Branding and brand identity are crucial for modern e-commerce stores. Given that more than 60% of all internet shoppers build relationships with brands based on their shared values, this is hardly surprising; customers are assigning more importance to a brand’s value and focussing less on price. This shift in focus provides e-commerce stores with the opportunity to appeal to potential customers and outdo their competitors.
The way to succeed in any business is to distinguish yourself from your competitors, and the best way to do that is through your branding. Your company’s brand is your company’s story, which you tell the world and your customers with the hope that it will resonate with them and entice them to make a purchase or follow your brand. The more customers can relate with your brand, the more they will want to be associated with it.
Having a brand identity goes beyond a nice-looking logo. Many companies fall at the branding hurdle and this can prevent them from having the successes they should. With this in mind, here are four key ways you can brand your Shopify store –
Be Consistent
You can’t have an inconsistent brand identity; how can a customer resonate and relate with something which keeps changing? They can’t. Consistency and a hard-hitting impact are crucial to nailing brand identity. The customer needs to relate everything back to your brand and that means having the same logo, same look and feel, same design, same marketing and same fonts across your entire brand.
Each time your customer interacts with your brand, either on your Shopify store, on social media or through other media, they need to have the same feeling each time. The brand identity therefore needs to remain the same, because this is what has resonated in the first place.
If you do not have a consistent approach, your brand’s identity will be lost very quickly.
Use Your Logo
Your logo isn’t just a pretty picture which you put up and ignore, it is something you need to use everywhere. A logo is an essential, if not the central, component of brand identity; your logo needs to be wherever your brand goes. This does not mean that you should put your logo absolutely everywhere, you need to strategically place it in places your customer will visit or come across your brand.
You can place your logo on your store, on labels in merchandise and on your packaging, for example. It is a case of carefully using your logo so as not to overwhelm the customer but not underwhelm them at the same time either.
Colour Scheming
If you were to step into a Hollister shop, you would know about it. Victoria’s Secret? Yep, you’d know straight away. ASDA or Sainsbury’s? You would instantly recognise them. Why? Because all of these stores have a distinct design and colour scheme. In Victoria’s Secret, it is pink and white galore, in Hollister you are met with dim lights, lots of wood and earthy colours, whereas in Asda and Sainsbury’s, it is green and orange signage as far as the eye can see.
You can quite easily use colour to establish your brand’s identity and choosing the right colour scheme is an extremely important task. As you will be aware, certain colours promote and evoke certain emotional responses, so your colour scheme should reflect the emotion and feel of your brand.
This colour scheme can then be incorporated into your Shopify store through the use of its comprehensive theme editing options and other tools.
Tone & Style
Your brand’s tone and style also help play a part in establishing identity, too. If you are a more casual clothing brand, then this should be reflected in your Shopify store’s copy and product descriptions, whereas if you are an up-market purveyor of handmade shirts. then a more formal approach would work better.
It does not stop at product descriptions, though. Any messages you put out on social media pages or through marketing materials should also follow the same style and tone. This ties back in with our point about consistency – don’t confuse your customers by having 3 customer service representatives who are casual and informal then three who are very uptight and formal.
E-commerce solutions such as Shopify are fast on the rise. With hundreds of new stores being established each week, it is important to stand out from your competitors and remain relevant. One way you can do this is by branding your Shopify store properly and keeping it consistent across all communication channels: website, blog, products and, perhaps one day, your physical store(s).