What comes first? → Brand identity vs a website build
Before the internet, a potential customer would walk into your shop, see what products or services you had on offer and speak to a member of your team. Nowadays, your customers head to Google.
Where do they end up? On your company’s website.
Rather than seeing the outside of your shop and being welcomed by a friendly member of staff, in today’s technology-driven world, a customer’s first experience of your business is your website.
So how can you make an incredible first impression?
Everything you need to make your business stand out comes from your brand identity. If you get your brand right, everything else will flow naturally across your whole business, whether that be online or in a physical location.
Why is a having a brand identity so important?
Developing a brand identity is the critical first step that must be taken before you even think about creating a website. If you don’t think about your brand first, you may end up wasting your time and money as well as losing customers and revenue in the meantime.
A brand identity influences the way a product, service or individual is perceived by those who interact with it. It’s not just about logos or visual elements - it’s about what people feel when they experience your brand and how you can play a part in enhancing those feelings. Branding creates an expectation of value, and you need to be able to deliver this value consistently every time anyone interacts with your brand. This includes visual interactions such as via your marketing activities as well as the interaction with your employees and all written communication - every single interaction counts!
You want your customers to establish a recognisable and positive emotional connection with your brand identity and a successful brand strategy can you help you do just that.
When developing a brand strategy, you need to ensure that you consider →
Who you are
Your beliefs
Your values and promises
Your desired market positioning
Your target audience
The direction you would like the business to take in the future
What sets you apart from your competitors
How these are all communicated in a succinct way
If you don’t consider your brand strategy and identity before you build a website, it’s highly unlikely your visual design, marketing activities and even your service model will be as effective as it could be.
How can you ensure all your communications are delivering the same brand and customer experience consistently if you haven’t established a clear brand strategy? Simply put, you can’t! Building a brand identity and a brand strategy must come first to build the foundation for your brand to help you achieve your long-term objectives. Aligning everything in one place will help you to deliver consistency, communicate a clear brand message across all channels and fulfil your brand promise to your stakeholders.
A brand could be as ‘simple’ as you like, but even the simplest of brands require thought, reasoning and creative insight (and often the simplest of brands take the longest to execute!). It takes time, insight and planning to distil your brand down to its purest and most authentic form.
A successful brand identity always starts with a strategic plan to ensure you are doing the right things at the right time. You need to give yourself the space to think it through, create it, design it, build it, defend it and ultimately evolve it over time.
To be effective, all brands must be differentiated, compelling and relevant to your target audience.
Many people think that building a brand is a complex process, it’s not. A brand essentially needs to answer three questions for your potential customers →
Why do they need your product or service?
Why are you different from the competition?
Why is your product or service better?
Simplicity isn’t necessarily easy – it takes time, effort and investment.
Once you have a brand strategy, you need to execute it and articulate it. You can do this in the form of a website.
Why do you need a brand identity to build a successful website?
Web design is an important next step to take after establishing your brand identity. It’s an opportunity to take your branding elements and bring them to life to really begin to tell the story of your business and its brand. With an existing brand identity, you can ensure that the visual aesthetic of your website remains inherently connected to your brand.
Taking the time to focus on building your brand also helps inform a potential web designer or developer how to visually lay out and structure your website. To put this into context, if your brand is colourful and quirky, this will help a web designer or developer understand that they shouldn’t create a high-end and chic website layout for your project. This can be key to transforming a bland, disjointed website to one that really connects with your specific target audience.
Brand design and web design go hand in hand. You’ve probably heard of horror website projects that just drag on and on for months or even years. They are difficult to manage and keep track of and they are even more difficult to execute. These disorganised projects often lead to websites that lack focus, don’t meet the need and goals of a project and crucially do not resonate with the target audience.
A strong brand identity helps make the process of building a website so much more straight forward and efficient. With a visual aesthetic of a business already confirmed through a brand identity, a web designer doesn’t have to waste any time (or investment) creating an aesthetic for their client. Instead of worrying about the visuals, they can focus on the functionally and user experience of the website to give you a greater chance of achieving the results you’re looking for more effectively.
Some final thoughts
Before you invest into building a website, consider the importance of your brand
A brand identity creates a visual foundation for building a website. It ensures that your website will remain cohesive with the rest of your brand and allows your website to evolve with your brand as it’s been built with the same visual foundation.
With an already established brand identity, you and your website designer will have a benchmark for knowing what your website should look like, ensuring that your website development will be completed on time, as your developer won’t have to waste time co-ordinating the aesthetics of your site and waste time making decisions that don’t align with your brand.
Ultimately, you will save yourself money and time because you will be creating visuals for your business that grow from each other. You won’t have to waste money redoing things that are no longer in line with your brand identity.
Well-positioned and consistent brands that meet, or ideally exceed, customer value expectation with every interaction and touchpoint not only generate loyalty, but will drive customer behaviour. By starting with a brand identity and strategy, you will be able to create a more successful brand in the long run as well as saving yourself time and money. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re an established business, it’s not too late to consider developing your brand identity. Creating a new, or developing an existing brand strategy, can help you rejuvenate your business, taking it to the next level or in a new direction.
