Exposing your audience to a rock solid brand leaves a lasting impression on your site’s visitors, and helps separate you from your competitors. To establish brand consistency across multiple touch points, it’s important to create and stick to guidelines unique to your brand.
Building a strong brand experience comes down to four things:
1. Find your voice
A brand’s voice means more than just the tone you use in your content and communications. It also applies to style, colors, and graphics. Is your brand bubbly, bright, and fun? Or is it straight to the point with clean lines and a matter-of-fact tone? Often times, the type of product or services you're selling as well as your company philosophy can help you determine an appropriate tone. There’s no secret for determining what an audience will respond best to, as all styles can be effective in their own way. So choose what works for you and your creative vision.
2. Be consistent
Once you’ve laid the groundwork for what defines your brand, it’s important to stick to these principles. This applies to your website, emails, social media posts, and any other place users come into contact with your brand. Taking the time to stick to an easy to read font, finding a color scheme that draws the eye and guides your readers, or having consistent verbiage can do wonders to further cement your brand’s presence and make it memorable.
3. Know your audience
While it’s important to decide what your brand is, it’s also important to know your audience, their interests, and how they prefer to communicate. For example, if you’re targeting busy, high-level decision makers, they may prefer something short and sweet—perhaps bullet points are the way to go. If you’re targeting creative individuals, it may be worth investing in a personalized logo and site. Highly visual assets such as videos would also be a great way to go. The more you know and cater to your intended audience, the more successful your brand will be.
To understand your users’ interests, use Google Analytics to view your bounce rates, time on pages, and pageviews—three indicators of user engagement. Understand where you stand in comparison to other sites and, if needed, improve on these rates by creating a stronger connection between your site and your audience, i.e. creating content relevant to your audience’s interests.
4. Prove your Worth
Having a particular value that you provide to your customers (not to be mistaken for price) can help separate your brand from competitors. For instance, what do you provide to your customers that is different or special? This can include everything from innovative products to great customer service and can also be an emotional value (think Kleenex being associated with comfort and support). Just make sure to deliver on any and all promises made on your site.
To learn more about how to develop your user experience, check out the
AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.
Posted by Jay Castro
From the AdSense team
@jayciro
