Just as it is in person, you have only one opportunity to make a good impression on your website visitors. The challenge is to decide exactly what you want their first impression of your business to be long before you get to any of the steps in putting your site online.
The perceived identity of your business website will either help your marketing efforts a great deal or sabotage your efforts from the beginning. Everything else might be right, but if your site doesn’t come across as precisely appropriate for your niche market, everything else that you do to be successful will be a hard uphill climb.
The first answer to the question of what your appropriate perceived identity should be lies in who your target audience is. So before you ever even begin a website, you have questions to answer about your business and about your customer niche. No, Virginia, just as there is no Santa Claus, “everyone” is not your niche market.
You need to know not only who your customers are, but what kind of company they are most comfortable buying the products or services you sell from. If you’re serious about your business, then you want to be that company that your customers prefer to buy from rather than a company who has put together a really attractive site with no thoughts about the feeling it gives your prospective customer on first sight.
Your presentation of your company is more than just text, color and graphics that make an attractive website. Think of it as almost a costume for your company. IBM is called Big Blue because of those big, blocky, massive blue letters. IBM picked that typeface for precisely the impression it created of a dependable, rock solid financially stable company capable of being a world leader. IBM made all the old International Business Machines company over until everything at IBM was consistent with the new image, until it was a consistent and cohesive image.
You may want your company to give more of a fun image, or a warm fuzzy image, but it’s a decision you need to make before the first word of your copy is on your screen, before you think about colors, before you pick a single graphic.
A good place to begin is with your logo. You need to use your logo consistenly, changing sizes, maybe changing it to grayscale for stationery. Your logo is the branding tool you will use online, working toward instant recognition.
If you see white text on a black rectangle followed by a red rectangle with black text, you think of Ken Evoy and MYSS. Likewise if you surf onto a page and see Cory Rudl’s header and logo, your recognition is instant. If you see a turquoise blob outlined in orange that looks like it was rescued from a ’50’s diner, you know it’s Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch logo.
If any of them decided at this late date that they didn’t like their logo, they would lose years of branding and brand awareness if they changed it. They all picked good logos in the first place, and that’s what you want to do, too.
If your business is successful, your business will change, probably gradually, to meet the demands of the market place. In five years your business will be very different than it is today. You may not even be doing quite the same thing.
Danny Sullivan was not always the leading guru in search engine technology. He investigated search engine technology because he had a client that griped, about 1995, that his site wasn’t listed in the top search engine where the client wanted it. Danny’s present business came into being because he started investigating, for that client, how search engines worked. Danny allowed the demands of the market place to change the direction of his business.
As a result, Danny Sullivan is a huge success, and his company is a huge success. Danny actually is his brand, but so is that distinctive turquoise and orange logo.
There are many stories in the cyber jungle; that’s just one I happen to know and admire—because Danny could have said ‘o, well, sorry, that’s just how it is’ but he didn’t. He did the work to deliver.
If you will bear in mind that what you and your company do today is probably not what your company is going to be doing in five years when you choose a logo, you will be able to keep your hard won branding without outgrowing your logo.
You want a logo and an appearance that will continue to reflect the presence that your customers are looking for, because although your business may alter direction, chances are your niche market will remain much the same.
Smart marketers online have such an incredible opportunity to make themselves their own brand, as the examples above have done. Your logo should introduce you to each new prospect as the company and the person they’re most comfortable doing business with.
Jan is the $25 custom logo maker and business image designer at Success Promotions. Her ‘other’ background is firmly grounded in sales and marketing. Visit http://www.successpromotions.com/simplelogos.htm to present your company the way your niche market prefers you to be.