Multiple brands: Should you have a different website for each?
Whether you have been running different businesses alongside each other from the beginning, or you have expanded your offering into different areas, the question business owners often face is, ‘should I have a different website for each of my brands?’. Unfortunately, the answer is not always clear cut and it very much depends on the brands and who they are aimed towards.
How does brand marketing work?
Brand marketing is about targeting your unique offering to a specific audience. Through this targeting you can greatly increase you reach and directly engage those clients and customers who truly want your products or services. There is a lot of competition out there, so achieving this targeted approach takes effort, time and resources. This is why bringing a secondary brand into this mix could either help build out the primary brand or dilute it. It all comes down to compatibility.
Are your brands similar or different?
If your primary and secondary brands complements each other, perhaps through conjoined or extended services that appeal to the same audience, then housing the brands together on one website can be a great idea. In this situation the secondary brand can bolster your more established brand, providing a wider selection of services or skillsets and making your business look larger.
On the other hand, if your brands are vastly different, or are orientated towards different audiences, putting them together on the same website can be confusing and distracting. Worse still, it may alienate both audiences.
SEO for multiple brands
Your website ranking and visibility are vital to drive traffic towards your site. This is achieved in a number of ways, but primarily, SEO works closely with your brand’s buyer personas. This is so your website can be optimized directly to your audience in what they search for, what they are interested in and how your brand can help their needs.
For this reason, you need to think carefully about adding a secondary brand onto your website. If they are orientated towards different audiences, this can end up splitting your website’s optimisation, making it harder for your business to be found.
How a multiple brand website can affect user experience?
User experience (UX) is about how your website is constructed and flows together. Have you ever been on a website where the menu didn’t make any sense, or where you couldn’t find the information you were looking for? That’s an example of bad UX and most of the time this will result in the visitor leaving the site without interacting.
The issue with adding multiple brands onto one site is that if they are not complimentary, or they add a lot of extra content that is not consistent, this will very likely lead to a poor user experience. When grouping brands together, extra attention needs to be paid to the design and continuity across the website to navigate this.
Time and resources for multiple brand websites
Creating and maintaining two websites requires a lot of time a resources, and for some businesses, particularly growing SMEs, this will be outside of their marketing budget.
Two websites mean double the cost for design, development, hosting, security software, content creation and marketing. If this is the case for your business, you will need to think carefully about whether having two sites will be profitable and what you may lose out on if you don’t separate them.
When should I defiantly keep my brands separate?
In our opinion brands should have their own website when:
- The brands are unique and targeted towards different audiences.
- They are in different geographical locations.
- When housing both brands together will create a vast and complicated site that will affect the user experience.
Connecting separate brands
Having separate brands does not mean they should never interact with each other. Even if your brands are targeting different audiences, as long as they are complementary in some way, creating brand conversations can lead to come great cross engagement. You could create a subpage on your primary site that presents your secondary brand, or use social media to link across different brands and promote one another.
Get in touch
If you have more than one brand and would like to find out the best approach for your brand marketing, get in touch.
