Web

Next Level Series: The Truth Behind Why Your Website is Underperforming (Part 1)

We are in the middle of a blog series featuring specific ways to supercharge your website’s success.

Having a beautiful and well-designed website isn’t enough to produce the kind of marketing results you want.

Your website must be integrated into a larger digital marketing strategy that leverages resources such as video, social media, and search engine optimization to drive people to your site.

But what happens when you are doing all the digital marketing things well and still not seeing a strong return on your website investment? You may have every digital marketing i dotted and every t crossed yet still lag behind in qualified leads. This is a mystery that can be solved and the secret is this: the reason why your website is underperforming may be that you have a weak, inconsistent, or worse, non-existent brand strategy.  

We don’t mean to sound harsh but this is too important to sugar coat. Even more important than leveraging available digital marketing resources, it’s crucial to arrange brand elements in harmony with an over-arching brand strategy that ensures consistency and excellence across all communication channels. The image and message you are presenting on your website must be in alignment with the image and message you present in all customer encounters, both online and offline.

Failure to develop and implement a compelling brand results in messages that are unreliable and inconsistent—two words you never want associated with your business.

In our next two blog posts, we are going to break this down real simple and demonstrate how brand strategy influences marketing strategy. We will show you what to do, what not to do, and how to orchestrate these details and strategies into a symphony of leads and conversions.  

However, there are a few things we need to get crystal clear before we dive into all that. Let’s get on the same page about what a brand is, what a brand is not and why you need a brand strategy.

Brands are About Promises Kept

We have other posts that dive deep into branding, but to summarize, a brand is the full measure of products, services, and benefits offered by a business or nonprofit organization. Branding is the means by which a business or nonprofit leader creates tangible expressions, experiences and personal connections between what they offer and the people they want to reach. Branding often leverages a variety of creative tools to tell a story that conveys the benefits of your brand to your customer and ultimately moves your customer along in a journey in which the customer (not the brand) is the hero.

Branding Leverages All Communication Tools

Your brand is so much more than fonts and color pallets. Logos, design, look, and feel are all very important to branding but these are not your brand. These are tools you use to convey your brand’s message.

It’s not uncommon to misunderstand the difference here, but thinking clearly about your brand—what it is and what it is not— is the beginning of seeing real change in your marketing efforts. If you pour all your efforts into the design but forget to create the experiences and cultivate the messages, your beautiful design will fall short. Instead, create a design that underscores your promise, reinforces your message, and promises experiences you are prepared to keep.

Why You Need a Brand for Your Business or Non-Profit Organization

Every brand has a story to tell and if you’re not telling it, your competitors will. What you are offering customers is unique to you. Tell your story a way that is relatable and conveys empathy and understanding to your personas. Find your brand voice, perfect the tone of that voice, and apply the message in creative yet uniform ways across all available digital marketing channels. Inconsistent messages will always hinder your success and chip away at the integrity of your brand. Know your brand story and tell it with excellence.

We have talked a lot about strategy over the last month. It’s a ton of information and can be overwhelming to make sense of it all— we get it! But we will never back down on strategy and here’s why: strategy drives everything we do in marketing, design, and communications; therefore, strategy will always be the foundation upon which successful campaigns and collateral are built. We want to make sure that our readers are equipped with a strong brand strategy that fits cohesively with your digital marketing strategy and assets.

Stay tuned as we dive deeper into the relationship between your brand and your website in the coming weeks.