John Thiel, Thiel Design

Josh Silldorf, Thiel Design

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Branding through your website

By Amber Burke – Director of Sponsorship (Symbiont)

As one of the Midwest’s leading branding consultants, John Thiel, president of Thiel Design, is a specialist in brand identity and integrated marketing communications that help to enhance an organization’s image, and drive revenue. He has devised and orchestrated branding programs for local, national and international organizations in a wide variety of industry categories and has a strong presence within the AEC industry.  We had the pleasure of having John speak at our May program on “Branding through Your Web Site”.  We learned how to tell our unique “brand story” through our web sites and increase our bottom line results.

John stated, in an ever changing and unpredictable world, your brand must be:  intentional, strategic, sustainable, compelling, relevant and unique.  Therefore, your brand story, should be both factual and aspirational, verbalizes unique positioning, summarizes vision and personality, serves as a catalyst for consensus and action, and finally the beginning of your brand story.  John shared some great web sites his firm designed and discussed the process involved with bringing the brand essence to life.

John also described how to develop your strategic website action plan and the steps involved:

• Identify your website team (design and content) – Internal and external resources
• Understand how the market perceives and values you – Perception research
• Define your compelling brand story and attributes – Brand profile
• Determine the content philosophy of your website – Site map and wireframe
• Evaluate the visual tools that project your brand – Brand identity
• Establish benchmarks for the website update – Visitor analytics (Traffic Now)
• Plan for content changes and updates – Content management system  (CMS)
• Develop searchable key word content – Search engine optimization (SEO)

Towards the end of the presentation Josh Silldorff from Thiel Design showcased a unique feature on their web site called (Let’s Talk) Live Chat, which allows you to reach beyond your static webpage to make a positive personal impression on your site visitors in order to cultivate leads and increase sales.  Audience members were quite enamored with this feature and could see ways it could be used in their own web sites to increase their accessibility to potential clients.

According to John Thiel, “In any economy, a strong brand and website may be your most valuable assets”.  One of the key’s to branding is let your identity be your inspiration.  Unless you define your brand the market will define it for you.  So it’s important to define your brand story.  Other than direct relationships, the web can be your strongest brand builder.  Your website is you 24–7–365.  Therefore, use it to the fullest to engage and prosper.

For more information on Thiel Design, check out their website at www.thiel.com.