Corporate Web Design: Shaping Brand Perception
Your website defines how people see your company—make it count.
At Eyekiller, we work with businesses across a wide range of industries. The one thing they all have in common is the challenge of ensuring that their product or service rises above the noise, in an often saturated consumer market. The first impression of your brand online is critical. Your website is often one of the first touch-points that your audience comes into contact with — if not the first — and that experience can make or break their perception of your company.
A research study in the UK found that 94% of people say design is the leading factor for rejecting or distrusting a website. This study underscores the vital importance of a well-crafted website design in establishing trust and fostering a positive brand perception.
What is Brand Perception?
Whenever customers buy a product, read an online review, compare experiences of customer service, or engage with your website, they make judgments about your brand. Brand perception is what customers believe a product or service represents, not what the company owning the brand says it does.
To shape how your brand is perceived, you must first define what you want to portray in your messaging to customers. This can be done by carefully crafting a brand personality that represents your vision, mission, or culture, and connects to the customer.
Ensure you have consistent messaging across all of your marketing channels. Connect your company’s personality to all five of your customers’ senses to resonate with customers on a visceral level and leave a lasting impression.
Measuring Brand Perception
Brand awareness says a lot about where you stand in the competitive landscape. Effectively measuring it can confirm (or pose a reality check to) your expectations about perceptions of your brand identity and your offerings. It’s important to measure your brand perception regularly, benchmark it over time, and identify what drives improvements. There are several things you can do to measure how customers perceive your brand:
Social Listening - People don’t hold back on social media, so you need to track mentions of and reactions to your brand across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Social data can be an important window into the performance of your social messaging.
Branded Search Volume - Using SEO tools (like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz), you can find out how many times your brand name is being searched each month and (depending on your level of account access) information about searchers, like what country they're from and what devices they're using to search.
Brand perception surveys - Surveys help you understand who your customers are and what they think of your brand. They’re simple and painless to do, so customers with an opinion (both good and bad) can respond to targeted questions and use open text to say what’s on their mind.
Content Marketing Performance - Creating valuable content to increase brand awareness and gain trust with your audience will help to expand your reach. By ranking highly on search engine results pages (SERPs), your content and brand can reach a broader audience and gain qualified traffic. Use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to monitor traffic and keyword rankings, and a tool like Google Analytics to monitor conversions.
Social Share of Voice - can be measured either manually or via a social listening tool. Calculate your social SOV using this formula: Number of mentions of your brand/total number of brand mentions (yours + your competitors') x 100.
The Essentials of Website Design
Visitors to your website are instantly forming a picture in their head about your company from the first click. If they’re greeted with sleek images of your product or service accompanied by snappy and informative content, then you may have got your hook. It is even easier to lose a website visitor if they are met with sloppy design quality and images that look like they were taken on an old Nokia brick! If they doubt the quality of your site, they’ll doubt the quality of your product!
Your website should clearly reflect your company's identity and how you are perceived by society if you want to get the most out of your site. The data shows that people aren’t as likely to buy into what a company is selling them if a visitor doubts authenticity. How you do this will be unique to your business. When designing a website for The Clandeboye Lodge Hotel we wanted to ensure we encapsulated the warmth and charm of the North Down Hotel.
The Impact of Website Design on Consumer Trust
Only 6% of participants in the study reported that their distrust was based on the actual content of the site. Web design was far and away the most important element in determining users' feelings of distrust. Participants also outlined the design redflags that contributed to this distrust including:
Busy, complex layouts
A lot of indigestible Content
Small text that’s hard to read
Dominating ads and pop-ups
Slow website load times
Lack of navigation aids
Boring web design and lack of colour
A consumer’s perception about a company has a higher impact than their perception on the brand. This means that consumers will purchase more from a company that’s credible, not because of what they say of their products, but by how reliable and trustworthy they have been in the past. So while we strongly advise investing in your website, to truly get the most out of your investment, it is important to build that trust with your customers and encourage customer loyalty.
The Psychology Behind Colour Choices
The psychology and use of colour to convey information about your company heavily influences how your brand is perceived. In a study titled “Impact of colour on marketing,” researchers found that up to 90% of snap judgments made about products can be based on colour alone. When it comes to picking the “right” colour for your corporate website, research has found that predicting consumer reaction to colour appropriateness is far more important than the individual colour itself. We asked our Head of Design Julie McClements about the considerations that go into corporate website design:
“Grasping the psychological influence of colour choices enables designers to craft websites that connect with users, evoke specific emotions, and elevate the overall user experience. Strategic positioning of these colours on the website is crucial to help users achieve their tasks effectively, all the while mirroring your brand’s identity and values. Consistency and adequate contrast are also vital for maintaining a professional appearance and enhancing readability."
Websites for art venues hosting diverse events across various genres might benefit from employing a palette of lively colours to convey the vibrant and dynamic nature of the venue.
Julie continued by saying "Whereas websites for luxury brands might choose to incorporate deep, rich, opulent tones like navy, dark green, or purple, combined with a minimal colour palette. This approach aims to convey a strong sense of quality, trust, and confidence. Furthermore, this helps emphasise the visibility of product photography while minimising potential distractions.”
A Corporate Website Doesn’t End With Design - User Experience (UX)
Having an aesthetically pleasing website user interface (UI) may make you feel like you have an appealing brand on your hands. However, if visitors can't use it intuitively, one small bump in the road can cause someone who would have otherwise loved your brand to leave in seconds. We live in an impatient era of diminishing attention spans, where busy people will gravitate to the most seamless experience. If that experience isn’t yours, you could be losing sales and revenue.
User experience design focuses on enhancing customer satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of user interactions on and corporate website. Visitors make instant decisions about your website based on the elements of user experience. They are:
Value – Does your content provide value to the customer?
Usability – Is your site easy to use?
Desirable – Does your content make an emotional connection with the user?
Accessible – Is your website accessible to everyone?
Credible – Does your website/content build the trust and belief of the user?
Since your site is the centrepiece of your growth marketing efforts, these elements must combine into a valuable and rewarding experience for the user. For more information on how to enhance UX for digital marketing, check out our blog.
How Can Eyekiller Help?
Website design is a great way to create a user-friendly environment where people come for helpful tips and make purchases. If a website is designed and managed properly by a professional web designing company like Eyekiller, it will improve your brand's perception and encourage customers to do business with your company.
With 20 years of experience in crafting websites, campaigns and digital strategies for our clients, your website would be in safe hands with Eyekiller. Over this time, we have developed a killer eye for what makes a brand stand out, allowing us to achieve the best results for us, and our clients.
If you are interested in having a conversation about getting a website built, you can see how we do this for our amazing clients by talking to us.
