Brand recognition, awareness and understanding is crucial for your business. You need your customers to know instantly who you are, what you are all about and why they need to connect with your products and services. But how to target brand recognition? How do you create brand awareness?
Your website design branding is crucial here. Your website is your business’ online face, and this is where many of your customers are going to make first contact with your brand. With this in mind, web design and branding should go hand in hand and are crucial to broader brand awareness.
This is why custom-built websites are so important. Read on to learn more about how a custom build can achieve brand recognition and consistency on a grand scale.
Achieving brand awareness with custom-built websites
Business authenticity
A templated website, or one that is provided off the peg or with little customisation and tailoring, might look great on the face of it. However, in a very real sense, it won’t be yours. By this, we mean it won’t have been built to your specifications and won’t reflect your branding and your identity in the proper way. This can make it very difficult for you to effectively communicate your brand and achieve broader brand awareness.
By opting for a custom build (i.e. your branding, design, copy and visuals), you give your business’ branding the chance to breathe, and you can achieve a website that truly reflects your identity. This is a subtle benefit, but it’s an effective one, as customers will respond well to your authenticity and will begin to see you as far more than just another face in the crowd.
Connect directly with your customers
A business relies on the quality of the connection it achieves with customers, and yours is no exception. With this in mind, your website needs to be a key point of contact and interaction, geared directly towards the concerns, needs, wants and motivations of your client base.
But it’s almost impossible to make this connection unless you are speaking the same “language” that your customers do. By this, we don’t mean English, Arabic, Spanish, Hindi, etc — although localisation is of course important. We are instead talking about speaking directly to customers and telling them what they need to know. This includes using the kind of technical language that is expected in your industry, but also extends to crisp and clear delivery of the information that your users are looking for.
With a custom build, it’s far easier to achieve this. You are not encumbered by off-the-peg page layouts and content structures, and instead have the freedom to communicate your brand to customers in a meaningful way.
Support a positive user experience
Your website branding needs to be building towards a goal — most often, the goal of achieving conversions and developing long-term value. This hinges upon user experience. To put it simply, if your users do not have a good experience when they visit your site, this will reflect badly upon you, and these users will simply head elsewhere in search of a better time.
To support this positive experience — and to make it part of your brand identity — the structure of your website needs to be geared towards helping your customers to achieve their unique aims. Users need to be able to move through the site’s architecture in a simple and straightforward manner, encountering little-to-no friction along the way. Unless your business and website structure are very simple, it’s unlikely that you will be able to achieve this with a template. Instead, if your business model is a little more complex, a custom-designed site will have more chance of achieving this experience.
Align web architecture with USP and value proposition
Every brand needs a unique selling point (USP) and a value proposition. This sets out your stall in terms of what you offer to your users and communicates exactly what your business is all about. Of course, your website needs to support this at every turn.
Let’s say that your USP and value proposition involve close support and consultation with clients, delivering them the expert knowledge that they need to get the most out of your products and services.
What happens if your website is structured in a generic way, and informative content is hard to find or poorly presented? Alternatively, perhaps your USP is lightning-quick delivery of products — if your website is slow and difficult to navigate, how will the customer respond to this?
In both of these cases, there is a complete non-alignment between the USP and value proposition and the website structure that is supposed to support this. The likely result is that your users either not identify your brand with your USP and your value, or they will believe that your advertised values are insincere.
This could be seriously damaging to your company.
Boost SEO performance
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, has been a key element in creating brand awareness for many years. Businesses understand that search engines like Google are key sources of traffic and revenue, and so they work to achieve high rankings for their websites on these platforms. But SEO is about more than just putting the right keywords in the right places.
Factors such as bounce rate and site speed are also factored into the equation, as well as other elements such as site structure. To put it plainly, if users are accessing your website and then immediately leaving again, this translates to a high bounce rate and will result in an SEO penalty. Similarly, if your website is slow, or has orphan pages not connected to hub pages in your site’s architecture, this will be reflected in poor SEO performance.
Custom websites put the power back in your hands, helping you to engage your audience to reduce bounce rate while ensuring that the site structure is logical and complete. What’s more, custom web builds include coding designed to influence website speed, helping your business to stay on the right side of Google’s algorithms while supporting a great experience for users.
Put content front and centre
With a custom-built website, you will be able to support your killer pieces of content by delivering them directly to the right users. Your content will be easier for users to find, engaging them and encouraging them towards a conversion.
What’s more, you will be able to ensure that your site structure reflects the information and format of your content. This ties into the authenticity we discussed earlier on, and it will make customers more likely to trust what you publish.
Gain Professional Assistance and Achieve Better Brand Awareness with a Custom Build
It might be tempting to opt for a low cost, convenient off-the-peg option, but this is not going to help you fulfil your aims. Instead, the best idea is to go for a custom build, as this will help you achieve a website that ticks all of your unique boxes. With the right custom web design company on your side, a custom-built website can unlock a world of potential for your brand.
