Branding Basics: How to Give Your Website a Powerful Personality
So before we get into the nitty gritty of ‘brand personality’, you may be asking yourself;
what the hell is a brand ‘personality’, why should I spend my time on this?
If you are asking yourself this question, I get it - the last thing a startup company or crazy-busy business owner is probably thinking about is how to give their website a ‘good attitude’. There are so many more urgent things to get done, agreed, but I do not believe that anything is as vitally important to your website (ergo, your company) as a relevant and powerful personality.
I mean, let’s look at Jack Daniels, a company styled around family, tradition and having a damn good time.
Now according to Investopedia, there are ‘five main types of brand personalities: excitement, sincerity, ruggedness, competence and sophistication’; going by this, I’d say Jack Daniels had pretty much hit the ruggedness nail on the head.
This brand personality is used by companies to attract an audience who loves the outdoors, warm fires on cold nights, live music, drinking with friends, and strong values; all qualities that Jack Daniels conveys through their website and marketing materials.
By endowing their brand with these humanising qualities, they have created a very human connection with their customers; a feeling of familiarity, fondness and excitement. Because by positioning Jack Daniels whiskey as the center of your good time, an association is created, and well cultivated through their social and promotional marketing.
There’s a reason it’s the UK’s favourite tipple (*cough* good branding).
So Jacky D is a great example of what a brand personality is, but if you’re still asking yourself why they needed one in the first place, I’ll give you 2 good reasons:
1 - Without a brand personality that resonated, appealed and ‘spoke to’ their target audience, Mr Daniels wouldn’t have been able to build such a huge, motivated and loyal customer base.
2 - Without this huge, motivated and loyal customer base, there would be no one to buy all their delicious whiskey. And if no one buys their delicious whiskey? Then ain’t nobody getting paid.
You know that without your customers, you’re essentially flogging a dead horse; if you don’t make people engage with you, they simply won’t, and ‘personality’ is key to achieving this.
This process of understanding your audience, developing your brands persona, and reaching the levels of customer engagement that marketers drool at the thought of, this all takes time. Consistency, creativity and time, but it is worth the effort. Brand awareness, loyal customers and increasing revenue all await for those who seek, and for those companies who have already ‘found themselves’, well as you can see, they’re reaping their rewards.
(AYR)
AYR, all year round, is a fashion label taking the denim world by its stylishly rolled-up cuffs.
Designed for ‘smart [and] strong women’, they have catered to their audience beautifully.
With a brand aesthetic of minimalist-chic, practically-stylish clothing for the modern, independent woman. Likely subscribes to Harper’s Bazaar, brunches on Sundays, professionally-creative and puts their outfits together the night before; portraying this ‘persona’ through site copy, imagery and engagement, they have created a brand that loyal customers come back to time and again for its relatability & trend-setting products.
At just 4 years old, AYR has managed to cultivate an influential and luxe following, who through their relationship with the brand, do a lot of word-of-mouth marketing for them - so useful!
In an interview with WWD, Maggie Winter talks about how AYR have decided to drop ‘seasons’ from their clothing range, and instead have used their product data to understand their customers’ buying habits. AYR Women want fashion that works literally ‘all year round’. So by providing them with what they want, they show a keener and more detailed understanding of their customers, and create a deeper relationship with them by listening, and catering to their needs.
Follow AYR’s Lead...
AYR got wise to their audience’s buying habits, and decided to work their product offerings around what their customers wanted, when they wanted it. This reflected consistently with their ‘thoughtful’ brand persona trait, and created a deeper, positive relationship with their customers, and probably prevented a lot of unsold denim at the end of each season!
To do this yourself;
Analyse your customer’s spending habits; identify any trends you can see (seasonal, promotion related, endorsements, etc)
Assess how you as a company can cater to these habits (provide more of one product, more promotions, etc)
Ensure any changes made are communicated across the whole company; this makes sure all teams are on the same page about brand, tone of voice and personality.
Promote this via social and traditional marketing to your customers; let them know how invested in them you are, how much you care about what they want.
(MoBros)
Cheeky, stylish and definitely on the sophisticated brand personality spectrum, Mo Bro’s is a brand that acts like a mirror up against its target audience. With tongue-in-cheek site copy, on-brand, engaging imagery and a consistent TOV across social and site copy, this company has taken men’s grooming to the affordable & stylish streets.
From the shiny Dragon’s Den stage, the Mo Bros team have grown a successful 7-figure business from just £750, thanks to one particular avenue; customer research.
Seriously detailed customer research that they invested both money and time in; this got them the insights and numbers they needed in order to develop such a strong and engaged brand, and build the international company they have today.
(MoBro’s)
Again, audience research has proven key to understanding how to brand themselves. Mo Bro’s were able to mould their startup around their audience, and have grown in tandem with their taste-changes and cultural male grooming trends. This is especially obvious with their social marketing, which speaks loudly and clearly to their target audience.
Speaking to the Express, they explain that “Technology and social media enabled [them] to build up a customer base very quickly…”, and this was vastly helped by their detailed customer research. By shaping their brand personality to their audience and engaging with them quickly on social media, they were able to attract a neglected demographic quickly, and grow with them, making tweaks to their brand guided by real customer feedback. Invaluable.
Follow Mo Bro’s Lead....
Mo Bro’s knew that to build a truly successful company brand, they needed to understand their target audience. Smartly, they invested money and time into this research and developed a brand that engaged and grew with their customers, and more than tripled their annual revenue.
To do this yourself;
Get your hands on all the audience data you can find. And then order some more. (Google Analytics, SEMrush, tools like these are the ones you need)
Analyse your audience; what sort of people are they? What do they value?
Look at ways (site copy, imagery, social) to embody your brand with these reflective persona traits.
Assess how you can incorporate these traits into your customer engagement; get creative with it!
4 Brand Personality Techniques for Your Site
With inspo from the brands above, it’s clear to see that by defining who your brand is, and what value it can provide for your audience, you can build and cultivate long-lasting and loyal customer relationships that span decades. I mean, there’s a reason that I visit the Buzzfeed website every day; because they use the same language as me, I’m made to feel comfortable there, I am being simultaneously entertained and informed with language and imagery that speaks to me and my tastes.
(Buzzfeed)
So how can you use the examples and tips above to inject some personality into your own website? At the end of the article, you can download a free Brand Personality Template to develop your company’s ‘Human Face’, but first, here are 4 techniques you can use on your site now to build a more powerful personality:
Tone of Voice
If the language you use doesn’t resonate with your audience, they won’t even bother trying to listen to you. Pay specific attention to keywords and phrases that your audience uses, check;
Social Networks for terminology, acronyms, emoji-frequency and other quirks that are unique to this age group.
Websites that they visit, how do they speak to this target group? Learn from their mistakes!
By having a canon of audience-appropriate vernacular, you can amaze them with your ‘down-with-it’ attitude, and make them comfortable enough to engage with you.
The crucial point here is to remember to communicate these language changes to everybody in your team - to ensure a consistent and coherent brand personality, everyone needs to be on the exact same page.
2. Branded Imagery
The value that branded imagery can bring to your site shouldn’t be overlooked. Whether this is high-def company team photography, bespoke designed infographics, visual blog headers, whatever, it needs to be three things to work well for you;
Reflect your businesses’ Value
Be consistent in brand Colouration & TOV
Use engaging & audience-relevant Copy (a picture can tell a thousand words, but a snappy, value-focused CTA will be even better)
Used across your site and shared across your social networks, this imagery will promote content sharing, brand awareness and customer engagement. An investment well worth the time & money.
3. Social Media Engagement
So what if you’ve already promoted your content or services on Twitter, do it again! And again! If you stop talking about your value, then people will soon forget - the blessing and curse of living in such fast-moving times. Companies MUST stay relevant!
Creating a structured social strategy allows you to keep your audience engaged with must-know company news, industry tidbits and keeps you in the front of their minds.
CoSchedule have an awesome Social Media Campaign Plan, that is more than worth your time to look over.
You will need to consider:
Who you are talking to
Where you are talking to them
What times you should be talking to them
Hashtags & visibility
Crushing your social strategy can seem daunting, but with logical content creation and the help of a genius social management tool (like Hootsuite), you can effectively organise and manage all your social platforms from one location.
4. User Research
If Mo Bros didn’t show you already, user research is imperative to the success of your brand, and it is definitely worth investing in some time to really understand the nitty-gritty of your target audience. As they have shown, it has been instrumental to their success, because it allowed them to:
Understand their ‘real’ pain points
Study the language used, and incorporate that into their brand personality
Build a strong presence on their audience’s favoured social networks
Engage naturally and effectively with their audience
Utilising your Google Analytics user data, and tools like HitWise and Survey Monkey, you can improve your brand with invaluable insights and content topics to create that all-important customer loyalty.
Brand personality is the ingredient that creates the loyalty that turn companies into household names; whether you’re in the fashion, technology or legal sector, creating the human bond that compels people to seek you, and only you out, is the end game everyone's playing for. And the first step towards building this legion of loyal site users, is to first understand who You are.
Quickly assess who your company is, who they ‘resonate’ with, and take your first steps towards building a strong and impactful brand personality with the free Brand Personality Profiles & Template Bundle below. And when you need branded, beautiful and value-focused site copy to empathise and engage your audience with, well just get in touch .
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