Branding is about more than imagery its the way your values are conveyed and received. As the principal mass media to interactively engage with your market, your website and online marketing should be a crucial part of that.That means making the experience work for your web audience. For your online presence to radiate your brand, your values must be inherent in all aspects of the user experience from how your website is marketed, to its usability and accessibility.

Brand values such as helpfulness, vision, forward thinking and responsive are over-used and too frequently under-delivered particularly in cyberspace. But with the right use of technology and design, these values can be delivered at an individual customer level. The key is in usability and accessibility.

Usability is often used to explain how someone navigates around a website. As such it incorporates user conventions and best practice. But while often this is no more than lip service, at other times such rules are used to stifle innovation and limit the organisations ability to express its values. So how can you move beyond such platitudes?

First of all bear in mind that good usability starts before your visitor lands on your site. Meeting a clients needs is the truest expression of brand values and thats the best way to think about usability. So think about how your visitors are going to find you and what they will be looking for via search engines.

A website then needs to meet the needs of all visitors. If it is designed correctly, most will not arrive through the home page but via internal landing pages as directed by search engines and email and off-line promotions. These pages must deliver in the first few seconds. They must:
Meet the need of the search and speak to the visitor
Make it immediately obvious to which organisation the site belongs
Make it obvious where the visitor is in the site
Make it clear how to get to other sections (sub-sections)
Make it obvious how to get in touch or book tickets online
Make it easy to find information via search facilities or logical navigation

This is good online branding. Likewise give control to your visitors over how they receive communication from you. Emails are a good way of building up a loyal base, but use your data to provide a better service. Allow visitors to sign up to topics they are interested in, not just a single large email which they are unlikely to read. And keep emails short with brief headlines and links back to your site.

Then use the information you have at your disposal to create a finely tuned email. If you have information about past visitor experiences such as their purchase patterns, use this to provide other targeted information to specific groups. For example, if you know they have been to see a certain exhibition, promote a related event to them. This should be done in a subtle way and always in support of the rest of your marketing message.

Clinton Porter

Clinton Porter is the Commercial Director and founding member of the UK digital agency NVisage. He jointly founded the company in 1997 and has since worked on a wide variety of sites from small commercial sites through to international ecommerce sites and public sector sites. He specialises in ecommerce consultancy with an emphasis upon adding value to a business through good online marketing and integrating online activities into the existing business model.