Published on June 28, 2012 The importance of a brand for your online store
Because it’s value is hard to measure, branding is often put into the too hard basket for many small businesses starting up. This is a huge mistake because branding is what you really need if you want your store to stand out.
Branding is more than just your logo design and colours, it’s everything about your business. It’s the personality of the business. It’s the way you market your products. It’s the way you present yourself in your business cards, in emails, in letters, how you answer the phone. It’s the little things about the way you present yourself. If you don’t build a powerful brand, you won’t be able to compete against your competition, or fend off new entrants. These are some of the reasons why the big online stores spend so much money defending and positioning their store.
How can a brand help your online store
The smaller you are the more important branding will be to your online store. Branding creates a connection between the buyer and the seller, and a reason to buy again from you. Over a number of purchases it creates trust and loyalty. The more competitive your industry, the more important this will be.
Understanding branding for an online store
If you had to sum up your idea, your approach, your point of difference, your personality and your story in just one thought – what would it be? That’s your brand. Your brand represents the aspects of the things that make up your business personality. These things include the things that people see about your business (your colours, your logo, your website design), as well as the things that people feel about your business (whether you feel inviting, efficient, cluttered, quality, professional, etc.).
There’s a famous story about a group of blind people feeling different parts of an elephant and all thinking that they’re a different animal because they don’t have the big picture. Your customers will see your brand from different perspectives and different angles so it’s important to ensure that all the different parts of your brand work together so no matter what angle your customer is coming from they all experience the same thing. Corporates use jargon like “ticking all the boxes” or “singing from the same song sheet” to describe concepts like these but it can be summed up in two words: in-sync. Everything must work together with synergy if you want your business to stand out from the competition and be instantly recognised.
What matters for your online store?
Here are some of the important parts of your online store design that must work together to help you forge a powerful brand:
- Your brand name and domain name.
- Colours – they must create the right feelings in the minds of the people who you are targeting. They can’t just be colours you like.
- Font faces – do they generate the kinds of emotional responses that you want?
- Wording – the way you write is as important as what you say.
- The Voice – how you write and whose perspective are you writing to – are you formal? inviting? helpful? informative? fun?
- Visual Styles – do you primarily use photos or line text, white space or heavy content, banners or plain text? static or with motion?
- How you present yourself on other sites – if you use banner advertisements for example, what do they say and how are they presented?
These are not all the decisions you need to make when it comes to design, but it’s a starting point for getting started. Your web design company may be able to help you get started with this if you don’t have a firm idea already.
How do you go about branding?
Working with your design company is the first thing you can do. Don’t just assume that you need a logo, get a standard logo developed and leave it at that. You need to do more planning than this so that the logo isn’t your starting point. A great logo design has the pillars of branding built into it, so do the ground work first and your logo designer will do a much better job of what they have been asked to do. You can’t re-create the Mona Lisa with just a paintbrush.
Branding doesn’t stop with your site design
Once you have a custom design that stands out in your industry, you can’t stop there. How you write your product descriptions matters, what types of banner advertisements you write, your shipping policies, your returns policies, your product images, how you write promotion pages, the types of promotions that you run, how you advertise your business offline. How you follow up with your customers after they buy and how quickly you send items out to them can also have an impact. Building a brand is about getting everything that you do working together so you make a memorable name for yourself and start generating referrals and repeat business. Make it work and you can build a successful business in any type of economy with any level of competition.
If you haven’t already done, start today with a custom ecommerce design for your current or soon to start store.
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