Master Online Branding with UVPs For Conversion Optimization

Your brand is the soul of your company. When you can clearly state your company’s benefits and back up your brand’s key conversion points, you will close more deals.

But to conveying your brand message online requires many headlines and scraplines—mini statements that summarize your UVP (unique value propositions). That’s because users scan and skim web pages very quickly, and your key points need to stand out clearly.

In terms of conversion optimization, branding and UVP are rarely talked about together. But they’re both crucial, and must work jointly, if you want your website visitors to convert.

Web Design Tips for Online Branding and CRO

Keep a notebook of all your ideas, since you may find that each page could have its own mini scrapline defining not only a keyphrase, but also the page’s reason for being. The more concise your mini statements are, the more quickly customers will “get” what you do and your unique value proposition.

Your goal should always be to build a clean-looking site that is easy to use.

• Make sure you base the look and feel of the site around your logo and traditional print campaign colors, and use general formatting that is consistent across all mediums.
• Avoid using too many different fonts and font styles.
• Avoid using too many colors or colors that are not part of a defined palette.
• Make sure the design has set places for calls to action or the things you want people to click, see, or do (typically located middle-right)
• Make sure your navigation (Home, About, Services, etc.) breaks out the content into logical keyword groupings, and that you have a way, as the site expands, to add pages that won’t make the site harder to use.

If you don’t have a place for clear calls to action and initially build your website in a way that will make it easy to add lots of content later, you will likely have to redesign the site later for better search marketing and conversions, as well as a better user experience.

Make Sure Your Site Appeals to Different Customer Personas

If your site is really appealing to methodical engineers but unappealing to spontaneous moms, competitive CEO dads, and humanistic types who require knowing more about who you are and who you have served, you will have received conversions from only 25% of the potential audience.

That means you’ve left 75% of the money you could have generated on the table.

Categorizing Customer Personas

Here are some examples of customer personas to highlight how different these people are and how they might perceive your brand messaging in different ways. We’ll use my brand, McDougall Interactive, as the example for various services these personas might be looking for online.

Business Owner Bob: Older, type A personality, looking for proof, case studies, news, ROI

Marketing Sally: Marketing coordinator, intermediate knowledge, good with details

Enterprise Erin: Senior marketing director with advanced knowledge in traditional marketing

Small Biz Tim: DIY type

IT Scotty: Tech guy asked to review our site looking for referrals, requires geek-level details

Ad Agency Jim: Looking to hire us for his clients, requires creativity, appreciates talent

Rather than getting into the granular specifics, you can also categorize potential visitors by company size. For example, we could simple create two categories—large business and small business.

We can assume that smaller businesses seeking our services are looking for freebies and DIY info because they have tighter budgets. Whereas a larger business would be looking for something like an ROI calculator or trends.

Categorizing Personas by Job Type:

• Agency
• In-house marketer
• Business owner

General Website Personas:

• Searcher: Looking for knowledge about a product, company, etc.
• Doubter: Still forming an option
• Knower: Wants to take an action
• Customer: Looking for service or support

There are many ways to break visitors into groups.It takes creativity and brainstorming to do it well, but in the end your customers will enjoy your site more if they feel like some of the content is specifically for them. Many studies have shown significantly increased conversion rates when personas are considered when writing content for a website.

Example Persona (With Template)

Here’s a basic template you can use to get the ball rolling when creating customer personas for your site.

Name: Business Owner Bob

[Insert an image here to make it more visual, which helps writers to target someone specific]

Age: 40–70

Gender: Male

Job title: President

Daily routines: Numerous meetings, dealing with vendors, putting out fires, reviewing the numbers, travel

Pain points: Never enough time in the day

Goals: Grow the business, keep customers and employees happy

Values: People who work hard and who are honest

Favorite Sources of Info: Nightly news, and may read the paper but more and more online

What Experience Are They Looking For? Exceptional organization, professional, high ROI

Site Usage: In and out just to verify we are the real deal

Content: Report on where Internet marketing is headed. News, case studies, testimonials.

Common Objections to Your Product or Service: Don’t want mindless reports but clear action steps. Need to prove ROI. Too time-consuming to work with us.

Level of Technical Knowledge: Reasonable but often think they know more than they do about sites. They think all users will like what they like and their pitch.

Brands They Identify With: BMW, Mercedes

Final Thoughts: Brining it All Together

All of these components are intertwined. Your online branding is reliant on understanding the different customer personas that land on your website.

Only then can you effectively create UVPs to target those specific types of visitors.

By taking the time to understand their wants and needs, you can create a brand messaging for each of them that puts your conversion rate through the roof.