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Laura Coyier , Account Manager
Laura is a lifelong Oregonian who loves exploring the wilderness, coaching high school cheer, and all things brand marketing. She's a huge sports culture fanatic and a solid shot with a longbow.
July 16, 2020 | Gain Knowledge
Welcome to the third and final installment of our guide to how your brand can impact user experience. In previous posts, we went into detail on branding and UX (see summaries below) but now let’s see how your brand promise can unite the two and bring everything together.
Brand 101 Quick Summary: Understanding your brand means knowing who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to be perceived. While you may not have total control over what people think of your business, you can certainly impact those perceptions. However, in order to impact perceptions, it is critical that you have taken the time to understand your core brand identity, promise, and have it organized in a manner that will lend to consistency in messaging.
User Experience 101 Quick Summary: Focusing on your customers’ needs and truly putting yourself in the shoes of your customer when making UX decisions is critical. What motivates them? What are they looking for? Why are they leaving? User experience is a way to better understand your customers. Through heat mapping, bounce rates, etc. you can actually test your user experience to make informed decisions that will back design enhancements, technology integrations, and marketing budgets.
Utilizing your brand promise to influence all of your marketing efforts will vastly improve your brand image (i.e. the way your audience sees your brand). Essentially, the more you marry the two elements, the more touchpoint opportunities you have for the customer to interact with your core brand. Thus, giving you more control over the emotional journey your users have with your brand and therefore improving and steering your brand image. In this post, we will review the downsides of thinking of these two strategies as totally separate entities and how marrying the two together will highly impact your overall marketing success!
Building the bridge between your brand promise and authentic user experiences is imperative. A company will suffer online if they are solely focused on the brand alone and the same goes for a company with tunnel vision on user experience. It is not enough to simply rely on the brand identity created by the brand promise as that is 100% brand centered without taking into account the user experience and feedback. The key here is to work research and strategy phases into your design process prior to the actual design.
Once the research is complete on both a brand and user perspective, the design can come to life. There – you’ve successfully created a brand image that is ready to present to the public. What next? It’s time to start refining that and gaining more insights on your users… It’s time to take those relationships to the next level! As traffic begins to flow, so too should testing to gain further analytical insights on your users.
Through various testing methods informed by the brand promise, you are then able to start gaining data and more information about your visitors… How long are they staying on the pages? How are they finding you? Are they able to navigate through the site seamlessly? All of this can be found through digital strategy and user experience methods. The point is, you will forever be deepening your understanding of your users—there should be a constant curiosity about them as your customers are forever evolving and changing.
Understanding your brand means knowing who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to be perceived. User experience is knowing your customers, learning how to evolve with them, and using data to further enhance and communicate that experience. Focusing on only one over the other will leave a gap in your brand communication and will slow the overall growth of your digital presence. Lastly, user experience decisions must be informed by brand promise and brand promise by research and knowing as much as you can about your ideal customer.
If you’d like to read more, check out the other parts of this series below:
How Your Brand Impacts User Experience (Part 1 of 3)
How Your Brand Impacts User Experience (Part 2 of 3)
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