When it comes to branding, inclusivity should be one of your top priorities. After all, if you’re not thinking about how your brand can appeal to as many people as possible, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. We’ll discuss why inclusivity is so important when it comes to branding and offer some tips on how you can make your brand more inclusive. So, read on to learn more!
User Experience Matters
Your brand’s user experience should be top-notch if you want to survive in today’s competitive marketplace. And part of creating a great user experience is ensuring that your brand is inclusive. You need to think about how people of all backgrounds and abilities will interact with your brand and what you can do to make sure that everyone has a positive experience. Your UX should be compliant and based on numerous tests and evaluations. For example, if you have a website, you need to make sure that it’s accessible to people with disabilities. That means using clear and concise language, adding alt text to images, and using fonts that are easy to read.
- You also need to think about the overall tone and voice of your brand. Are you using language that is welcoming and inclusive? Or are you using language that could alienate certain groups of people? It’s important to be mindful of the words you use when you’re talking about your brand and make sure that everyone feels welcome.
Creating an Inclusive Brand Identity
Your brand identity should also be inclusive. This means creating a visual identity that represents all the people who interact with your brand. When it comes to choosing colors, fonts, and images for your brand, make sure that you’re not excluding any groups of people. For example, if you’re using images on your website or social media channels, make sure that they’re diverse. Use images that represent different genders, races, and cultures. And if you’re using people in your images, make sure that they’re not all thin and able-bodied. Showing a variety of body types will make your brand more relatable to a wider range of people. It’s also important to think about the overall tone of your visuals. Are they friendly and approachable? Or are they cold and sterile? Again, you want to make sure that everyone feels welcome when they see your visuals.
Making Your Marketing More Inclusive
Your marketing efforts should also be inclusive. This means creating ads and social media content that appeals to a wide range of people. When it comes to your ad campaigns, make sure that you’re not using offensive language or images. And if you’re using people in your ads, make sure that they’re diverse. When it comes to social media, you need to be careful about the language you use and the content you share. Again, you don’t want to alienate any groups of people. So, be mindful of the words you use and the topics you discuss. If you’re not sure whether something is appropriate, err on the side of caution.
- Social media strategy: A great way to show inclusivity is to use a social media listening tool to see how people are talking about your brand. You can use this information to make sure that you’re using the right language and tone when you’re talking about your brand. And if you see that people are using offensive language when they’re talking about your brand, you can address it directly.
Engaging With A Wider Audience
You need to think about how you can engage with a wider audience. This means reaching out to influencers and thought leaders who represent a variety of groups. When you collaborate with these people, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience and make your brand more inclusive. For example, if you’re trying to reach a more diverse audience, you can collaborate with influencers who have a large following among people of color. You should also think about the events you sponsor and the conferences you attend. Make sure that these events are inclusive and represent a variety of people. By attending and sponsoring these types of events, you’ll be able to show that your brand is committed to inclusivity.
Inclusivity is important for branding because it allows you to engage with a wider audience. When you make an effort to be inclusive, you’ll be able to reach more people and create a better user experience for everyone. So, keep these tips in mind as you work on your brand identity and marketing campaigns. And always remember to think about inclusivity when you’re making decisions about your brand.
Every company has a unique value proposition (UVP) and something they excel at. The thing that makes you more desirable than the competition is likely your UVP. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort building expertise, but you also have to showcase it or your potential customers will never know what’s so great about your company.
McKinsey recently released a report pointing to the impact of COVID-19 on innovation. Digitization rose exponentially due to the necessity of staying home. This created more space for entrepreneurs, with 1.5 million new business applications in the U.S. alone.
If you want to stand out from the crowd, you must show what makes your brand different. Here are the top ways to showcase your expertise along with a few examples of companies doing it right.
1. Use Photo Evidence
Sometimes you don’t have to say a word to show your expertise. The right photograph is worth 1,000 words. Rather than saying you create amazing websites, show off some screenshots of those sites. Instead of pointing to your updated equipment, share an image of it.
Invest in photographs of your top players. A professional headshot makes a different impression than an image shot in someone’s backyard.
Leroy Merlin is a French interior design firm. Rather than talk about their many successful designs, they show some of them in unique representations. You can see everything from a teen bedroom to a living room.
2. Use Numbers
If you’ve been in business for a while, your experience is obvious. Use cold, hard numbers to show users how much expertise you have. You can also highlight some of your more interesting projects, but for your headline or tagline, utilize the number of years and why that makes you an expert in your industry.
EAM-Mosca states they have 35 years of experience with a team of experts in the industry. They then offer advice from their people in strapping machines, materials, spare parts and service and support advice. They make it clear they can offer an all-around solution to users.
3. Know Your UVP
In order to share your unique value, you first must know what it is. What do you bring to the table that no other brands like yours offer? You should study the competition to see what their UVPs are. Choose something outside the norm.
At the same time, your UVP should be something your target audience cares about. You might have the cleanest factory floor in the area, but if people don’t understand the benefit to them, they won’t care.
4. Let Your Value Speak for Itself
Some people are kinetic learners and they have to try something before they’re convinced of its value. One thing you can do with service as a software (SaaS) type business is to offer a free trial. If you sell a physical product, you can showcase the advantages via a video or customer testimonials.
Gong offers potential leads the opportunity to try out their software simply by sharing an email. Note how they talk about the advantages of their software in one short paragraph and then get right to the call to action (CTA) of getting them to sign up to try it out.
The company knows if they want you to continue to use them into the future, they need to sell you on the convenience of the product by getting you to use it and see how much it helps you.
5. Tell a Story
Since the beginning of time, people have loved to sit around a fire and share stories. When you share your expertise via a tale, consumers are much more likely to listen and absorb what you have to say.
Storytelling can enhance your images and headlines. Think about a fun way to share your expertise via video, infographics or blog posts.
Pipers Farm utilizes family farms and they tell a story about how they started and the families they work with. It pulls the reader in and shows what is unique about the company. You go along their journey with them and learn about their expertise in the process.
6. Use Icons
Another idea is using icons to set off your areas of expertise. You can list out the benefits of doing business with your brand and list each with an image, subheading and a few details about the thing you’re good at.
You’ve likely seen this method utilized on service sites where they say something like, “Benefits of our service” and then list out the specific features they feel they excel at. The way people see you and the image you want to project are sometimes two different things, so make sure you can back up any claims you make.
Know Your Strengths
Before you can highlight your expertise, you have to know where you excel. If you have weak areas that discourage potential clients, work to turn them into positives. Once you have a list of the things you thrive at, go ahead and share what they are with anyone who visits your website.
Ideally, you’ll share your expertise throughout your site. Your blog posts should highlight your experience. You’ll have testimonials, reviews, benefits lists and many other elements all pointing to you as the best choice for the person to buy from.
Eleanor Hecks is the editor of Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.
Most people go looking for answers online to help them decide which products and services to purchase. If you don’t have a website, customers can’t find you, and your competitors with websites may have an advantage over you. Also, a website can build your brand’s credibility and visibility, especially if it’s optimized for search engines.
Before a customer can start navigating your website, the first impression of your brand is formed by what they see. Since the first glance counts, not just any website will work. So, if you want to be competitive and succeed in the modern marketplace, you should consider a professional website that reflects your brand effectively.
Here’s how you can create a website that can boost your brand, build credibility and trust, and increase your bottom line.
Research And Analysis
Any good business tool should begin with solid research. It’s recommended to study and know your customers, competitors, and brand’s niche and how they all fit your brand. The research will give you direction and save you time during the actual creation of the website. The clue here is to start with your target customer and build from there.
- Your target customers: Start by defining who your target audience is, what they want, and the information you want them to have about your brand. Put yourself in their shoes and list everything you would want to know if you visited the website.
- Your competitors: It’s important to consider your competition so that your website can offer a better customer experience. Check where they fall short so that yours can cover the issues they haven’t. Also, consider the competitors’ helpful features that you can potentially incorporate into yours. Let your website give customers a reason to purchase from you and not your competitors.
- Your niche: Your website should be reflective of your brand’s industry. Make it easy for customers and visitors to connect your website to a particular niche without any difficulty.
The most important thing is to ensure that the three key points above merge and fit into your brand. Reviewing your tag lines, logo, and related images, as well as for deciding whether you want a formal or casual tone for your website are good places to start.
Also, deciding if you need to hire a web designer or to use templates and blocks from website building services is key. If you decide on website builders, ensure to make comparisons such as squarespace vs. wix to know which one works best for you.
Reviewing Everything Together
By this stage, you should know of your target audience, your competitors, and how your website should relate to your brand.
During the review, you should:
- Have a defined brand personality that tells the customer something about your brand that resonates with them and the industry that you are in.
- Decide what you must include on the website and what you should let go of.
- Ensure that the images speak clearly to your target audience, bring power to your brand, and tell customers why they should choose you over your competitors.
- Ensure you have something valuable to offer your customers, that other websites may not.
Keep reviewing and revising until everything fits properly, is in tune with the brand, and unique in comparison to other companies.
Creating The Actual Website
This is where it now comes together. It’s important to keep your brand identity in mind when creating the actual site. Below are the components to consider when creating a website that meets customers’ expectations while giving your brand power.
- Content: What you say and how you present it on your website is important. Ensure to match the images with the relevant content. It should be valuable and help the customers understand your brand, the products and services you offer. Always incorporate the best keywords that customers are likely to use when searching for products or services in your niche.
- Navigation: Don’t make it hard for customers to find their way around your website. Simplify their search with simple navigation without having to go through a long process to find what they’re looking for.
- Design: The site needs to be appealing to the eye. The images, colors, illustrations should all complement each other. Your website indirectly teaches your customers about the brand. Create a balance between appearance and practicality. The design should also reflect your brand’s industry.
- Optimize your site: To be found easily on search engines, you need to optimize your website content and structure. This is the assured way to appear on search engines. If the site is optimized correctly, you can appear among the top search results. This is where you want your website to be so that your customers can find it.
- Call for Action: After doing your best to create an attractive, practical, and functional website, encourage your visitors to act. After all, the reason you want to power your brand through the website is to generate sales. Ask them to play their part and buy or share the information.
Keep Updating
After your website is up and running, don’t stop there. A website is a work in progress. Technology, graphics, and design continually change, and so should your website. Only a few years ago, a website didn’t need to be mobile friendly but today it’s a necessity. Also, make regular updates to the content to keep it current and reflective of any changes in your business from time to time.
A website should continue growing as the business and the brand grows. The most unfortunate thing for your brand would be being associated with dormancy. Regular blog posts are an excellent way to show your customers you’re still active. New information is attractive to clients and search engines as well.
A Website For Brand Power
A website holds great potential for empowering your brand. It can reach audiences that other business tools may not and empower your brand by placing it in the limelight. It also holds the power to increase your business’s bottom line, besides working for you 24/7.
No matter your business’s size, you can have a professional website that can improve your brand’s power over your competitors and for improved interaction with your customers.
The colors you use to represent your company are one of the strongest branding weapons you have. Think about large corporations such as Ford Motor Company with their blue oval or Coco-Cola with its red and white color scheme. We associate those colors with those brands because the companies use them over and over on their products and in their communications.
The colors you use in your designs have a psychological impact on users. Use color to reach different cultures, create an emotion or grab attention. Don’t be afraid to take your brand color palette and then add a contrasting pop of color to your calls to action (CTAs). You’ll find so many ways to use color in your site design. Here, we’ll look at eight potential methods of incorporating brand color and a few examples of how other brands achieve a specific look.
1. Choose One Strong Color
One method of using color in your designs is choosing one bold color for your brand and using it everyone — your logo, website, social media pages, advertising and so on. If you base your color palette around a single color, you need to make sure this color is bold and defines you as a brand. Red might indicate excitement, pink may represent girly products and dark blue resonates with seriousness for endeavors such as finances.
Home Depot is a prime example of a brand with a single, bold color it uses everywhere — especially on its website. The orange reminds viewers of construction and building, so it fits perfectly with a home improvement brand. The logo is an orange box with cutout white letters with the brand name. Orange accents are used throughout the site, repeating in lines, bars, CTAs and even in some of the graphics, such as the stars.
2. Use Color in Photos
An interesting way of incorporating your brand’s color palette into your website design is reflecting main colors within the images you choose. You’ve likely seen this technique used with photos that seem to almost blend with the rest of the elements on the page. Achieve this through careful editing or by choosing color in the pictures you take. You may need to make some tweaks to the saturation and color levels to get the look to match up perfectly, but you can achieve the color through any professional photo editing program.
3. Use Color As Background
Another option for incorporating your brand colors into a website is using the colors as part of the background. A solid colored background doesn’t distract from other images on the page, allowing you to share photos of your work in action or highlight products without pulling away attention.
Many different methods are available for adding color to the background. You can go with a white background and add a band of color. Or, use a gradient that incorporates all of your brand colors and shifts slowly from one to the next. You might also simply add color borders around other images or add color to the background of a navigation bar or header.
SITECH West does a wonderful job incorporating its brand colors into its overall design. The site relies heavily on the brand’s main dark blue colo and adds in some white and darker blue to highlight the top navigation bar and information. Further, some of the site’s CTA buttons and small underlines underneath page headings feature a splash of the logo’s yellow. The effect is subtle but incorporates its brand image nicely.
4. Add Color to Typography
Any strong website design features beautiful typography. Whether you use type for your landing page headline or simply have a font hierarchy, think about the colors you want to use and how they highlight your brand colors. You can use color for body text, but make sure there is a notable contrast between the background and the text color. Also, don’t forget about issues such as accessibility and how colorblind people might view different colors on your page.
Look for opportunities to incorporate a splash of color, such as underlining a headline in a color from your palette or adding an accent shadow to text.
5. Play with Your Name
If your brand has a color in its name, you can have fun with your website color palette. Or, if people associate your business with a color such as green for money or red for food, you can play on that association as well. Think about how to highlight that color best. If you want to use yellow, you might put it on a black background so that it pops. Or, if your brand is Dark Blue Gadgets, you might place a dark blue color over white.
Gold Bar Whiskey is the perfect example of playing on the title of a brand to come up with an eye-catching website that draws users in. The site utilizes a black background so that the color gold pops on the page. Then the creators added the brand’s gold coin logo, gold icons, gold type at the top and a gold line. The larger gold typography lays over a darkened image, so the color still pops. The result is a beautiful and striking website that exudes class.
6. Go Outside Your Color Palette
Maybe your color palette doesn’t translate well online. Don’t be afraid to make a few minor adjustments. If your color palette features pastel blue and yellow, go with a bolder blue and yellow. Add an accent shade that complements the colors you’re already associated with. If your logo also doesn’t look good on a screen, ask your designer to provide a black and white style or change the colors to something bolder. While your color palette is an integral part of your branding, don’t be afraid to change it as needed if it just doesn’t look right.
7. Add Animation
The web hosts around 1.7 billion sites, a number that changes constantly. You have a lot of competition out there clamoring for consumer attention. Anything you can do to make your site stand out helps. Adding some animation and incorporating your color palette into this animation draws user attention and helps highlight your brand. Either add animated graphics in brand colors or add color to text and animate the flash of color.
Mellow Mushroom has a sort of psychedelic-looking animation that grabs user attention from the moment they land on the page. Note how the color yellow pops behind the letters and flashes a bit, giving it a living look. Animated graphics of pizza slices and globs appear in the background’s yellow swirl, which is reminiscent of the universe.
8. Reverse the Colors
Do you typically use bright red with a small splash of white? What if you turned that around and used white with a dash of red for your website? The color palette remains the same, but the central shade and highlight colors change. This still gives users a sense of who you are and associates those colors with your company, but it allows you to use hues which are easier to read on electronic devices.
Incorporating Colors Online
Figuring out the best use of colors without sacrificing online readability is challenging. With a little creativity, you can make even tricky color palettes memorable enough for users to come back to your site in the future. Put the aesthetics and usability of your design over just using specific colors — but stay as close to your true branding as possible — and you can’t go wrong.
Lexie Lu is a designer and writer. She loves researching trends in the web and graphic design industry. She writes weekly on Design Roast and can be followed on Twitter @lexieludesigner.