Expressing Your Brand Through Your Site’s Structure and Content

At mStoner, we believe your brand is what you stand for in the hearts and minds of the people you’re trying to reach, influence, and move to action.

Strong brands connect with people both intellectually and emotionally. Strong brand positions are aspirational, but grounded in reality. They should feel like a better version of who you already are.

Your brand is a promise you are making to all of your audiences about what you will be. Your brand might include promises of exceptional service, great advising, and a willingness to support and help students as reasons prospects should consider your institution above others.

Here’s the catch: Your website will either fulfill these promises or break them.

[Tweet “Does your site uphold your institution’s brand promises? Here are two tips from #mStoner.”]

When you work on your website’s structure and content, keep these two opportunities in mind:

1. Visitor experience supports or diminishes your brand promise

Let’s move beyond the success or failure of a single visit or experience. Think more broadly about how many visitor experiences, accumulated over time, coalesce into a firm impression of you in the minds of your audience. Ideally, every one of those experiences should be wonderful. How do we accomplish this? With a brand-aware, visitor-first approach to your visitor experience and content.

Supporting your visitors’ journeys with clear link labeling and navigation structure, clean visual and typographical hierarchy, and thoughtful content is valuable in its own right — it helps them find information and complete their goals.  But the larger value is that strong design and content reinforce the brand attributes that you want people to believe in  — that you are strong communicators, have great attention to detail, and are willing to go above and beyond to support them in their journeys to find and gain admission to the institution that fits them best.

2. Content makes a lasting impression

Thoughtful, tailored content says to your audience:

• “You matter to us.”
• “We took a long time and made a lot of effort to provide you with the best content possible, because you need it, and you deserve it.”
• “We want you to be a part of our community.”
• “We want you to succeed.”
• “We want to help make this incredibly important decision as well-informed and positive as possible.”

That’s the opposite of what a lot of websites do. Common examples of poor content include:

• Acronyms or jargon that prospective students don’t understand
• Writing that takes a bureaucratic or punitive tone
• Walls of text with no heading hierarchy
• Sections of content that render poorly on mobile devices

Poor content doesn’t just make it difficult for visitors to achieve their goals. You’re saying to them:

• “You weren’t worth the work.”
• “We don’t understand what’s important to you.”
• “We’re not actually as helpful as we just told you we would be.”

Poor UX and content leaves your audience thinking that you don’t and won’t care about the things that are important to them. The totality of good and bad experiences they have will leave them with a clear impression of you, and that impression will inform their ultimate choice of whether to apply to your school.

Let’s Talk About This Some More

When you respect your content and visitor experience, you respect your visitor. Choosing a college is one of the biggest decisions many people make in their lives. Respect that, and respect them, by putting forth the best design, structure, and content you can.

How do we create digital experiences that respect, delight, and inspire our visitors and reinforce our brand position?
I took a deep dive into answering that question during an in-depth webinar on November 10, Structure and Content: Helping You Live Your Brand Promise. It’s available on-demand for purchase. Join me as we take a look at techniques, best practices, and best-in-class examples of websites that respect their visitors, themselves, and their brand.