How Branding And Design Can Increase Your Customer Confidence And Sales
This is a guest post from Graphic Rhythm Designs.
For succeeding as a business, it’s essential to deliver high-quality service and products that add value to the lives of your customers. But in a competitive marketplace that’s not sufficient.
You got to create a positive association with your name and stand out in the mind of your customers. You need to carefully construct your brand image and communicate that through your design.
If you look around, there are numerous examples of corporations that convey their personality through their branding.
● Apple is forward-thinking and synonymous with luxury. They are also known for innovative design.
● Gary Vaynerchuk is the poster boy for hustle. You can read how his blog design conveys his high-octane and energetic style.
Indeed branding and design are great differentiators for small businesses as well. Let me show you a few ways how you can leverage them for increasing your bottom line.
Consistency Breeds Trust
Do you have a favorite restaurant in your locality where you always love hanging out?
My first choice is a Starbucks right across the street. I love the Vanilla flavored Cappuccino on their menu. It always has the right amount of milk and coffee. It tastes the same. Humans love familiarity, and if you deliver consistent experiences to them, they will start recognizing you.
You can create branding guidelines to facilitate consistency across all your touchpoints. Typically, it consists of defining your audience and the unique differentiators that distinguish you from your competitors. You can also list the values that you want your brand to be known for.
A critical aspect that nonverbally communicates your brand attributes is your design. Your color scheme, logo, fonts, and overall visual appearance should blend with your core brand message.
For instance, Joco creates eco-innovative, reusable drinking vessels. Their branding assets, for example, their website design is minimalistic and predominantly brown in color that conveys their value proposition aptly.
Your brand assets, including infographics, lead magnets, and social media creatives all need to follow the brand color palette. If graphics are not your cup of tea, then you can outsource it to our team of experts. We’ll deliver stellar customized designs for you at affordable prices.
Once you earn credibility with consistency, you’ll start getting preferred by your customers over your competitors. However, to ensure they always buy from you, you need to keep growing…
Pro Tip: Check out the branding guidelines of a few brands here for inspiration: Medium, Skype, Spotify, Cisco, and Netflix. They discuss the usage of logo, font, and the other aspects we’ve touched above.
Let Your Brand Evolve As You Grow
Winning the confidence of your customers is crucial for the long-term success of your business. It starts with keeping your promises to reinforce trust in your products. However, in a competitive marketplace, you need to stay relevant with your messaging, design, offerings, and overall branding.
Your brand is not a static entity. It should evolve strategically as your business model changes else it will lose meaning. You need to communicate your growth and keep generating new attention in the marketplace. For instance, in 2007, Apple dropped the “computer” from its name to reflect its foray into consumer electronics.
You can represent evolution with something as simple as updating your logo. Remember how Google updated its logo in 2015? However, you can also perform a full-fledged website redesign and overhaul your visual appearance.
As you continuously evolve, always remember the cornerstone of successful businesses, which we will talk about in the next section.
Pro Tip: If you rebrand as you grow, it’s important to consider the connotations of your branding elements in different cultures.
ConvertKit, an email marketing software, decided to rebrand under the name “Seva.” However it faced a huge backlash and had to undo their rebranding although it had cost them upwards of half a million dollars. Read their founder’s interview on the same.
Customer Loyalty Is Key
Finding new customers is always going to cost you more than retaining your existing ones. Author Kevin Kelly devised a theory that states that 1000 true fans are sufficient for a creative entrepreneur to make a comfortable living for themselves.
For cultivating long-term relationships that bring repeat business, a strong brand and consistent experience is a great start. However, you also need to ensure stellar customer service. So regularly request feedback from your customers and keep them in the loop about the latest updates from your business.
For example, Kevin-Indig (an SEO expert that runs a curated email newsletter) sent an NPS survey to his subscribers. And he flaunted the results.
Besides soliciting feedback from customers, you also need to meet their needs quickly. If you have the budget, then hiring staff to resolve customer issues is ideal. Else, you can also create resources for guiding your customers.
You can take your customers behind the scenes by creating an “About our team” section. It put faces and personality on the people that run your business. Here’s how Digital Marmalade do it to make their brand accessible.
Similarly, you can also create an interactive FAQ page or a help center by integrating custom illustrations. You can facilitate information retention by splashing these boring pages with some personality. It keeps your branding on point and takes care of most common concerns of your customers.
McDonalds Canada allows you to perform an interactive search on their FAQ page. You can type keywords and see related questions pop up.
Final Thoughts
If you evoke positive feelings in your customers every time they interact with your business, then they will want to come back to you. Your branding guidelines, logo, color palette, values, design, and overall personality have significant roles to play in this.
Now it’s your turn to create a memorable brand identity that your customers can connect with and consider buying from you.
Have you got any other branding and design strategies to increase your customer confidence and sales? Let me know in the comments below.