Long before a customer ever has experience with your product or knows about the positive testimonials and reviews from other customers and clients, they’ll encounter your business branding.

The elements that make up your brand — logo, name, colors and other countless design choices — will have a big impact on whether customers consider your company or investigate the competition first. With the right design, you can create something that is distinct and stands out.

These six strategies are all tried-and-true methods to build a strong brand.

1. Start With Structure

Good design and a solid foundation are essential when building a brand. Before you begin developing other elements, make sure you have the basics down. Focus on the logo, brand colors, target customer, USP and voice.

With these elements in place, you’ll have a much easier time designing visuals and coming up with content for your brand.

Your business site should also have some foundational components, like a header or other elements that make navigation easy. This header should provide quick access to essential info — like what your company does, your policies, hours and address, and how to buy products.

2. Incorporate Branding Into Site Design and Marketing Materials

Once the structure is laid out, you should make sure basic brand elements are integrated across all advertising channels. A good place to start is with your logo. This design should be one of your company’s most commonly used graphics. It should be visible in advertisements, email campaigns and press releases.

On a business website, most companies will stick the logo in the top-right corner, where it serves as a quick link to the homepage. This placement isn’t required, but because so many sites do this, visitors may be thrown off if you try something more innovative.

3. Design Highlight Reels of Previous Work

New customers may not always know about your business’s previous projects.

Sometimes, old work can speak to your brand’s values and commitments better than any design element on your site. Creating a space to highlight this can show off your company’s track record, help provide a little bit of visual interest and demonstrate what makes your brand different.

Blueprint Studios, an event design and production company, uses a combination of text describing a function the company put on for Twitter and a simple slide gallery. It shows the company’s design in action while providing some attractive visuals for the audience to latch on to.

4. Create Content for Your Site

Content marketing is a popular advertising strategy among companies for a few different reasons.

With the right strategy, you can provide valuable, informative content to visitors, while collecting web traffic and solidifying your brand. Every blog topic, word choice, interesting bit of vocabulary or turn of phrase will give people a better idea of what your brand stands for. Content will also help them know the kind of advice and services you’ll offer if they become customers.

Pinetree Garden Seeds, a seed and gardening supply store, posts about prepping a backyard for gardening. The content is aimed at a fairly wide audience and provides tips that people of any skill level can put into practice.

Building out similar content for your audience is a great way to develop your company’s voice. As you create articles and blog posts, you’ll need to decide who the content is for. These decisions will help clarify your brand vision.

5. Develop on-Brand Visuals

Strong visuals are always a critical component when it comes to brand-building. Because most people scan websites before they delve more deeply into content or storefronts, providing elements that will catch the eye is essential.

Anything and everything can work here, including illustrations, stock photos and graphic design. If everything aligns with your brand vision, any type of site visual can help build your business’s visual identity.

The homepage of Elemental Beverage Co., a coffee company with a novel approach to making cold brew, shows off how this can work. This page is dominated by a large, abstract visual that features some unusually cool colors. The visual helps underscore the company’s unique visual identity and its special technique for making coffee — a snap-chilling process that cools down freshly brewed coffee in an instant.

6. Don’t Forget About Customer Experience

Customers’ impression of your brand depends on more than just content and looks. The overall experience of browsing your website and interacting with your company will also affect how they feel.

Focusing on mobile design and customer experience are two known ways to boost CRO and retain customers.

While you’re working on revamping your branding, take some time to look at customer experience. For example, websites with slow load times and difficult navigation can work against your branding efforts. Visitors don’t wait long for a site to load. According to research from Google, the chance that a mobile user will bounce increases by 123% as load time goes up from one to 10 seconds.

Compressing heavy images or multimedia elements, minifying code and avoiding render-blocking Javascript can all help keep page loading speeds quick and site navigation enjoyable.

Site Design Can Help You Build Your Business’s Online Identity

Good branding is central to success. Modern businesses have a range of options when it comes to building their identity. Site design, the inclusion of brand elements in marketing materials and a solid content strategy can all be effective tools.