The Importance of Consistent Brand Messaging for Your Redesign

When it comes to a website redesign, brand messaging is too often thought of after the redesign has taken place. However, content and messaging should be planned at the very start of any redesign. After all, your brand messaging demonstrates who you are as a company; no site will be successful by placing it on the back burner.

Your design, just like your content, should be able to translate these meanings and messages with visual cues that allow users to identify your brand (company) through images alone. Textually, your content should be doing much the same thing, providing a single, over-arching message that expresses your company’s perspective(s) and shared values with its target audiences.

How to Keep Design in Mind

The visual aspects of your site’s redesign should consist of easily identifiable cues. For example, a consistent use of the colors present in your logo can add dimension throughout your site. Use accent colors to highlight things like call-to-action (CTA) buttons or blocks of text you want to call out.

Thinking about branding will also help you create conscious designs that put your audience first. An intelligent use of your site’s main navigation, meta navigation, and dropdown navigation can help you direct your users where they need to go while keeping the pages and content most important to your company right at the top.

How to Keep Content in Mind

Consistency in voice and tone is highly important for creating a consistent message throughout your website. This messaging is not limited to page content and blog posts alone; even the smallest pieces of content such as headers and sub-headers need to be in your company’s unique voice. Every word on your site will be seen by viewers as an expression of your brand.

For more help with content creation and best practice tips, especially when it comes to voice and tone, check out our blog on content writing.

Why It’s Important

At the end of the day, consistency in brand messaging leads to greater user trust. Users naturally give more authority (and, therefore, value) to content that they recognize. However, recognizability isn’t the only reason. A brand that shares similar values or perspectives of life with a particular user may be enough to draw his or her support, and these are things that are communicated solely through messaging.

Face it, the majority of users aren’t willing to spend the time it would take to fully understand your company inside-and-out. The world we live in now allows people to access and consume new information in seconds. This means that you have only seconds to convince a user that your brand is worthwhile. Thinking about these elements prior to a redesign gives you the opportunity to plan in advance and make these successful strides forward.

What You Need to Do

The best, most efficient way to ensure your brand messaging is consistent throughout your website is by creating a style guide. This is a document (sort of like an all-knowing cheat sheet) that explains your company’s philosophy, mission, values, and preferences for all internally produced content and design. If you work with contracted vendors who will be creating content on your behalf, this might also be something you share with them.

Style guides are highly brand-specific and act as a sort of checklist for people who are working on anything related to your brand. This can be very helpful for giving direction to a designer as they build a website that perfectly reflects your company.

However, while a style guide is immensely helpful when it comes to unifying and informing creators as to the message of your business, it cannot prevent inconsistencies from occurring. That’s where a sharp eye for detail must come into play. Play close attention to every detail and make sure all content – including images – matches up to what is outlined in your company’s style guide.

Need help with your brand messaging or style guide creation? Media Genesis has plenty of experience in both. Reach out to us at (248) 687-7888 or inquiry@mediaG.com to find out how we can make your website branding stronger.