The Importance of Website Branding for Startups
Branding is a tool that gives life to a business’s personality and is an inevitable part of any business, regardless of whether or not it is consciously being practiced. Companies will be known for one of the two: a great company with excellent branding or a struggling and faceless company with inconsistent or zero interest in branding. While the former is a satisfying feeling, we know the latter isn’t. Here’s where website branding says a gigantic hello.
Website branding is one of the most important aspects of branding goals for a startup. They must focus on it at the beginning of the business. In this article, we’ll talk about why website branding is essential, especially for start-ups.
What Is Branding for Start-Ups?
A start-up can be defined in two ways: one being a new business from existing business fields, like a hair salon or a supermarket, or a business created to “test” an innovative idea. Either way, both start-up categories require branding to survive in their respective markets.
Branding helps start-ups identify what the company wants to achieve, what it stands for, and how people should perceive it. It helps start-ups take control of whether they want to be seen as a “luxurious” brand, a “funky” brand, and so on.
For example, if you see John from our blog on branding and marketing differences, he’s known to be “happy”. That’s the effect of his branding. Similarly, you need to create and demonstrate the persona of your brand. If not, people are going to slap a personality onto your brand according to how they feel. If they feel the website is unprofessional, they will call the brand unprofessional, and so on. For start-ups, this means confused customers, poor brand guidelines, and a nice pathway to failure.
What Is Website Branding?
Simply put, website branding is how a company conveys its brand message, mission, and values as a part of its website. Everything about the website defines the brand’s personality; the organization of every part of the site, the experience felt by website visitors as they move around the site, the design, the tone of the site, the speed, and every tiny aspect of it.
This personality is the website’s branding. People start to see the brand for what it means and stands for. Here’s where a custom website, created by a branding agency that understands the start-up, comes into play.
The Impact of Website Branding
Website branding is very impactful on many aspects of a start-up. We have outlined its three core impacts below.
#1 Improves Customer Perception of Your Brand’s Personality
Start-ups need people to know about them, and what better way than to promote a website that communicates what the brand is? If you want a chirpy brand, it has to sound, look, and feel chirpy. Chirpy customers will come flocking in because they’ll understand what your brand is about. Or it could be your brand’s values; people will share the brand if they are persuaded by it, or if they share the same values.
Website branding makes everything from your logo to blogs speak like the brand, which consequently increases how effectively people understand your brand’s personality. What more does a start-up need than a customer who understands the worth of the company or product?
#2 Determines If Customers Choose You
88% of online users refuse to use a site they had a poor experience with, whether it was slow loading speed or a poor user interface. This proves that customers hate tacky websites with poor user experiences, which signifies poor branding. Good branding for websites comes with easy navigation around websites, great design, and a better user experience overall.
Research shows a USD 18 billion loss from shopping cart abandonment due to poor checkout flow and design. This is an important part of user experience. Customers choose to leave brands with a poor user experience. Start-ups and entrepreneurs cannot afford to make such losses.
Start-ups, however, are small teams that can’t do it all. A branding agency like Alapra can be a great, affordable solution for flawless website creation with the ultimate branding!
#3 Inspires Employees
Start-ups are often one-person or small teams. Entrepreneurs struggle to put together an efficient team. Hiring takes at least six months for a start-up, says Beth Haggerty, founder of Parity Partners. Hiring, training, and paying employees requires a lot of time, effort, and money, so start-ups must keep their employees motivated to use their skills wisely.
An effectively branded website gives employees direction and helps them work in a company that knows what they’re doing. A custom website conveys everything about your brand. Employees and customers know what they’re in for, which keeps them satisfied and clear. Just like customers, this also brings in employees with like-minded values!
The Downfall of a Start-up: Missing Out on Website Branding
While there may be many reasons for failure, poor branding is one of the most common reasons, with 35% of start-ups shutting down due to misreading market demand, which is a common result of not paying attention to your brand strategy. This results in your brand becoming a nobody.
Alapra prevents such disasters, especially for start-ups in Toronto. We help start-up brands that collaborate with us by breathing life into their brand through our website creation services. We create custom websites built on a well-established brand strategy and protect start-ups from their worst nightmare: failure!
Reach out to us, and we’ll bring the best of your brand’s personality to life!
