Posted: Wednesday, Apr 27, 2011

Developing your Web design strategy can be a challenging task as you want to ensure the results justify the investment. If you are not tying that strategy to the value of your brand or using it to build brand awareness, you are missing an important step in your quest to dominate the market in your particular industry. This is especially true if you are promoting commodity products as your brand can not only land you at the top of the first page in search results, it can also ensure customers will pay a premium to purchase from you.
One of the top priorities in your Web design should be to drive targeted website traffic. To accomplish this, you need a firm focus on building your brand awareness and driving Internet marketing activities. The latter helps to build the former so that customers and potential buyers do not search for a commoditized product, but instead search for your brand. Building brand awareness online can be a challenge, but it can easily be overcome with the right web design strategy.
This web design strategy must focus on the smaller details, meaning you have to put considerable thought into your URL, the keywords you will optimize on, the type of content you will add to the site, the social networks you will use to promote your brand, the niche you are targeting with your products or services and all other activities you will conduct that will in one way or another touch your website. Simply creating a website to say you have an online presence will do nothing to build or promote your brand in a saturated space.

Think about the biggest brands online, companies like eBay, PayPal, Facebook and Amazon, and examine their URLs and brand positioning. You don’t find these online companies dominating a space with a web address of anything other than their brand name. Amazon built its phenomenal success by residing at Amazon.com and leveraging key strategies that not only brought buying customers to their site, but also kept them returning for more.
Your website is truly the foundation for building your online brand, while it also serves as the springboard for all of your marketing activities to build that brand. When you design the right strategy to keep all things working in tandem, you can build your brand, grow the business and increase your sales all at the same time.
Once you have that solid brand name and URL in place, you can begin to launch your strategy for building brand awareness online. Keep in mind that this is a process that takes dedicated activity and time, but it will be time and resources well-spent. Your focus on social network integration, video creation, blogging, interactive communities, content creation and more will all contribute to strengthening your search engine results and building your brand among your target market.
Be sure your strategy identifies that target market or that niche so that your efforts are focused accordingly. When you tie your web design strategy to activities that will build your brand among your target market, you will find that prospective buyers won’t just come looking for the products or services you offer; instead they will come looking for you.