Branding and Web Design: How to Use Both to Grow Your Business

An exceptionally designed website does more than just provide information – it becomes a centerpiece of your overall brand image. Likewise, a thoughtfully crafted brand strategy should directly inspire the look, feel, and messaging on your company site. 

When branding and web design align and reinforce one another, they become a force for elevated growth. This article reveals how small businesses can leverage branding and web design best practices in harmony to attract more customers and expand revenue.

Build Your Brand Foundation First

Before even beginning branding and web design, first devote time to build a solid brand foundation and strategy for your company centered around four key elements:

• Clearly Define Your Brand Mission  

Your brand mission is an inspirational statement communicating the meaningful long-term change you exist as an organization to make in the world.

It declares what motivates you to keep improving the lives of customers and communities over many years.  

For example, a safety product company’s brand mission could be to “create security and prevent harm in communities we serve.” An educational company’s mission might read “empower lifelong curiosity, growth and achievement for learners worldwide.”

This declared motivation should guide all other branding and web design choices over seasons to come. Revisit it often when needing direction on difficult branding decisions at intersections down the road.

• Pinpoint Descriptive Brand Personality Traits

Your brand personality captures the distinctive essence and character your business conveys consistently across customer touchpoints. Summarize it in 5-7 descriptive words like sophisticated, friendly, bold, confident, academic, sympathetic or fun. 

These adjectives then shape visual design, language, imagery, and messaging choices made everywhere customers engage your company – especially prominently on your website.

For example, an academic educational brand might exhibit personality traits like intellectually curious, insightful, thorough or knowledgeable. A children’s toy brand could emphasize whimsical, friendly, energetic and clever instead in branding.

• Define Your Distinct Brand Voice

Tone of voice, vocabulary and style all contribute to your distinctive brand voice when communicating written or verbal messages. Consider whether your brand voice leans formal, casual, conversational, sympathetic, witty or academic in flavor.

This voice should remain recognizable to customers across web content, blog posts, social media, sales materials and ads. So intentionally develop the linguistic flair matching what you want your brand personality to be.

• Create Visual Brand Identity Components

Finally, assemble visual branding identity assets conveying your brand visually including:

• A logo 
• Brand colors 
• Typography selections
• Complimentary accent colors
• Any unique graphical patterns, motifs or illustrations

This visual language recurrent across touchpoints like business cards, packaging, storefront signage and ads maintains recognizability when extended to your website design too.

With branding essence captured across those four elements, conveying a consistent brand image through web design follows more fluidly.

Choose the Right Branding and Web Design Partner

Your website will become the digital epicenter representing your brand online. So you want a web design firm that can deeply understand and execute on your unique brand strategy.

Find experts who appreciate branding and share case studies of websites strongly aligned with their client’s brands.

Avoid agencies that simply plug you into a pre-made templated site or rigid content management systems with little customization. Be wary too of individual “web developers” lacking skillsets in visual design, user experience (UX), and conversion rate optimization.

Ideally, your branding and web design partner will include specialists across multiple disciplines:

• Brand Designers
• UX Experts  
• Visual Designers  
• Copywriters  
• Developers

This expanded expertise allows crafting an online presence custom-matched to all you want your brand to convey. 

Build Brand Consistency Across Website Elements 

With aligned experts on board, consider website elements one-by-one to ensure brand consistency.

Visually embody distinctive brand personality adjectives across your website using strategic color palettes, font choices, graphical treatments, page layouts, imagery, animations and message framing. 

Evaluate if current elements exhibit intended personality traits or if refreshed creative better conveys your brand across all touchpoints.

• Spotlight Your Brand Mission 

Prominently display your inspirational brand mission on high-visibility pages like:

• The homepage introduction  
• A dedicated “Our Mission” page
• “About Us” and “Culture” pages
• Subtly integrated into “Contact” page content  

Repetition keeps visitors cognizant of your motivations multiple times during site engagement lifecycles.

• Speak in Your Unique Brand Voice   

Ensure web content projects the same linguistic style developed on existing channels like social, ads and sales collateral through aligned vocabulary, phrasing, formality and personality-reinforcing descriptions.

• Craft Conversion-Focused Experiences 

While conveying brand essence through design aesthetics matters enormously, visitor journeys still require optimization for commercial outcomes.

Apply UX best practices to guide visitors seamlessly towards conversions through:

• Intuitive Navigation

Strategic main and secondary menus with simplified architecture direct visitors quickly to next intended actions.

• Seamless Page-to-Page Flows

Logical next-page paths match visitor intent anticipating needs through purchase funnels and contact/sign-up flows minimizing distraction.

• Motivating Value Copywriting

Concise, scannable paragraphs focus on resonating visitor benefits over features – inspiring contact, sign-ups and purchases.  

• Prominent and Attractive CTAs  

High-contrast, benefit-driven calls-to-action placed strategically in hotspots attract attention and click-throughs explicitly towards conversions.

• Scan-able Typography

Careful text formatting, spacing, contrast and strategic use of headers facilitates quick information digestion keeping visitors engaged.

• Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques 

Tactics tailored to your niche audience like social proof, scarcity and guarantee messaging compel visitors closer towards transactions. 

Test and Iterate Site Design 

Keep improving the implementation of your brand strategy digitally by testing alternative creative approaches and content variations against visitor response. For example, experiment with:

• New homepage imagery reflecting brand adjectives
• Adjusted design layouts 
• Different supporting color combinations    
• Varied text and slogan content
• Changes to key action placements or visual prominence

Assess user behavior and conversion rates to identify the most effective options matching both your brand essence and growth objectives. Then double down by expanding winning variations across more site pages.

Evolve Your Website Alongside Your Brand

Finally, recognize your website demands ongoing evolution to align with where your brand heads in the future. Set reminders twice annually to evaluate if the current site design integrity and content still fully reflects your brand as it is right now. 

But also consider if small adjustments could better align with where you want the brand positioned long-term. For example, gradual UX upgrades, feature additions, or shifts towards new brand personality traits not strongly conveyed digitally yet. 

Continual improvement unifies website visitor experiences with your brand’s developing identity and maturity over seasons and years.

Tying Your Digital Presence to Brand Strategy 

In today’s crowded markets, an indistinct commodity brand won’t sustain – but a clearly defined brand essence stands out and connects emotionally with target audiences.

Your website then becomes the peak opportunity to extend that brand recognition and affinity digitally through aligned identity, personality, mission and voice.

But brand presence alone fails to grow a business without equally advancing conversion goals. Hence smart branding and web design harmonizes conveying your brand aesthetically with enabling desired visitor actions functionally. Test and refine site elements until brand representation and bottom line results combine to drive growth powerfully.

Then maintain momentum by keeping branding and web design interconnected as each continues maturing well into the future.

It’s a wrap

A strong brand elevates any business above competitors. 

An exceptional website transforms more visitors into customers. But a website strengthening your brand through every user flow and touchpoint is a combination of branding and web design into an unstoppable force for expansion.

Hopefully, this guide provided some tactics to help small business leaders looking to align their websites tightly with carefully crafted branding for greater visibility, trust and loyalty from audiences.

Just remember branding and web design only drive dramatic growth together when treated as two halves of one whole.