to invest in this process, the greater the chances of success in that.
Tell your true brand story on your website with Squarebird
As a full-stack digital agency, we’ve got all the skills to bring out your brand identity and display it for all to see on your own, bespoke website. Our expertise in providing holistic solutions to common brand problems of identity and awareness mean you’ll get a result that you, your team, and your customers can all own – building up a sense of community and supporting your business growth.
Get in touch today to spread the wings of your brand and website, achieving results that soar.
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