When talking about branding, you’re talking about giving your company a personality, which is why it’s so important. Home improvement branding should feel genuine and personal. Ultimately, you should be welcoming prospects to connect with your company, and whether visual or textual, branding is the initial factor in that.
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Establish Your Why
Before you even get started (or restarted) with your approach to branding, you need to establish your why, which starts by asking yourself the right questions.
You can start with a few basics:
- What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are their pain points as it relates to your services?
- What positive outcome will your prospects have if they choose you?
The list could go on and on, but answering these kinds of questions thoroughly will give you a solid foundation. You could always be brave and jump in the deep end, but we can almost guarantee that will leave you floundering trying to settle the branding chaos.
Again, branding is all about giving your company a personality and telling a story.
If you’ve ever heard of the StoryBrand approach to marketing, you have an idea of what we mean when we say you want to tell a story.
Telling your company’s story starts with telling what you do. We won’t dive into all the details of the StoryBrand approach, as great as it is, but we especially like their ideas on How to Tell People What You Do in 3 Easy Steps, and if you want to know how to start telling the story, this is a good place to start. And it works just as well for Home Improvement branding as for any other industry.
Without fail, the first thing people look for when they visit your website is an overview of what you do. Why? Because that is who you are as a business. Tell your audience why they should choose you within the first few seconds of their online interaction with your company.
If your “what you do” is muddled, your bounce rate will be much higher. If it’s clear and engaging, you’ll have a better retention rate for website visitation.
Textual and Visual Home Improvement Branding
Much of the time, when we think “branding” we think visual, right? Design, colors, all of that. While that is a huge part of it, it’s important to remember that text is also a vital piece of branding as a whole.
Text and visuals go hand in hand when it comes to creating personality through your home improvement branding.
Some examples of visual branding:
- Logos
- Colors
- Graphics
- Profile Pictures
- Etc.
Some examples of textual branding:
- Website copy
- Platform descriptions
- Text on graphics
- Voice and tone
- Etc.
Believe it or not, text and visuals can be either compatible or incompatible.
If you are going fun and upbeat with your visuals, you’ll want to go fun and upbeat with your tone in your phraseology. If your text is serious and heavy, there’s going to be a textual and visual disconnect that people pick up on either consciously or subconsciously. That’s where rhetoric comes in, and we could write a whole book on that, but we’ll save it for another time.
Text is incredibly important for conveying your story, but also for showing your expertise and making your prospects feel secure in what you know and what you do.
Similarly, a story can be told as much in pictures as in words. That’s why graphic design is so important, and it’s why you want visual clarity and quality on all the platforms you have a presence on.
Visuals are especially important for recognizability, which we will talk more about later. In the meantime, consider quality and consistency in your visual representation and in your company “voice”.
Platform Consistency
Another factor in home improvement branding is a consideration for platform consistency. The emphasis on branding in modern-day marketing is directly related to recognizability.
Consider this: there are over 90 million small businesses on Facebook and there are nearly 133,000 remodeling companies in the US (not to mention other types of home improvement). Of all those, how will your business stand out? And the same question could be asked of your website or any other platform where you have a presence.
Quality branding for your company is your chance at standing out. It gives you an opportunity for consistency across your online presence: your website, social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and anywhere else your business can be found online.
Consistency correlates with recognizability and, ultimately, results in a subconscious association between your brand colors, visuals, voice, etc. and your business (and the quality of your services).
Some variance in voice and style between platforms can be okay when it is actually beneficial (ex. tailoring to different audiences), but your brand should still be recognizable and connectable across platforms.
As they say, you have to know how to follow the rules before you can know how to break them.
Why Does it Matter?
We’re not just here to ramble, so we hope we’ve already answered your questions about why home improvement branding matters.
Just to recap: Personality. Trustworthiness. Consistency. Recognizability. Association.
Your online presence matters, and SEO, keywords, and all the rest of it is only as important as the quality of your branding. After they find you, you have to tell them who you are and why to choose you.
Your goal: Make prospects remember you!
Do you have more questions about home improvement branding online? Contact us at Brown Creative Group to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts.
