Aligning your brand with your website is all about consistency, core messaging, and audience appeal.
Abigail Vitaliano, who handles PR for Visit Baltimore, knows that she has only seconds to draw her audience in. “Our brand colors, logo and current campaigns are incorporated throughout all the content and pages on our site. As a destination marketing organization, we are providers of information, [and] this is the driving factor for a lot of our website content, because we are catering to our audience, visitors to Baltimore.”
She shared these practices that highlight both website and branding success:
Establish your credibility. This is as simple as your contact information being easy to find, your press kit and basic media material being available, and keeping all other assets in your press room and image library up to date.
First impressions are everything. This means your site should not only represent you but should also be presentable and easy to navigate. For example, when working in destination marketing or PR, it is important that your team is paying attention to what information visitors are looking for and then aggregating that content appropriately and representing it in a user-friendly way.
Consistency is key. With goals in mind, your website and brand will find success by creating and following a consistent style guideline, developing and employing core messaging, and producing content that is appropriate and appealing to your audience.
Whether you are on the marketing side or the PR side of this topic, it’s all about knowing your audience.
Drawing the right audience to your website is absolutely essential to survive in the fierce cyber market where buying decisions are made in milliseconds. Joel Layman, Director of Marketing for Lacrosse STX, LLC, knows this all too well, especially as their site caters to one of the toughest consumer audiences out there: lacrosse players ages 14 – 18 (and their parents). “I know this isn’t a new or innovative approach these days, but we really design every page of our site with a mobile-first approach. Our core consumer is as connected as any other consumer segment and if our site experience on mobile is subpar, then we will lose them almost immediately,” said Layman.
When it comes to promoting their brand, simply said, their website is everything. Layman said their most successful page is the Ultra Power page, which highlights a premium product. What made this page such a success? It’s colorful, packed with valuable content, easy to navigate, consistently draws in the user, and tugs on raw curiosity. “The average time on site for that specific page is well over three minutes. That is an eternity in the digital world, especially among teenagers who are constantly being distracted by 100 things during their day. This is nearly three times more than our average across all pages on STX.com, so it speaks to the previous point about a quality engagement is just as valuable, if not more, than the number of engagements that you’re acquiring.”