How much success you achieve in online marketing depends on how well you can use the web. There used to be a time when having an online presence for business was just enough, but with dramatic changes happening to the web over the past few years, the outlook of using the internet for marketing and branding has changed drastically. Having an online presence is now just an essential requirement, and the actual work begins after you have uploaded your website on the web. As the outlook in web marketing has undergone a sea change, so also the approach to web design. Design concepts that had worked and supported marketing a few years ago are no more effective and replaced by more advanced techniques that match with the changing approach in online marketing.
The
marketing focus has shifted to mobile users whose numbers have overtaken the number of desktop users. Accordingly, the concept of web design has changed and has become mobile-centric so that users do not see websites on all devices with the same display quality irrespective of the screen sizes. Responsive web design has the unique features of adjusting the display according to the screen size that has brought about a paradigm shift in web design. Besides, Google has expressed it liking for mobile-friendly websites and thus web designs now effectively capture the SEO friendly as well as mobile-friendly aspects of a design when creating sites.
The design must uphold the brand
Online marketing begins by establishing the brand first because it is easy to identify the business under the brand. Consumers can relate easily to brands over the business. The brand talks a lot about your business by telling the audience who you are and creates a distinct brand personality that becomes easily distinguishable from others. From the colors to images and from fonts to the style of writing as well as the online channels and platforms you use, everything contributes to the creation of a brand personality. It is thus understandable that the elements of web design play an essential role in creating brand personality and designers have to first understand the branding objectives before setting out to create a blueprint for website design. That leads to the use of
branding archetypes that play a critical role in branding.
Brand drives traffic
Brands are responsible for giving a face to business and often become so popular that the company remains hidden under its cloak. People know the brand but not the business and the trust they repose on the brand automatically passes on to the business that lies under it. Brands are primarily responsible for driving traffic to websites, and since the web design is responsible for creating attractive and functional sites that are friendly to online marketing activities like SEO, there is a direct relation between brand building and web design. After all, you need a robust and attractive website to launch your branding and marketing campaign.
The need for brand positioning
Every brand occupies a particular place in the marketing landscape, and it is essential to identify the space and position the brand accordingly. The position refers to how you would like to place your brand in front of consumers so that they can allocate a distinct category to it that helps quick familiarization with it. The goal of brand positioning is to earn a marketing niche for the brand that covers a range of products and services. By creating a unique impression in the minds of consumers, it is possible to uphold some specific and desirable qualities of the brand that makes it distinctly different from other brands. When you can position the brand appropriately, it becomes easy for consumers to relate to it from among thousands of other brands in the market.
Brand positioning with archetypes
Every brand has to create a psychological relationship with the audience even though it might be at a subconscious level for which you need help from archetypes that relate to the brand. The brand archetypesprovide the foundation for understanding your brand from the inner depths and evoke psychological responses that influence the decision-making process of consumers. Thus it becomes easy to connect with consumers as the brand appeals to their senses and they find reasons for liking it. When you are using some archetypes for your brand, it becomes easy to mirror your inner thoughts and feelings about your business in your marketing and branding activities.
Archetypes connect the brand to the audience
To connect with the audience, you have to tell a story with the help of a character to which they can connect at a personal level. The target is to generate the right emotions that facilitate the audience to get closer to the character. Through the character of the story, you can convey some ideas and philosophy that relates to the ethos of your brand, and in the process, the character becomes a representative of the brand or archetype that personifies the spirit of the brand. The vision and message conveyed by archetypes go much beyond generations, culture, and time. Archetypes have universal appeal due to the humaneelements that make it the ubiquitous choice of marketers for creating a brand that lasts for ages.
The relation between web design and archetypes
Archetypes impart human values and traits into the brand, and web designers have to understand how business owners want to position their brands. They have to create designs by choosing appropriate design elements of colors, fonts, and graphics so that it not only matches with the vibes of the archetype but also propagates it throughout the design. The ‘hero' archetype has close links to bright and warm colors while the narrative of a ‘caregiver' is visible through softer colors having a gentler tone.
The best web design is a combination of aesthetics and functionality that takes care of the marketing goals. The design elements must complement the marketing goals, and web designers must have a good understanding of marketing and branding techniques to produce the most useful website designs.
