It should be a given in 2019 that your brand has a web presence. Regardless of your industry or the field of expertise, a website, in its simplest form, can help your current and potential customers find your business.
Even if you don’t trade online, this valuable information is used by people every day to make purchase decisions and without an effective web presence, you could be losing customers to your competitors.
But I do have a website!
Oh so you do have a website, eh? Well, that’s great! However, without careful design and consideration for the customer or audience, your website may be doing very little for your brand.
You see, without a design that allows customers to find the information they need easily, you could experience high bounce rates (people leaving the site without any interaction) and low session durations (people reaching your site and leaving pretty swiftly after doing so).
What exactly should you consider when building a brand presence online or optimising an existing website?
Getting there is half the battle
Without a website that can be found for relevant services, products or your brand, you could be missing out on a huge portion of ‘organic’ traffic.
In order to ensure you can effectively compete in search engine results, it’s important to establish an SEO strategy that considers all of the technical elements on your site as well as building meaningful and optimised content.
If you’ve got the budget, paid advertising, whether this is within Google Ads or social media paid ads, can support in building an audience by putting your brand in front of a specific type of consumer. Promoting your brand through this method can (almost) instantaneously allow you to reach the people who will find the content on your website the most useful.
Without a social media presence, it can be difficult to truly establish your brand tone of voice and grow alongside your audience. Social media channels are great for shouting about your products services and engaging in meaningful conversations which grow your brand tone of voice. You should ensure that your website is equally engaging as your social media presence in order to drive further interactions once a user clicks through.
Designing a customer journey
Once you’ve managed to actually get users to your site, you need to ensure that there are clearly defined customer journeys which are supported by seamless design. In order to tell your brand story, you need to create a site that has enough quality content to suitably guide your audience through the process.
It’s important to consider the appearance of your site and how this manipulates the user to take a journey. If the end goal is to convert to a sale, you need to ensure you have designed a user journey which offers a plethora of information to suitably convince a customer to buy your products.
It should also be easy to find out more, find products and find a solution to their problem. If the user journey is too fussy, takes too long or is confusing, a user is more likely to drop off and look elsewhere.
Make it beautiful, make it functional, make it secure
What’s a brand without a logo? Can you imagine Nike without the tick? Starbucks without the mermaid? Apple without the… err apple? The key to establishing a brand is creating an identity which is instantly recognisable.
Once you’ve nailed that logo, you should be sure that your wider presence reflects everything your brand is and wants to be. This could include colour and design themes which build your brand personality or a bunch of cool multimedia assets which tell your story in a clear and compelling way.
Finally, you can make the most stunning and user friendly website in the world, but when it’s not secure, you’ll know about it.
Users don’t trust sites that aren’t https and without this, you can see a drop in rankings, and lose customers rapidly. Browsers warn their users about using unsecured sites from the offset, not just those that collect payment information, so it absolutely vital to ensure your site is secure.
Who can shout loudest?
After you’ve put the time and effort into building a great website, you should make sure that everyone sees it right?
Without some kind of marketing presence, you’re not going to see those traffic numbers increase and will struggle to build a following or customer base.
Your marketing should reflect who you are and your brand vision. That means utilising the most relevant social
So, what did we learn?
Your website is a super important asset which can help bolster your companies brand visibility. It helps support the customer journey and can drive brand trust by delivering a streamlined customer journey.
Once you have an established and seamless website in place, you should also look at your acquisition channels. By assesing how users reach your site and what they do once they get there, you can determine an effective marketing campaign which will support in building your visibility.
Also published on Medium.
