Back in the days before Internet marketing, companies strove to make all of their messages look the same. Once a firm had established a well-known brand, they did everything that could to ensure that all of the materials that they came up with matched said brand. This sort of attention to detail eventually fell out of fashion as designers focused on flashy web designs that didn’t necessarily match the rest of their firms’ brand image.
Since we’ve gotten to a point where many top brands have their own apps as well as sites, it’s common for this sort of brand ennui to make its way into every aspect of a company’s advertising materials. Rather than trying to achieve a rather uniform-looking brand, firms have instead given up on trying to frame things a certain way. There’s no reason, however, that you can’t enhance your landing pages as well as your main site by adding your own custom branding to them.
While it’s certainly true that the various online platforms do indeed come with a host of limitations, savvy web designers have found ways around them. Problems related to responsive website design are easily dealt with if you know how to do so. Best of all, you can add custom branded materials to several of the most popular platforms with a minimum of difficulty.
Redesigning a Web Page without Touching the Underlying Technologies
Chances are that if you’re already managing a series of sites and landing pages for your brand, they’re all made with a content management platform. WordPress is probably the likeliest choice, with a sizable majority using either Joomla-based tools or a proprietary management service like Wix. Irrespective of which of these platforms you work with, you can add at least some sort of special branding to them.
Consider the issue of color, for instance. Some brands are immediately recognizable because of the specific hues that they use. Coca-Cola doesn’t just have red cans. Their entire brand is built around a very specific shade of red that most people subconsciously associate with the brand the moment they see it. If your company has any sort of specific hue associated with it, then head over to the theming section of your content management platform and define a custom color.
Usually, you’re not just limited to a pallet of pre-selected options. Though you may not be used to setting colors using HTML hex numbers, it’s easy to do so once you have a value. Consider importing your current logo design into a garden-variety paint program and use the dropper tool to find the number. Swap this into your content management platform’s color selection system and you’ll be surprised at the change.
Assume, for a moment, that you’re using something far more locked down than a customized Joomla or WordPress install. You might think that you have no recourse, but you can still at least upload your logo in the form of an image. If you have one that’s been professionally designed, then simply save it in a format that your management platform understands.
An increasingly large percentage of them can work with WebP pictures, which will help to reduce the load that your users might experience when accessing a page with a number of images on it. However, feel free to use JPEG or PNG images as long as they’re not too heavy for download.
Those who don’t mind digging deeper into the world of customization may want to improve their design even further than this.
Tweaking Your Landing Pages to Match Your Company’s Brand
Unless you really don’t ever want to touch a line of code, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to redesign the look and feel of individual landing pages or company blogs to better fit the brand and design language your company has sought out. Consider things as simple as widgets, which are often overlooked.
While you can allow your client’s browser to render the widgets in whatever is seen as default, you may want to replace them with assets of your own. While you don’t want to get too cutesy and make your landing page look like a Flash site from 20 years ago, it’s a good idea to at least customize the onscreen widgets to match the rest of any color scheme that you were tweaking before.
Other aspects, such as forms, should be customized as well to meet your branding as well as provide a minimum degree of functionality. Keep in mind that how well your site works reflects strongly on your business as a whole.
Potential leads might not think very highly of something that doesn’t function well no matter how visually attractive the design. Consider using dedicated WPForms WordPress forms and customizing these to better match the look of your overall design.
As soon as you’ve gotten these chores out of the way, you’ll be in an excellent position to figure out new ways to use your branding to generate additional leads.
Encouraging Lead Generation with Solid Design
Generating a healthy amount of incoming leads has always been difficult, but you can take advantage of these design changes to help you out. A flashy visual style that still looks modest and subdued might be enough to attract some people. For the rest, you’ll want to redo how you sign users up for your mailing list.
By creating user-intent based lead magnets with an integrated mailing list widget, you can encourage people to sign up and then share tailored messages with them. You might be surprised to learn this, but more than 70 percent of Millennials say that they communicate with their favorite brands through email.
That should help to illustrate how this is a great way to stay in touch with your clients in spite of the fact that many people have opined that email seems to be going away. Nevertheless, you need to figure out some way that you can better incorporate this into the overall design of your site. Consider putting the email signup form somewhere along the edges, where it doesn’t look out of place.
Think about your whole landing page as though it were a series of quadrants. This could help you to get a better handle on spacing.
Using Blank Space to Help with Branding
Blank space probably doesn’t seem like it can help establish your brand, but it does three vital things that can improve your overall sense of identity. Most importantly, it improves legibility, but it can also create groupings of elements that divide different aspects of your company from one another. Careful consideration about what each of these elements represents will guide you in properly placing them around your site.
On top of this, extra space can emphasize some aspects of your company while establishing a clear hierarchy. If your prospect leads notice that one item is above another on your site, then they’ll associate your brand more with that item even if they do so subconsciously. Sort your company’s business activities in this way and you should notice increased attention to them from prospective clients.
Branding in today’s digital world isn’t easy. It might feel like technical limitations are a huge influence on what you can and can’t do with your brand. On top of that, it may even start to look like most of the good branding ideas are already taken. All is not quite what it seems, however.
Set aside some extra time to think about these issues and you might find that these limitations quickly start to look more like opportunities than they do pitfalls.
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