Website Success:

Branding Awareness Tactics

Among all touch-points, a website is the single most powerful element you can use to enhance and promote your brand.  Enhancing your brand, how others think of you, should be a top priority for your organization.  Following are 10 tips on how you can use your website to accurately advance and promote your brand.

1. Tag Line: A tag line is a unique, easily remembered and compelling proclamation about the work you do that summarizes your mission, vision and values.  It works to demonstrates what you do and why it is significant and can be used on every page of your website to reinforce your importance. 
2. Design:  An effectively branded website feels distinctive and highlights the uniqueness of your organization. Your logo, color scheme, and general web design reinforce what you do and what makes you unique. Your design should communicate what you are all about and give visitors a sense of your key values and priorities.
3. Pictures and Videos:  What you write on your website is important, but there is more to content than copy.  Visuals like pictures and video can work to convey and invoke emotional images that more effectively present your brand in a positive way. Select them carefully and use them gingerly to illustrate your brand.
4. Whitepapers: Your willingness to share your knowledge by providing whitepapers, case studies, op-eds, and other reflections about which you are knowledgeable provide tangible proof of your expertise and work to promote your brand. Create a web-repository of information for your audience to learn more.
5. Pubic Relations:  When the press publishes articles about your program and services, be sure to include them on your website. Articles illustrating your activities show what you do in tangible ways that allow your audience to connect with you on a real-world level.
6. News & Information: The web offers an ideal place to present related information not necessarily about you, but about your field.  A news and information section further demonstrates your expertise and knowledge, positioning you as a leader in your field.
7. Partnerships: Relationship building is best done in person, but your website can help foster, construct and continue relationship building activities.  Links to and from partner organizations and sponsors help raise your standings with search engines and show your commitment to the collaborations providing subtle endorsement of your brand.
8. Social Media Tools: Extend the reach of your website and brand through social media links like Idealist, Facebook, Linked In, My Space, Twitter, Blogs, and message boards which can present your organization as an expert in the community and provide value to your constituents. But remember that these tools require time and a meager Blog can brand you as unsuccessful.
9. Web Interactivity: Elements that involve the user can communicate sophisticated ideas in engaging and interesting ways.  Especially if you are a technical organization, consider adding maps, wikis, document sharing, chat, online training, products, financial calculators, glossaries, service guides, animations and other components in your website that specifically highlight your brand.
10. Touch Points:  To achieve the instant recognition of an effective brand all your collateral materials: logo, letterhead, brochures, annual reports, and web must have consistency and look as though they are from the same source.  You don’t want your program brochure to look totally different from your website, offering different logos, colors or themes. Pick a direction and follow it across every touch point.