Using Your Website to Establish Your Brand Identity

Your brand identity will be a major determiner of your business’s success.  People don’t simply buy products; they buy things based on the emotional connections they make with those products.  Your brand helps establish and cement those emotional connections.  Think about your own life: aren’t there some brands you consistently buy or choose not to buy? The bottom line is that most products – whether they are shampoo, motor oil, or automobiles – aren’t significantly different when it comes to their main job.  The reason you’d buy one over the other has a lot to do with brand identity.

So how can you establish a brand identity with your site.  First, you need consistency.  The layout of all of your pages should pretty much the same.  You want the links to be located in the same location.  You want the same use of coloring for all of the site elements, etc.

Additionally, you must remember that a big part of establishing a brand identity is repetition.  On your site that means repeating your tag line, your logo, your name, your unique position statement, etc. frequently and on almost every page.  The more your visitors see and read these things about your company the more they will become ingrained in their brains as part of your brand identity.

A third crucial factor is writing style.  Everything on that web site, including the page content to the articles to the blogs to the news sections, should be rewritten in the same style and tone, preferably by the same author.  If you don’t have a full-time copywriter on staff, then you need to look for a freelancer who can handle your jobs and who is versatile enough to do both persuasive and informative writing.  When your site presents a unified voice, that voice becomes a big part of your brand identity and helps your visitors become attached to your brand.

Other factors to establishing your online identity include getting cheap web hosting that is reliable.  It is very important that your website be available online and having a reliable host is just as important as creating your identity.  After all, if your website isn’t accessible then what good is it?