Written by First impression count, more than ever. Your outward appearance across all of your brand needs to speak to the user, resonate with their needs.
We live in a time when attention spans are lower than ever, and the demand for attention from advertising and social networks is expanding day by day. Amidst all the noise, it's hard to get your business noticed, and harder still to create loyal customers if you can't even get them through the door.
Creating web maps for your users provides a powerful communication channel for your business. The insights available can supercharge your users with insights and answers like never before.
Even more powerful is creating web map applications that seamlessly integrate with your brand and company personality.
Custom made solutions can solve this problem, offering a made-to-measure deployment that can match your existing logo and colors. However, it can be an expensive option.
Depending on the scope of your web map deployments, custom development can easily run into the tens of thousands. For many, this upfront cost is prohibitive, and worse still, custom made web map deployments often don't include ongoing updates or maintenance.
Keeping your maps updated might be simple enough, but with technology changing so rapidly, it's important to not get left behind. If a proprietary technology or framework that your maps rely on becomes obsolete, as we saw recently with the sunsetting of Flash technology, you’ll be stuck with a system that users can't even access on up-to-date systems.
Customer experience is a crucial to brand awareness and satisfaction. From the moment a user loads your map, to the answer they walk away with, the experience culminates in one of the three outcomes: positive, indifferent, or profoundly negative.
If your user's experience falls in the latter, whether in whole or part due to the confusing look and feel of your web maps, or difficult to use web GIS tools that makes it harder to extract answers, then it's likely your users will leave, and never come back. Worse still, they might have no other choice but to come back, albeit begrudgingly.
Here's the bottom line:
If you're not using your brand across your web maps, you're missing out on a crucial opportunity to connect with the end users of your map.
A professional, consistent on-brand color scheme, your logo, and your domain name creates trust in the user. Sending the user off to a new URL creates confusion and questions: "Aren't they answering my question themselves? Where and I being sent?"
But branding can't solve all the problems; answering their queries accurately and quickly is just as crucial.
However, if you start the experience on high, with an attractive interface, that’s clear, concise, and intuitive, that offers the shortest possible path to answers, you'll have a satisfied customer.
Many online GIS solutions put custom branding out of reach for many small and medium enterprises, requiring expensive plans, complicated consumption credits, or the need to code your way to an attractive map.
Mango Makes Web Map Branding Really Simple
You can upload your logo to display on your maps, datasets, and your web map portal, and ensure that your brand is front and center.
Matching your brand colors is just as straightforward. Pick from a range of attractive preset color schemes, or set your exact brand colors with hex color codes straight out of your brand identity.
A seamless experience for your users also means integrating your web maps with your web site domain name. It requires adding a single line to your domain registrar's records, but once configured, allows truly seamless browsing experience.
Users can navigate from your website, let's say acme.com, and click on a map or dataset link, and stay on acme.com. You can use a subdomain, like maps.acme.com, or your top level domain, so users can browse to acme.com/maps, and find your map and data portal.
For deployments that need a completely transparent integration, Mango offers a one-click white label option. White label turns off all Mango branding throughout the map and dataset interface - so your users need not know that you’re using Mango to power your online GIS maps and data.
Branding isn't just skin deep. It encompasses your entire brand personality. Mango can even work with your language or terminology.
Have a map that you don't want to use the colors or branding? Easy, it can be turned off on any map with just a click.
Like all things in Mango, our branding tools are simple to configure, and can be enabled with just a few clicks.
If you need powerful web maps that delivers answers and integrates with your brand, take a look at the powerful web map branding options offering in Mango.