Conventional branding wisdom is being challenged everyday by Web 2.0 and the new Internet. Organizations and their products are more transparent than ever, even if they don’t want them to be (for better or worse). If a business is making a claim about itself, and not delivering, you better believe that it is being discussed and shared somewhere: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Though it was always the truth, now it’s more obvious than ever that your brand isn’t what you think about your products and services, it’s what the market thinks. You can take advantage of the market’s ability to quickly shape and control that brand image. But if your website isn’t in line with the market’s key purchase criteria, and you’re not setting visitor’s expectations correctly, you’re more vulnerable than ever to brand denigration.

How can you tell if your website falls into this category? Here are a few easy questions to ask yourself, your employees and co-workers, your customers and potential customers:

1. When you land on your website, especially on your homepage but also on interior pages, is it instantly obvious what your company does, what problems your products or services solve and for whom?
2. Is there an overall persuasive idea about your company that reveals your unique value proposition to your customers, one that is applicable to all of your products and services?
3. Is this idea fundamentally true, meaning that in using your products or services your customer will come to the same conclusion about the value and quality of your company?
4. Is this truth consistently communicated, restated and proven by the content and imagery of your website?
5. Is there a specific, clear value proposition for each of the target markets you serve? Is it consistent with their critical pain points?
6. Are there competitors doing any of the above more effectively, or directly competing or undermining your brand?

If any of these question throw up a red flag, than a rebranding or revitalization of your brand could have a huge positive impact on the effectiveness of your website for converting more leads of a higher quality. You’ll convert the right visitors because you’ve helped them figure out if your offerings are the right fit for them, right off the bat. If you do that well, happy customers and prospects will spread the word.

In my next post, I’ll discuss Information Architecture, and key indicators that it’s time to rethink the categorization of your content.

Note: This is post two of a nine-post series entitled, “Is Your Website Optimized for Demand Generation?” To read post one, click here.

Tune into a podcast interview about this post with the author of the series.

For more information on website optimization, check out Nowspeed’s eight chapter eBook “Is Your Website Optimizated for Demand Generation and High ROI?”