Mastering Brand Excellence: A Deep Dive into XD (Experience Design), Brand Audits, and Visual Identity
In the evolving world of marketing, businesses require a strong foothold to build an identity in their respective industry. The growth of eCommerce has brought forth many businesses that offer a diaspora of products and services. Through the combination of brand presence, brand identity and visual identity, businesses have been able to succeed within their respective markets. By optimising user experiences and conducting a thorough study of implemented strategies through brand auditing, your brand identity can be uncovered. With the adherence to your brand guidelines, you too can stand out in the crowd. Discover the potent combo of a stellar marketing strategy, great web design and a catchy appearance to master your brand excellence!
The Essence of Experience Design
Experience design can be used to design any kind of experience, from creating novel new items to crafting catchy advertising campaigns or even workplace regulations that improve people's experiences. The word itself captures the essence of its meaning: a methodology that uses user experiences to inform the features and design of your environments, processes, products, and strategies. To create experiences that are centred on users, experience designers consider their requirements, emotions, circumstances, and mindsets. These experiences can be anything from a transaction to interactive displays to customer support. When you engage in experience design practices, your focus shifts from the product to the experience as a whole; marketing an encounter.
Comprehending and questioning user needs helps to create an effective user experience. Every interaction in a well-designed experience must be carefully thought out, organised, and strategically executed to be consistent. Every touch point, from the mobile app to the packaging, offers a chance to communicate the experience design (XD) concept.
The Importance of Brand Auditing
A brand audit is a thorough examination that provides a clear picture of a brand's performance with a set of predefined goals. It looks at the bigger picture to assess how the brand is positioned in the market; helping businesses pinpoint their advantages and disadvantages for future improvement. In this day and age, it takes effort to stand out in the vast sea of sameness. Hence it is important to conduct recurrent exams to inspect the efficiency of marketing strategies.
A brand audit is essential to creating a strong brand that generates quality sales. The three areas of brand auditing include…
Internal Branding
Educating employees about the mission and vision of the company to create brand awareness.
External Branding
When a business communicates to its clients through messaging, goods, and services. A company's external brand consists of components such as logos, ads, websites, social media presence, and email marketing.
Customer Experience
Customer service interactions and content engagement are examples of this aspect. By conducting an audit in this area, businesses can learn how well their customers interact with their brand through customer service and sales techniques.
Hence, conducting a brand audit is beneficial in many ways. It is a comprehensive examination of the marketing strategies employed by a company. A brand audit can help resolve weaknesses and propose new ideas.
Visual Identity
What creates a lasting impact on the customer base is what they perceive at first sight. Visual identity plays a crucial role when it comes to branding. Visual identity is a collection of visual elements that encompass a brand. It showcases a company’s values and visions. When used efficiently, a visual identity design can convey a certain emotion or idea without using words. However, a badly designed identity might mislead consumers with dull messaging and cluttered visuals. A study conducted by the US Chamber of Commerce shows that 55% of brand first impressions are visual. It was also found that colour increases brand recognition by up to 80% (Link).
To summarise, visual identity is the outward manifestation of an organisation's personality, while brand identity is its core. It encourages customers to relate to your business.
How is Brand Excellence Achieved?
A successful brand is the result of an organisation's capacity to express itself consistently and provide meaning along with goods and services. In many respects, a company's success depends on its strong brand, which stems from an efficient branding strategy. Brand excellence is achieved through strategic brand management.
So, how do we at Planetmedia achieve brand excellence? Inherently, we provide innovative, forward-thinking, and transparent digital marketing solutions and a digital transformative process for brands across the country. Our consultations are always conducted with precision and quality, all done through the dedication of our team of passionate individuals working towards one goal; providing quality service and excellence for our clients: you!
We are a company that adapts to current market trends. We feel that the combination of these elements brings together the brand. The team focuses on creating impact through touchpoints, videos and curated content. We conduct in-depth analysis to predict brand placement in volatile market conditions. Planetmedia has helped many clients by identifying their weaknesses and solving them efficiently. Read on to learn more about our success stories…
Upmarket Homes
Upmarket Homes is a custom home-building company based in Canberra. Their team of talented builders share more than 30 years of experience in home construction all across Canberra. They provide services and consultations in constructing new homes, knockdown rebuilding and providing design concepts that account for your needs and budget.
Our team at Planetmedia were asked to redesign their webpage which needed a better customer base. An analysis pointed out that the poor user interface and lack of appeal resulted in low performance. Our team incorporated XD design principles throughout the redesign process. We included a homepage that reflected the core values of the company clearly with multiple links for contact and queries that prompt customers to take action. Our team was careful to include honest testimonials from satisfied customers and a gallery segment of Upmarket’s completed projects. Overall, the interactive interface created an engaging user experience.
A deep understanding of the core values and services of the company helped our team undergo the project in a structured way. We were able to highlight their seven-step process, site-start guarantee and fixed pricing. Adding icons, animations and enhancing their content provided a better user experience. Our mission at Planetmedia is not over once the project has been launched. We provide maintenance and support throughout for optimum performance.
ACT Community Sector Careers Gateway
ACT Community Sector Careers Gateway (ACTCSCG) is a government initiative aimed at creating rewarding careers in the community service sector across Canberra. They are a fast-growing firm that offers many benefits apart from job satisfaction. They offer community work in many sectors which are making an impact in the Canberra community.
They approached Planetmedia Canberra to develop a unique website from scratch. Our team collaborated with officials and members of ACTCSCG to structure the user interface and other features within the website. These consultations resulted in a low-fidelity sketch of the website. Our creative team developed a high-fidelity design concerning the consultations that gave a seamless user experience.
Providing a seamless user experience is the core of XD design. Brands that can capitalise on the experience design features can push their brand value to greater heights. Websites based on XD design have an advantage in flexibility with seamless integration to mobile phones and smart screens.
The National Judicial College of Australia
The National Judicial College of Australia is an independent, non-profit organisation that provides judicial education and training for judicial officers all over Australia. With the growth of their judicial programs, the company approached Planetmedia to update its website and rebuild the brand. Our team of experts in product branding were able to conceptualise and create a logo with constant feedback from the client. Creating a logo with their acronym could make them stand apart. We were able to rebuild the visual identity while maintaining the original colour palette.
Success stories and satisfied clientele are the ultimate proof of a great marketing agency. The stories mentioned are from the testimonials of our happy clients. At Planetmedia, we strive to achieve perfection for our clients. We pride ourselves on being able to go the extra mile for customer satisfaction. Our marketing strategies are customised for optimised performance. Reach out to us to learn more about successful branding!