How To Give Your Landing Page Personality With Branding

We recently took on a huge rebranding project at CustomerIcare. We have one main problem with our brand as it is right now: We don’t have personality.

This brought us to do some research on brand personality and more precisely what makes a brand memorable.

We all hear about how people buy from people and not businesses. I believe in that saying but it is not entirely true. People primarily buy from brands. What makes brands so powerful is the human-like personality with give them.

In a business world where we all have competitors, a distinctive brand personality can help us stand out. This is particularly true for your landing pages where the quality of your product can’t really be a factor yet.

In this article, we’ll see how you can give personality to your landing page and what kind of personality you should go for.

Always Adapt Your Brand’s Personality To Your Customers

Different customers have different needs and are attracted to different personalities. The number 1 mistake a lot of businesses make is to create a brand that talks to them but not necessarily to their customers.

That’s why people creating a business in a field they are passionate with often have an easier time creating a relatable brand.

The question is, how can you find out what kind of personality speaks to your customers?

First you will need to clearly identify your target audience.

Let’s say you are selling funny ties. You will want to find out who wears ties, who buys them, where they buy them, why they prefer funny ties to more classic ones.

For that you can go through specialized forums, monitor social media for mentions about ties, research your competitors and see how they speak to customers or conduct customer interviews.

Put yourself in your customers shoes for a while and get to know what all of them have in common. This group of customers makes up a community with a specific personality.

The goal for your brand is to become a member of the community, an insider.

Use Brand Archetypes To Get Inspired

There 12 main brand archetypes you can use to build your brand’s personality. Each of them have unique character traits and determine what can of relationship you will have with your customers.

Different archetypes are also more of less popular in different industries.

The “Hero” brand archetype is, for example, extremely popular in the sport industry. Hero brands advertise hard work, productivity and courage.

They protect us from a greater evil and we love them because they make us feel like heros ourselves. Nike is a great example of a Hero brand in the sports field.

The “Magician” archetype is popular in the entertainment industry. Magicians sell dreams and seek to create wonder. No one really knows or cares about how their product works but it works and it is amazing. Disney and Pixar are both Magician brands. They are here to make us dream and that’s it.

“Jester” brands are becoming more and more popular in the startup scene. They’re the good friend you know will make you laugh or the funny guy at a party. They’re usually selling to young adults or other startups.

You can take 2 roads to select the perfect archetype for you:

1. Go for the common archetype in your industry because it is probably the most popular one among customers.
2. Pick a completely different archetype and use that to stand out

The second option is a lot riskier but it will also yield way better results if you pull it off. Why? Because it will make your brand unique and you will appeal to a niche of customers who were not receptive to the currently used archetype.

How To Communicate Your Personality On Your Landing Pages

The best way to give your landing page personality is to tell a story. I am not saying that you should publish a novel on your landing page. But you should trigger your visitor’s imagination.

A popular storytelling framework is the Problem - Solution - Success framework.

If we go back to our earlier funny tie example, here’s how they could use it:

• A first part calling out the visitor and making them picture the problem: “Tired of wearing the same boring old ties?”. Note that it is also really effective to use a photo to illustrate your point since most of us are visual.
• A second part where you present your product as the solution: “Bring some joy to your neck with our 1000 of funny ties”
• A last part where you display your success: “20,000 men are already wearing a happier life. Are you in?”

I love this framework because it can be applied to almost any business and it is highly effective.

Once you have your story laid out, all you need is to apply your brand personality to it. You could have the same story but tell it very differently depending on whether you are a jester or a hero.

My funny tie example definitely falls under the Jester category but I could have told the same story with the more heroic approach.

Why Personality Is So Important In Business

If you asked me today what my biggest regret is when building a marketing strategy for CustomerIcare, here’s what I’d tell you: I wish I had spent more time building a unique brand.

We could definitely have a better branding on the visual side but it is the least of our problem. We just don’t have personality. We don’t have anything that makes us memorable or helps us stand out. We never wanted to use a person as our brand’s face but we forgot to build a face for our brand.

It is so easy for a startup to just adopt the “founder as a brand” model but it is not the best decision and here’s why: If you plan to grow your company, you will need to grow your team and if the founder of the company is your brand, you will have a hard time keeping a consistent voice.

It can be hard to build a brand when you don’t know yet what market is right for you or how much your business is going to change. That’s why I would build the company culture first.

Once you have a great culture, branding will come and you will stand out. Investing in culture right from the start can seem like a waste of time but successful companies like Zappos or Airbnb could tell you it is worth it.

A great brand personality will help you stand out even in a crowded market.

More importantly it will pave the way for long term success and bring consistency to your business. If you have a small business, you must know how valuable that is!