Before we can build anyone's website, we always want to get to the bottom of what our client's brand is about. Some know their brand attributes well, but most do not. Here is what I sent one recent client prospect on that topic.
What makes you guys a great choice, for your clients? What unique asset do you bring to the table better than anyone else? If you're talking to a prospective client and they say, why should I hire you and not the guy down the street, what do you tell them? Ideally, this should be one main idea, or if it's a few ideas, please put them in priority order. You probably know the term Unique Selling Point, or USP.
We want to find something true about you and true about your clients, and focus on that. What outcome do your clients want that you deliver best (be sure to focus on a benefit they receive rather than a service you provide)?
From your USP, we can start to imagine, what sort of company delivers that USP? What does such a company look and feel like? How do they talk? What is important to them? Why are they so committed to delivering that USP?
For example, our USP is that we're the best available fit for medium and small business web design services because we're affordable, reliable, and do great work. Why? Well, because that's true about us, and it's true about our clients. But why? What sort of company provides the USP of being the best fit for medium and small businesses? What story can we tell about who and what we are that justifies and reinforces that? What's our origin story?
Batman fights crime in a bat costume because he's angry about his parents and has bat PTSD. BMW makes great cars because they're obsessed with building the ultimate driving machine. Subarus are a good fit for your aspirational, hipster lifestyle because they're built with love (who would say something like that? A hipster would).
Our brand is about happiness. We want our clients to be happy. We are people pleasers. We built our company with the expressed goal of pleasing medum and small businesses.
How does a company that wants you to be happy with your web design look and act? Our brand is caring, fun, cheery, and optimistic. It speaks in a voice that makes it clear we're on the side of our clients. There should be joy in every word and image we share. We're basically selling happiness.
The design of our site started out as the design for a spa, which makes sense. Spas are all about making people happy. Our logo is inspired by the WD-40 logo, because a medium/small business owner is a working class professional and what better friend do us working folks have than reliable tools like WD-40? WD-40 makes people happy the same way Austin Web and Design should do for our clients.
Let's work out a reason-for-being for your company, then come up with an origin story that justifies that, and think through how that looks and sounds.
