4 Ways to Build Branding Through Your Website and Logo
Small businesses, like solo and small law firms, should not be spending marketing dollars on branding alone. Only large corporations that have the money to spend on that can really afford to do it. However, for the rest of us, it is possible to build a brand through your existing marketing, and in fact you should be doing it that way. High quality and effective marketing can build your brand in itself.
You can get halfway there by having a good website and a logo. Don’t have a web site? Then choose a good design company and get it done! As for a logo, you can create one yourself through something like Canva, or hire a designer (like I did) through 99Designs.
But while doing so, you should implement these four tips to use that logo and website to create a brand that will allow you to stand out from your competition. You can build them into a branding asset that make you stand out from the crowd and your competition..
1. Your Logo Is a Memorable Symbol of Your Brand
You want people to recognize your practice by your logo. It can be.a powerful visual cue that people will remember. For this reason, your logo should not live solely on your website. It should appear in all of your marketing and advertising. As such, it is important that your logo not only match, but also look good on your website, print ads, printed mailings, and the like.
If you are porting your logo to your website from other marketing copy, that logo has to work on the web. You should work with a graphic designer to develop a version of that logo that will not only look good in print, but on a computer screen as well.
You should also consider how your logo will fit in the overall design of your website. It should appear at the top of most of its pages, and that means that the color and style of the rest of your site design should work well with it.
You’ll also want a version that works great in ads and emails, meaning you’ll also want “light” and “dark” versions that look good on different backgrounds. Not only that, but you will need two versions of your logo: a horizontal version and a vertical or stacked version. Consider these two from my law firm:
You can see why having these two different versions can help your logo fit seamlessly into different locations in your marketing copy. You might be using your logo for your website, newsletter, ads, billboards, sponsorship t-shirts, etc., and you want to already have those perfect, branded images on hand.
2. Think in Color
The colors you use on your web site are just as important as your logo when it comes to consistency. You want those colors to match as closely as possible to the colors you use offline while still being “web safe.”
You also want to use your main colors unobtrusively throughout your website, so visitors get a reassuringly consistent experience no matter what page they land on/navigate to.
3. Create Consistency With Fonts, Typefaces, and Graphic Design Elements
An effectively designed web site has to make consistent use of more than just colors and your logo; consistency in the images and graphics you use should stick to a similar format and style. In addition, the fonts used in main text and headers should also be the same.
Heading levels should be utilized logically and consistently to organize your content as you would in an outline (H1, H2, H3). This will make your content more easily read and skimmed.
4. Your Website’s Domain Name Is Another Branding Opportunity
Let’s not forget your domain name, which is how people get to your web site in the first place! There are many different ways to go with on this. Some law firms incorporate their main keywords—something like “njbankruptcylawyer.com.” Others may use a version of their firm’s name to boost their branding—much like “richardsonlawoffices.com.” Some even combine their brand name with their main keywords to come up with something totally new!
Whatever way you choose to approach it, you DO want to come up with something simple, memorable, and easy to type into the search box.
Need Help?
Need help bringing it all together into a killer combination to build your brand? Then reach out to my strategic partner Foster Web Marketing to learn more. Just use their memorable and easy-to-type-into-a-search-box domain name: FWMdesign.com.
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