How to design a logo that will drive traffic to your web site?
Often, too much emphasis is put on directing traffic to a website and not enough on directing the right traffic to a website. It’s not nearly as difficult to get traffic as it is to get paying traffic. If you are in business online, you’re not as interested in getting “clicks” as you are in getting “click throughs” to your check out counter! Establishing your online brand image or corporate identity, speaking the right language that appeals to your market and positioning in the right places is the way to attract the right market to your website and achieve online success. For me web traffic means nothing if it doesn’t convert to leads. Driving traffic to your site is simple, driving the right traffic based on your target market is a completely different story.
The New MasterCard Logo
As they say image is everything, especially when it comes to E-Commerce your logo or corporate identity is the messenger of trust that sends the message to your audience, this is the only image that people will see and eventually trust to do business with. Thus, you need to spend much attention on the design, concept, color, shape and application of your company’s logo. This is the image that will convey the message whether it is a small, mom and pop fly-by-night business or a legit established on-line company. For example, if your logo is one that attracts only a certain nationality or status, maybe you want to attract high-end customers when you also want to include middle income customers with upper income aspirations, you will need to change your advertising strategy. Especially if you do run an on-line business, generally your logo needs to be simple, hip, cool, modern, bold, fun and should be internationally accepted. Your entire team of web designers, graphic designers and other creative design team members will need to re-jig your corporate brand design in order to attract the changing and growing market. If you keep the same corporate image for too long it will become boring and out-dated. Even fortune 500 companies had to re-brand their logo, product packaging and brand image to avoid being mediocre and to keep up with the changing audience. Have you seen the new Walmart logo? What about the Vonage logo and have you seen the new MasterCard logo? Even Payless updated their logo recently.
The importance of corporate brand design cannot be overemphasized. In the travel industry, for example, a chain of resort hotels must walk a fine line. They want to emphasize all the luxurious appointments and amenities their resorts have, but they don’t want their potential customers to feel that their resorts are only for the rich. Something as seemingly innocent as a font logotype design can either attract or repel a significant share of the market. Think of all the hotel chains you can. Their corporate image is intimately connected with their company logo.
Your online corporate image will first be defined by your company logo and then by the over all content including the images, design elements and text on your website. Your web designers should have an expert copywriting team in place that is familiar with the language of the internet. The keywords they use should not only be specific to your general market, but to your specific niche as well. Then you will be targeting the right market for your website.
You want to get targeted traffic to your website, not just traffic. If you take both the language that web crawlers understand (plain English keywords) and the emotional language of logotype design and other graphic design elements into consideration, you will be well on your way towards having a high percentage of click-throughs and lower bounce rates to your shopping cart instead of just useless traffic passing through your website and wasting your bandwidth.
To do this right it is smarter and in the long run more cost effective to hire a branding firm or a creative graphic design company to do the designing for you. This is something you don’t want to do yourself. Lets put it this way, if you have a nice pair of scissors and a comb, would you dare cut your own hair, just when you are about to be seen by thousands of visitors? For a especial event, where you will be greeted by all your friends, associates, classmates, pilates and yoga friends, neighbors, and even your banker, will you do your own make-up? You get the point right? D.I.Y. logo (do it yourself or design it yourself logo) will not do you any good, it may even send the wrong message, especially with on-line business. With thousands of scammers out there, we need to be very careful how we present our company’s logo or image to the market. This is your opportunity to decide how you image will be perceived by many.
I would like to hear from you, let me know your thoughts on this topic. Please leave us a comment.
If you need more ideas on how to properly design and create your corporate image, please feel free to contact us or drop us an email at creative@puredsn.com and one of our creative graphic designers will be happy to give you creative ideas and suggestions.