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Branding

While look and feel are not considered to be as important as functionality to the user, it does serve another purpose: branding.

The purpose of branding is to get people to recall your company/product/service from memory. The ultimate aim is to get people to trust you more than the competition, and to think of your Website before they think of the competition's Website.

Good examples of Websites that are well-branded are the Search Engines. Do we really know if Google is better than Ask.com or Yahoo.com or one of the others? Or do we just like the Google brand?

Branding is psychological. It exists in the minds of visitors, customers and prospective customers. Slogans in advertising call up the image of the product. That's the power of branding.

Repeated exposure to the brand is vital to producing a successful brand. Small businesses don't have multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to burn their brand into the minds of a large audience. That doesn't mean that there aren't tools at your disposal.

Here are 10 branding strategies for you to apply to your own Website:

1. Repetition - This is very important: keep all of your design elements the same from page to page. Most importantly, display your logo at the top of each page, consistently throughout your Website.

2. Your Website must have its own distinct "feel". The feel should be consistent with the image that you think will be most successful with customers: examples: traditional, fun, old world, high tech, etc. But try to remember that you are appealing to your potential customers and don't get bogged down by some preconceptions of your image.

If your customers are seniors then that's where your Web success is likely to be. Can you expand to other groups? Possibly, but most people want a direct pathway to Website success so matching your Web brand to your best customer is probably the quickest route.

3. Use newsletters to push out your domain name and slogan consisting of your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). The USP is an advertising theory that each ad must make a proposition to the reader/viewer: "buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit."

The USP rules:

• The proposition itself must be unique - something that competitors do not, or will not, offer
• The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product
• The uniqueness can't be too small or too technical for customers to observe the differences in actual practice

4. Use your domain name (like www.LongGroveWeb.com) as your brand. Put it on all of your stationary (letterhead, business cards, post cards, statements, etc.).

5. Leverage your brick and mortar store to push your brand. No customer should leave the store without your URL on a receipt, flyer, or giveaway. Will you be competing with your own store? Possibly, but your store isn't open 24 hours per day and doesn't give your customer unlimited time to browse as well as location-independent access.

6. Implement your domain name and USP into your signature file, so that with every email you send visitors will be further exposed to your brand.

7. Thank you pages - If you have online forms (for visitors to contact you, request more information, subscribe to your newsletter etc.), you most likely have a "thank you" page where you thank visitors for using your form. This is an excellent place to position your logo and slogan.

8. Ebooks - Create free books on subjects of interest to your visitors and allow them to re-distribute to their own visitors. Brand your ebook with your logo, domain name and slogan on every page (also consider pushing your own name to establish your authority on a topic).

9. Publish free articles or contribute to forums - With all of the Websites, blogs, and ezines popping up on the Web every month, the demand for high quality content is immense. You can provide articles for other webmasters/editors to publish on their Websites/ezines. At the end of your article put your name and a link to your Website, with short teaser copy to get people to click on your link (offer a free ebook or some other enticing offer) This is free publicity at its best - not only will you get traffic back to your Website; you'll also add status and credibility to your name (provided your article is of high quality).

10. Autoresponders - These are emails that are sent automatically to anyone who requests them (triggered by sending them an email). Autoresponders are great as they work 24 hours a day without any intervention on your part. Use them to send visitors free reports, articles, list of links, etc. And add your branding copy (logo, name, slogan, USP etc.) at the top and bottom of the autoresponder message, with a link back to your Website.

Nowadays all good Web hosts provide their customers with free autoresponders.

This information was gleaned from several Web marketing sources. As you can see, the investment is small but without efficient branding your Website cannot get noticed in the sea of available choices.

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