What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is an indicator of customer trust and awareness of your product or service. Company’s brand awareness gives you an outperform over your competitors.

The brand awareness goals are to introduce a comprehensive idea about your product or service for the target audience and evoke certain emotions and attitudes.

Difference between brand awareness and brand recognition

At first glance, identical concepts carry different meanings.

Brand recognition is a component of brand awareness. In other words, recognizability gives the user only a visual picture of the brand. The user identifies the brand by its logo, unique font, color, and packaging. Brand awareness gives the users a spectrum of emotions associated with the product, an idea of the company’s image, and makes them emotionally attached to the brand.

The main objectives of brand awareness are arousing in the users a sense of attachment and encouraging them to choose certain products of a particular firm from some other similar ones, based on the customer’s trust in the brand.

Why is brand awareness important?

People tend to buy proven goods and services. This is where brand awareness comes in handy. The users show their trust in products by choosing your company among other similar ones. The importance of brand awareness in web design means that the user is attracted not only by the beautiful cover but also by the attitude and atmosphere.

It also plays a role in the company’s revenue. For example, if you compare companies with high and low brand awareness, the first has a higher income because it has more customers.

And the third, not less important fact. The users are more likely to choose a company with high brand awareness. That’s because they know it won’t let them down, rather than they will search for information about little-known brands to ensure the products’ quality.

The types of brand awareness

There are five essential types of brand awareness. Each type has a specific purpose and is aimed at the particular needs of the company.

Brand recall
Brand recall is a type of brand awareness in which the customer recalls a brand name from a range of products or services in the same category. As a rule, people remember from three to seven brand names.

Brand recognition
Brand recognition is acquired when the firm has its target audience. This type implies that buyers can quickly identify the brand in a suggested category and distinguish it by certain qualities. Brand recognition can be established through its name and logo, branded packaging, or slogan.

Top-of-mind awareness
Choose any category and try to recall its brands. The brand that came to your mind at first has top-of-mind brand awareness. It doesn’t mean that it’s the most famous brand in the world, but the one that got your attention and created a connection with the customer. Top-of-mind brand awareness also means that the users can remember the name of the brand and its characteristics.

Brand dominance
Brand dominance means that the customer can quickly recall only one brand in a given category of products or services. A great example is Coca-Cola, a soft drink, or an Apple brand in the technique category.

Visual branding
This type of brand awareness means that the customer distinguishes the brand by visual characteristics such as logo, packaging, font or color, but cannot always remember the brand name.

Increase awareness through web design

A website is one of the tools to promote your brand on the Internet. According to statistics, a consumer needs, on average, five to seven vivid impressions to remember a brand.

The website will be the face of your brand, but it has to match the company’s style. Let’s look at seven tips to increase brand awareness through web design.

Blogging
You can establish contact with the user and show your professionalism in the chosen field by writing informative articles on the blog. Another benefit of blogging is the ability to get to the top of the Google search with SEO optimization, thereby attracting and letting more people know about your brand.

Choose your brand’s color palette
According to Forbes research, companies that operate in the same color palette have raised their brand awareness by 80%. If a user observes a confusion of styles and colors, they stop trusting the brand. It’s human psychology. We tend to trust visuals.

Brand color is an expression of the personality and image of the firm. Also, working in the same color and style makes your company stand out among your competitors.

Focus on the typography of your website
The choice of company font is also important, as a single color palette. You improve the perception of content by paying attention to typography.

Users also remember your company’s style and associate it with the brand. In this way, you raise awareness.

Interact with social media
Social media is an integral part of our modern lives. It’s reported that 53% of the world’s population has social media. You can get more people to know about your brand by maintaining a page on one or more famous platforms. Place well-known social media icons at the top of your website. This way, you will increase engagement.

Add video content
Human psychology is built so that our brain visually perceives more than 80% of the information. That’s why you need to pay attention to typography, color, and video content on your site. The users watch a short informational video about your brand, and it stays in their memory. 54% of users are preferred to watch brands’ video content. Thus, study up on the company and raise brand awareness.

Eliminate clutter and keep the white space balanced
Place content on the site in an orderly and structured manner. More doesn’t mean better. Maintain a balance of white space. This helps you to make your website visually responsive. According to surveys, dividing content into blocks and adding spaces between paragraphs increases comprehension by 20%.

Think about the domain name of the website
Google pays attention to the domain name. It’s necessary for Google that the website’s address is a representation of your brand to raise its ranking. For example, www.nike.com, the domain name is both the brand and the company name.

Great visual brand awareness examples of famous companies

Let’s look at a few examples of well-known companies with high brand awareness:

Nike
Nike is a world-renowned clothing and footwear company. The logo and website of the company are designed in the same color palette: black and white. On the brand’s official website, the first thing we see is a video that presents the company’s products. The site isn’t overloaded with information, has excellent typography, and perfectly conveys the mood and message of the company.

Microsoft
Microsoft is a well-known company in the world of technology. The site perfectly represents its brand and creates a great visual impression. It’s filled with lots of products pictures, their brief descriptions, and has stunning filmed video content that presents the brand’s products. It’s worth noting that the structure of the site and the arrangement of elements in it resembles their logo.

Coca-cola
The website of the soft drink company Coca-cola also presents a great design. All the content is built on images that tell the main objectives of the company and its activities. At the top of the site, we can observe their world-famous logo with a unique font that makes it stand out from the competitors, increasing its brand awareness.

Conclusions

Now the market is crowded with many brands. Some of them are known to everyone, while others remain in the shadows of their competitors. Therefore, it’s necessary to win the attention and trust of the users. To do this, you need to create an image and uniqueness of your brand. High brand awareness among users means you are on the right track. It’s possible to achieve such a result if you put in the effort and ingenuity.

GsysLab knows how to help you. Contact us to reinform your business. Check out the finished projects. And also take a look at the services we provide.

It’s important to ask the right questions during your web designer selection process. Who you pick to work with will determine the end product, which affects how your customers interact with your products and services. Scheduling a meet-and-greet can set up your project for success.

By asking the following smart questions, you’ll not only sound prepared, but you’ll also develop a stronger understanding of what your web designer can bring to your next project.

1. Do you have a portfolio I can look at?
Many web design companies showcase their work on their website.

Always look at their client work and take note of their design style and whether or not they place focus on user experience. Then ask yourself, “does their style align with my business?”

2. What research will you conduct for my business?
Great branding and web design require a lot of research of your business and industry to successfully market your business. Your preferred designer should want to work with you to understand your ideal client and build a marketing strategy around them.

Ask if they have a business specialty or have private information about a specific audience or industry.

3. Do you offer other services besides web design?
Most web designers offer more than one service to their customers. For example, it’s common for web design companies to offer logo design, illustration, copywriting, and video editing.

Oftentimes, designers will outsource jobs to independent contractors that can fill in their skill gaps. Ask if they do this because outsourcing can lead to delays or additional costs.

4. What is your estimated time of delivery (ETA)?
It’s always good to ask about the timeframe for your project and whether they can complete it in time. Make sure to allow for extra time for unexpected changes or issues. Ask the follow-up question “what is your design process,” so you can predict where hang-ups may occur or whether or not they use project management software to lead you through the project.

5. What do you need from me before starting the project?
Some web designers need their clients to hand over their passwords, content, or images before they can start working on the project. Most web designers can’t do it all, and if they have to contact you in the middle of the project for needed information or content, it could push your delivery date back. If you ask early, you’ll be able to come up with content at your own pace.

6. When and where can I contact your web designers (or you)?
The web designer you hire must be easy to contact. There’s nothing more frustrating than multiple days of silence from a team you’re paying to construct your website. Ask where you can contact the individual web designer or team, what their office hours are and how quickly they respond to avoid frustration, delays, and buyers remorse.

7. How many rounds of revisions or edits are included?
Before signing a contract, establish checkpoints throughout the project. Explain that you want to be able to review and approve the project in stages before the designer comes up with a first draft.

This process benefits both you and the designer because they can adjust to your needs periodically rather than all that once, which wastes time. Designers typically offer 2-3 revisions.

8. Is my website secure and responsive?
Even if you don’t plan to sell any products on your website, it still needs to be secure and responsive. Ask the design staff what content management system they’re using (WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) to determine which security measures you need to take. Your website also needs to be responsive and secure on all platforms, especially on smartphones and tablets.

Now in existence for over 10 years, the self-described “front-end open source toolkit” is used on over 22% of all websites. And we see it included everywhere from customized UI kits to WordPress themes.

Why has Bootstrap been able to reach such heights? For one, it comes packed with virtually everything designers need to craft a clean, responsive UI. Plus, the fact that it continues to be actively developed and evolve means that web professionals can reliably come back to it again and again.

With a decade under its belt, this is a good time to look at the overall impact Bootstrap has had on the web. Has it been a blessing, curse, or somewhere in-between?

A Tool for Rapidly Implementing an Established Look and Feel

The biggest advantage Bootstrap provides is the ability to implement an established look and feel. Right out of the box, you have a set of UI elements and components that cover just about every use case. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling t-shirts or blogging about your favorite video games – the framework gives you a massive head start on the design.

In addition, Bootstrap is extensible. It’s built with customization in mind, making it a fairly straightforward process to change various components to meet your needs. Creating your own components is also possible.

That goes beyond individuals performing one-off tweaks for a specific project. It also extends to theme developers. They can leverage the framework to bring a familiar front-end UI to content management systems (CMS).

Yet, customization is still optional. If your goal is to design and deploy a project quickly, just installing Bootstrap (or an offshoot UI kit) and familiarizing yourself with its contents is all you need.

This level of convenience and flexibility has undoubtedly played a large role in Bootstrap’s enduring popularity.

The Bootstrapping of the Web

Bootstrap does its intended job quite well. Perhaps a little too well.

As we mentioned, the usage statistics point to nearly a quarter of all websites utilizing the framework. When a UI is so widespread, it’s bound to lead to some sameness when it comes to design.

Much like the early days of the CMS, it’s often easy for the trained eye to pick out elements of Bootstrap within a website. You start to notice the same buttons, navigation styles, and pricing tables. Even sites that don’t use it may well attempt to duplicate certain aspects of the look.

To be sure, it’s generally clean, accessible, and easy to read. While that can be considered a good thing, there’s also a bit of a downside. And it isn’t necessarily an issue with Bootstrap itself.

Rather, it’s about designers either accepting its default styles or changing them only minimally. The result is a web that is becoming increasingly homogeneous.

Inspiring a New Category of Frameworks

Perhaps it’s a testament to how well put together Bootstrap is. There aren’t a bunch of shortcomings that need fixed. Everything works as intended right from the start.

With that, some designers may not feel the need to radically change anything. One could even argue that it goes against the very point of the framework in the first place.

Unlike a lot of tools aimed at the web design community, Bootstrap has a universal appeal. There is no particular niche that it can’t fit into. That’s a key to its massive adoption rate. And it has inspired an entire category of CSS and JavaScript frameworks.

Other worthy competitors have popped up in recent years, such as Tailwind CSS. It has a similar appeal. However, it differs in that it’s more “utility” based. The various elements are all there, but depend on the designer to customize them to fit a need.

Bootstrap is unabashedly opinionated in its design. Tailwind CSS goes in the opposite direction. If anything, this provides designers with two great options, depending on their own preferences.

Design from the ground up or implement a completely polished UI – the choice is yours.

A Behind-the-Scenes Powerhouse

Maybe the most impressive aspect of Bootstrap’s 10-year rise is that it’s a completely developer-focused tool. That is, you interact with its code and view the results on the front end. That’s opposed to, say, WordPress, where users create content and install custom functionality via a back-end dashboard.

The framework is generally of interest to professionals. Thus, it relies on web designers for growth. It doesn’t have the same public-facing profile of a CMS.

That says a lot about what Bootstrap has done right over the past decade. To win over a sizeable portion of this industry is no small task. To maintain it and continue to grow for this long is even more telling.

What will the future bring? We don’t have all the answers. But, whatever happens, it’s likely Bootstrap will still play a significant role in web design for years to come.