Once you’ve clarified your brand message, making it easy to communicate with your target market, you have the foundation laid to align your visuals with this brand messaging. If you’ve been following this series, you’ll know that your brand message can be expressed in a simple statement. It reflects and is reflected in the three parts of your brand and tells your target market what you’re about in just a few seconds. (If you’re still figuring out your brand message, check out how The Big BAM Process can help guide you through all the steps to create this key piece of your brand.)
Aligning your visuals and tweaking your marketing collateral to reflect your brand message is key to attracting the right clients. If your messaging is clear, but your content and visuals aren’t, it creates confusion, and doesn’t position you as a guide for your potential client. We can fix that. This doesn’t mean you need to start over with your visuals or rebrand at all. In fact, you can better align your visuals with your brand message starting right now.
There is a lot of science and psychology that happens when someone visits a website, and this can be a key factor in whether you win or lose a potential client.
Let’s start with what marketers call “above the fold.” This is the very first content you see when you go to a website. This is crucial. It’s where a lot of brands make some big mistakes. When people visit your website they should be able to understand what you are going to help them do in less than seven seconds. If that sounds like a good place for your brand message to be communicated—you’re right.
I see brands clutter this prime real estate with call to action (CTA) buttons and visually overwhelming content. Doing this makes a potential client work too hard—to decide if they want to click or ignore those buttons, or find the content they actually want. This creates subconscious resistance to your brand messaging and anything else you have to say to them later.
I recommend using both a direct CTA (such as a “Register Now” button) and a gentler transitional CTA (Such as an invitation to “Enter your email address for a free copy of our ebook.”) in the top-right of the website. Choose visuals that will reinforce your brand messaging. I typically advise my clients to keep the visuals minimal in the hero banner (that’s the main visual element above the fold) for the most effective results. A slider can work in this position, too, when two slides are used creatively, but can otherwise just be a distraction.
The text you choose for the hero banner needs to address an internal struggle or conflict that you can solve. Below the hero banner, you might place the CTA or a brief sentence stating your solution to their problem, or showing empathy for that struggle while also implying you’re an authority who can bring them the solution. You want them to feel like they are in precisely the right place. Again, this all comes back to your brand message.
Need some help aligning your website to your brand or building a new website? Get in touch—we’d be happy to chat about how we can help.
You can take the same messaging—your CTAs, your hero banner text, your visuals, etc.—and ensure your brand’s entire online presence reflects this message. That includes all of your social media platforms and anywhere else your brand lives.
Seek feedback from clients and create incentives or a reward system to show the value of the person’s time when you ask for their opinion.
This is part of a series on simplifying and aligning your brand message with your marketing. Start reading the series from the beginning, or let us know how you’ve been able to implement the tools we’ve discussed.