Building websites with brand as the foundation

At Sullivan, we believe that your website should be a living and breathing manifestation of your brand. So, how do you create one that differentiates your brand and works as a tool for your business? From our perspective, it starts with your user and culminates in a set of guiding principles that should lead your website’s structure, content, and design. Below, we dive into how we imagine and deploy brand-led websites with guiding principles as the backbone.  

Getting to your principles 

The website development process begins with two critical pieces: establishing your design target and solidifying your website’s marketing objective. Getting to your target requires ranking your audiences in order of importance; prioritizing who matters most to your site and designating a primary user. There can be secondary and tertiary players, but you need an MVP.  

Then, once you understand who this person is – and I mean deeply understand them (their passions, anxieties, and dreams) – you need to ask yourself: What is this person looking for from us and how can I give them what they’re looking for in a way that’s beneficial to our brand? Once you crack that nut you’ll have landed on your site’s core objective. Boom. 

But we don’t stop there. Then we build a vision and a set of guiding principles in support of that vision to ensure we stay within a strategic sandbox as we create your website from soup to nuts. Your vision should be as succinct as possible – a single word, a short phrase, a mighty sentence. It should be a proclamation of your website’s future value that’s simultaneously ownable and actionable. 

And your principles? Well, those come next. Your principles will be strategic tenets designed to safeguard your brand. They should be rooted in your primary target’s needs and representative of who you want to be: equally substantive and evocative; aspirational and directive. 

Letting your principles guide you 

How does this all manifest in a brand-led website that’s good for business? Let me explain with three website stories. 

KKR 

KKR is a global asset management firm who’s continually expanding their investment purview. They came to Sullivan for a rebrand and then a website to help them drive interest from investors who underestimate KKR’s investment expertise beyond private equity. This goal coupled with our primary target’s need for a trusted long-term partnership amounted to an objective, as well as a vision of positioning KKR as a purpose-driven organization committed to the livelihoods of others. 

With this vision as our north star, and KKR’s new identity in hand, we developed the following guiding principles: empowerment, humanity, and optimism. Empowerment translated to a user-driven experience in which all content is structured in response to our target’s needs for clarity, access, and insight. Humanity meant embedding the site with immersive storytelling experiences featuring real people in relatable circumstances. And optimism inspired inviting design elements that incite exploration, such as a playful, circular cursor that animates in concert with buttons on-hover. 

What was created as a result of these principles is a refreshingly friendly website that celebrates KKR’s dedication to those they serve, which increased engagement by 20% and user views by 40% within four months of launch.  

THL 

For THL, a renowned private equity shop trying to shed misperceptions of complacency amongst management teams, our guiding principles were written as directives. We wanted the site to embody the experience of working with THL as a hungry and highly collaborative partner. We wanted to show, not tell; put their network to work; and consult the user.  

Showing, not telling meant spotlighting content that conveys THL’s culture as smart, hungry, and humble: trends-focused thought leadership, growth efforts across industry categories, and features on products and services. Putting THL’s network to work meant exposing the people behind their business with evocative bios amongst other tactics to underline the strength and breadth of their expertise. And consulting the user led us to conduct usability testing post-launch, amounting to various user-driven improvements, such as adapting the size and color of one of our modules to promote readability and reorienting the presentation of case –study content to heighten digestibility.  

Now, THL’s website more closely mirrors that of a consulting firm – one that’s less about them and more about those they serve. And its 60% uptick in website traffic from targeted businesses and 48% increase in pages per session year-over-year suggest it’s working. 

Osaic 

Our relationship with Osaic, a broker-dealer in support of financial advisors, followed a similar path to our work with KKR in that we built their website after solidifying their brand. As such, we had a leg up in really understanding who they are, who they wanted to be, and what they uniquely offer independent financial advisors seeking a community of empowerment. We wanted their website to generate awareness and consideration from advisors by signaling Osaic as an enabler and advocate of their success. 

Our guiding principles were potential, belonging, and harmony, which gave way to a site that elevates what next-gen advisors seek: partnership, growth, and community—three items reflected in the site’s primary navigation. Digging deeper, we leverage a bouncing animation style and design elements that expand and contract to underline Osaic’s fluid version of partnership. We also spotlight specific growth opportunities, such as advisor-coaching initiatives and celebrate Osaic’s community as diverse and multi-dimensional through people-driven content.  

Our client is ecstatic about how their site turned out – and we’re looking forward to assessing its success with forthcoming site metrics.  

Propelling your business forward 

As you build a website, it can be easy to get lost and land on a website that does little to define and differentiate you. But with a clear vision and guiding principles in hand, you can be sure your website reflects the real you while propelling your business forward.