A strong brand can raise awareness and boost credibility, leading to a stronger reputation and increased customer satisfaction. Here are five strategies for strengthening your company’s brand:

1. Make your message consistent

The key to building trust is creating a coherent message that reflects your company’s core beliefs. Everything about your business, from the tagline on your website to the colours you use in your logo and advertising, should convey how you want your customers to perceive your business. All areas of your company need to be focused on providing the value to your customers.

2. Focus on your niche

If you try to market to everyone you’ll dilute your brand and reduce your ROI. Instead, carefully define your target demographic and work to establish your company as the expert for that unique crowd. By narrowing your audience, you can more effectively focus on their needs and create products or services that cater specifically to them.

3. Leverage social media

Social media is a very effective marketing tool that helps you stay in contact with customers. Respond to both positive and negative comments and solicit feedback on a regular basis. This encourages customers to feel like they are part of a tribe and lets potential customers know that they’ll be taken care of.

Update your website and social media sites regularly. If you can create blog posts that get people talking or post an in-depth LinkedIn article, others will start to see you as an expert in your field.

4. Collect testimonials

Strong reviews and praise from satisfied customers is very helpful in establishing brand trust. In many cases all you need to do is ask. Customers are happy to give their opinion and provide support for a company they believe in. If you have a hundred four and five-star reviews in Google and your competition doesn’t, you’ll attract many new customers just through word of mouth.

5. Understand the competition

You don’t want to define your business in opposition to other competitors, but it can be very helpful to see how other companies are branding a similar product. Studying the existing market can help you locate a niche that is being underserved. You can also identify how your strengths differ from your competitors. These exercises are invaluable to helping you narrow down your target audience and create a focused brand.

Creating a strong brand takes dedication and ongoing work, but the payoffs can be huge. Over time you’ll establish your expertise and recruit your customers as allies to spread the word. By creating a compelling message and a consistent marketing strategy, you’ll build brand value that sets you apart from the competition and draws loyal fans to your business.

Hiring a design professional is the more expensive option and if your needs are simple this may be an unnecessary expense. But there are definite benefits to working with a professional. Here are some of the advantages you’ll get from a high-quality, custom website:

Marketing strategy

A well-designed template may use good SEO tactics to improve search results, but a web designer can build a site that complements your brand and brings you the highest quality traffic. A large part of an effective website is creating a business strategy and defining the message you are trying to convey. A good designer can tweak the tone of the site to reinforce your message and appeal to your target demographic in a way that an out-of-the-box product can’t.

A designer can help you clarify your call to action and create a superior user experience for customers who visit your site. Pages that are slow to load or difficult to use have a higher abandonment rate, but a site with a clean layout and a clear message is more likely to hold a user’s attention.

Ease of use

While a template-based site might be easy to set up, it can actually be difficult to make layout changes that would differentiate your site from everyone else using the same template. With a designer, you get a site that is customised and created specifically to make your content shine.

A good developer will create a site that’s easy to update and make changes to. You may still have to call in the experts if you want to make major changes, but for the near future you’ll be able to make regular updates without any hassle. This is important, as a website is not meant to be a static platform. You should regularly be adding blog posts, highlighting promotions and updating pages to keep things fresh and relevant.

Expertise

The biggest advantage a professional designer brings is that they offer a level of expertise that the average businessperson can’t match. You can teach yourself SEO strategies and find tools that help you do A/B testing and track analytics, but that takes time and energy away from what you do best – running your business! If you hire a pro, you’ll get someone who creates hundreds or thousands of websites per year and knows all the latest tricks and tools to make your site the best it can be.

Is a web designer right for you? If your budget is less than £500 or you are just testing an idea and aren’t ready to commit to a product, then a template site is a good place to start. You’ll at least get something out there and the cost will be just a few pounds per month. But when you are ready to take your business to the next level, a high-quality website can help you attract the right customers and reach your long-term business goals.