4 Online Brand Design Tips to Help You Get Noticed
The online world is a noisy and competitive environment where it’s becoming increasingly challenging to get your brand noticed. Nonetheless, brand awareness relies increasingly on your online presence, even in the case of local businesses. A more visible and credible brand will help to raise awareness and increase conversions as well as improve your customer retention rates. Branding requires a creative approach that takes into account the unique aspects of your business, so the following tips should help you to establish a distinct identity:
01. Create a Professional Logo
Branding typically starts with a logo and, as such, this is often the most difficult thing to get right. Choosing a great logo will help you to decide on every other area of your branding style, such as the typefaces and colour schemes you use. Being the primary visual representation of your brand, you’ll need to choose something that suits your industry and appeals to the sensitivities of your target audience. Logos largely fall into three main categories – font-based, illustrative and abstract. Perhaps the best way to find what works for you is to study the competition, but remember that your logo needs to be completely unique.
02. Choose a Design Style
Your design style will likely draw its main inspiration from your company logo, mascot or any other graphic you use to represent your business. Both colours and typefaces evoke different emotions in people, so it’s important to choose something that suits both your company’s individuality and its industry. For example, shades of blue might convey an impression of dependability and strength, while purples point at luxury and exclusivity. With regards to typefaces, sans serif fonts tend to have a modern and minimalistic look, while more elaborate cursive fonts might be better suited to businesses such as upmarket hotels and fine-dining establishments.
03. Be Active on Social Media
Social media is often touted as being the new SEO, and there’s no doubt that maintaining a presence on the world’s largest social networks is extremely important. It’s also one of the most cost-effective ways to increase your brand’s reach and visibility, although it is generally not suitable for promotion itself. Almost every company should have a presence on Facebook and Twitter at least. However, industries that rely on visual appeal should also include platforms like Pinterest and Instagram in their portfolios, while LinkedIn is the number-one social network for professionals and B2B industries.
04. Be Consistent
Consistency is critical in all aspects of online branding. After all, it is your company’s distinct branded style that people will come to recognize, often before they even recognize your name. If you use a different style across multiple websites and other online platforms, your business will start to lose its identity which, in turn, will have a negative effect on important goals like customer retention and raising brand awareness. From the colours and typefaces you use to the style of writing you adopt, your branding needs to be consistent across the board. Similarly, and in the case of local businesses, any reference to your company’s name, address and phone number must be identical.
Branding should play a role in every area of your digital marketing strategy from the advertisements you create to the blog articles you post to the email newsletters you send out. The goal of any branding campaign is to establish a personality for your brand that both humanizes and distinguishes it in its competitive surroundings. Ultimately, your goal should be to get people to recognize any piece of printed or online media immediately from its branded style alone.
Spil© specializes in creative design strategies that help organizations unlock the power of brand equity. We believe that the only way to grow our business is to first grow yours.
