How to build a great brand and website for my business?

How to build a great brand and website design for my business?

In a competitive market, a great brand and website design is your voice, calling out to customers, rising above the competing noise to be heard loud and clear. They are integral to any businesses wanting to establish itself and grow; in fact, getting it right from the start can have long term implications for future success.

So, what do you need to know to build a brand and a website right for your business and to avoid costly mistakes?  

Why does brand matter to customers, and to your business?

Your brand isn’t just a logo and a product, it’s what your customers feel and experience when they interact with your business or even think about it – it’s your whole reputation on the market.

Buying can largely be an emotional experience, so your brand plays a key part in your target audience’s decision-making process around whether to buy from you or not.

A good brand is also valuable for your business:

• It defines a clear set of core values and benefits, creating customer connections and loyalty.
• A brand builds a consistent message to make your business more recognisable to the public.
• It distinguishes your business from others, giving you a competitive edge with customers who prefer to buy from a brand they know and trust.
• It makes it easier for your established brand to introduce new products to loyal customers.
• It enables a business to define a target audience and speak to it, which means your audience will recognise themselves in your messaging and will want to connect.
• Loyal customers will want to support your brand by giving useful feedback to help evolve products and deliver enhancements that they will value.
• Loyal customers help you with word-of-mouth marketing; customers acting as your marketers are the most effective way of marketing.

How to build a great brand

Knowing why branding matters, and how you want your business to be seen, is a good start. However, you can’t build a solid reputation out of hot air. Businesses must live up to their set of values and ensure that the reality of the service and UX on offer lives up to their words.

When you understand how you want customers to think and feel at every touchpoint with your business, you can then start devising a strategy to define what your brand needs to communicate and how. From this basis, an identifiable visual identity can be designed, along with a narrative, style and channels of communication. This then informs your entire marketing strategy, connecting with your target audience, building momentum around your brand and by creating a community of loyal trusted brand advocates.

It is important to remember that building a brand and building website design isn’t a once-only activity but a continual process that sees your brand evolve as your business, customer needs and marketplace change. Your brand may need to adapt in order to sustain and continue to grow your business, but you must retain a clear sense of your unique selling point (USP) and your mission so customers can see that your core values remain constant.

What makes a great website?

A key component to any business’ branding and marketing strategy is its website building & website design. Not only is your website your 24/7 shop window, but it’s also an important conveyer of your brand, contributing to the look of your business and to your customer’s UX when doing business with you.

As with a brand, the first step to building an effective website design is to understand its purpose. Once clear on what your website needs to deliver for your business, it can be designed to deliver your objectives.

A 5-point website design checklist

In order to achieve your branding objectives, your website should:

• Tell customers about your business, explaining your story and building your credibility
• Contain compelling content to generate business interest
• Connect you to your customers through contact and enquiry pages
• Offer support and value to customers through useful content and advice
• Offer a simple and efficient venue for customers to buy from

Branding and digital transformation

Brand development is clearly important for your website design. It should also be embedded in a consistent way across every element of your business. Digitally transformation offers many opportunities for a business to strengthen its brand, not just by its graphic design or clever coding but by delivering a better user experience (UX) that pleases your chosen audience. Your technology should exist to serve a purpose rather than you finding a purpose to fit your tech.

Our team at Incepteo often gets called in to deliver a range of digital solutions, to help our client increase productivity and provide more value to their end-customers, but we don’t just think about the technical challenges.

Our software development starts with understanding the business needs to ensure suitable solutions are implemented. During the initial discovery phase of a new project, our branding experts are fully engaged to ensure that our technical solutions are aligned with current branding and work towards strengthening it, with the customer experience at the heart of our approach. We only go into the detail of technical architecture, hosting platforms and operating systems once we’ve helped you to define clearly your brand attributes and the UX to be delivered that engages with your customer’s experience.

We also understand that a digital platform must offer cyber-security – a critical element for building customer confidence in a brand and ensuring their data is protected.

Providing the complete echo system of services enables us to work as a “trusted technology partner” with our clients in an entrepreneurial way that is adaptive to their growing needs, nurtures new ideas and responds in an agile way. We take the time to truly understand what’s really important to our customers before applying our decades of technical and business expertise to build and sustain digital innovations that are fit for purpose.

Developing an authentic and effective brand strategy means understanding not only the technology and architecture of a new iOS and Android app, website or SaaS solution, but also the client – not just what they do but why they do it.

Branding is more than just a concept or a design, it must be lived through everything a company does. By investing in the time and expertise at the beginning, you get to define your brand before it defines you.