Website design is essential for product and brand differentiation. Read on to learn the best tactics to help your business stand out.
David Hehenberger is an accomplished SaaS entrepreneur and coffee enthusiast.
There are many ways to employ your site to outperform your competitors and convince web visitors that your products and services represent the best solution to their pain points.
Nevertheless, if you're looking for a super-effective web design strategy that seldom fails, focus on speaking to your target audience's needs.
Ultimately, consumers want and expect brands to put their requirements first.
One survey has shown that 79% of people will only consider buying from brands that demonstrate they understand and care about their needs. Plus, in-depth audience understanding represents a crucial aspect of a pleasant customer experience, too.
According to data from 2022:
So, if you want website design to differentiate your brand from your competitors, why not focus on your dedication to presenting your customers with real, relevant value?
Invest in visuals and copy that directly address your target audience's needs and expectations. Highlight opportunities for solving their pain points. And don't shy away from using measurable metrics to show how you intend to help them achieve their goals.
For example, if you look at a service brand like Somewhere, you'll see it achieves this objective with a well-written value proposition. By pointing out that the brand helps prospects find "amazing employees that cost 80% less than US equivalents," Somewhere expertly describes its target audience's expectations and points out how it can help.
However, note that this brand differentiation tactic isn't just for service brands.
You can easily apply it to your ecommerce business branding strategy, as Leaf Shave did. This brand uses the homepage hero section to point out that consumers only need to buy once, after which they can simply refill razors as needed. It also addresses key shopper concerns by saying that its products deliver proven results, that they're buy-it-for-life, economical, and safe for sensitive skin.
Although successful and conversion-inspiring brand differentiation necessitates a multifaceted approach, it's important to understand the crucial role visuals play in allowing your products and services to stand out.
People react far more intensely to visuals than text. Scientific research shows the following:
With this in mind, one effective tactic for creating brand differentiation through web design is to hit the visual angle of your brand and products very hard.
This will make it easier to communicate the value you offer and inspire web visitors to move through the sales funnel. It will also help you elevate your brand — especially in comparison to your competitors.
There are different ways you can incorporate this design tactic into your web design strategy.
On the one hand, you can align your visuals with your target audience's aspirations. This works equally well for service and ecommerce businesses, seeing that it relies on presenting your offer in a way that reflects your ideal customers' wishes or objectives.
EE Buyers Agent, for instance, understands that its potential customers want exclusive, off-market properties and a tailored, trustworthy property concierge experience. That's why the images throughout the homepage depict visually stunning properties that genuinely fall under the category of "dream home" and that clearly set EE Buyers Agent apart from its more prosaic competitors.
On the other hand, depending on your target audience's core characteristics, you may have to opt for a different direction.
Ecommerce brands, in particular, might have to emphasize trustworthiness to successfully engage their prospects.
In these cases, an approach similar to Whole Wood Playhouses, which relies on carefully selected user-generated imagery, may be the better way to differentiate your brand's offer. The images in question are powerful instances of social proof highlighting the brand's credibility. They're still uniform and aesthetically pleasing, helping Whole Wood Playhouses position its products as some of the highest-quality options in the market.
In some cases, brand differentiation isn't about making impressive statements to inspire your audience to choose you over your competitors. Instead, it's about doing your best to help shoppers comprehend the value you offer and its relevance to their particular needs.
With this in mind, you'll want to enrich your website with design elements to boost product comprehension.
Now, while you can do this with well-written copy optimized for readability and accessibility (as well as images), no format drives product understanding as well as video.
According to data from Wyzowl, 98% of people have watched explainer videos to learn about products and services in 2025. Moreover, watching videos is people's favorite method of collecting product information, with 78% saying they prefer this type of content over articles, manuals, infographics, sales calls, and webinars.
By investing in high-quality explainer videos (which can contain an aspirational aspect to elevate their conversion potential), you help your target audience understand the value your business offers. More importantly, you can effectively differentiate your brand and products from alternative options in your niche.
The GetSafe hero section video is an exceptional example of an ecommerce business using the format to describe its physical product. It directly addresses the features that make it different from alternatives (the fact that it's not a wearable). On top of that, the short-form resource represents a marvelous way for GetSafe to show how well it understands its prospects' unique needs in a humorous and relatable manner.
As for incorporating this differentiation tactic into your service brand's website design, consider doing something similar to Klue. This SaaS business doesn't just focus on what its service does. More importantly, it uses the explainer video to provide a use-case context, making it far easier for web visitors to comprehend the unique benefits of investing in the competitive enablement platform.
Effective web design — regardless of whether you're trying to differentiate your solutions or achieve any other goal — requires that you understand your audience's buying journey.
After all, without knowing how your prospects discover, explore, evaluate, and choose products and services, you cannot possibly identify the web design tactics that will help your business stand out.
So, here's the deal. Knowing that the differentiation process relies on positioning your business as the best-in-class, why not start the positioning strategy at the very beginning of the customer journey?
Remember, most people don't enter the sales cycle during the evaluation phase. Instead, they start their shopping journeys by searching for information on their pain points and exploring potential solutions.
If you want an effective yet simple differentiation tactic for your website, pay attention to how you design resources meant for the awareness (that is, the topmost) stage of the sales funnel.
By prioritizing informational value, aesthetic appeal, and user-friendliness with your company blog, you will position your business as a credible industry authority that consumers can rely on for quality advice/information. You'll also create mechanisms for attracting and nurturing new prospects, automatically turning these posts into a tool that helps your brand stand out as the superior choice in your niche.
Take, for example, Clue. This SaaS brand offers one of the most popular (and highest-rated) period and pregnancy tracking apps. However, the reason it has earned its reputation of being "the best" isn't just the fact that the app works well. Instead, Clue continually invests in its website, with a strong emphasis on making its company blog an extensive encyclopedia of science-backed articles covering all aspects of women's health. The wealth of informational value works to attract new leads. And it positions Clue as a trustworthy authority in an otherwise confusing industry.
The approach works just as well for ecommerce product differentiation.
The article below, published by Lick, is a highly informative educational resource that attracts new prospects and empowers them to solve their pain points. Note how it also serves as a method of gently nudging consumers toward the lower stages of the sales funnel thanks to a set of natural-looking, relevant product page links.
Your first instinct when choosing web design strategies to effectively differentiate your brand may be to avoid mentioning your competitors. However, this isn't necessarily the right choice.
Consumer behavior research shows that most buyers go through an extensive research phase when selecting what products/services to invest in. In fact, PWC discovered that 29% of consumers visit websites specializing in product price comparisons before making a purchase decision.
So, knowing that future customers are bound to compare your offer to alternative solutions, it may be a good idea to dedicate a section of your website to competitor comparisons.
This will help engage web visitors (preventing them from leaving your site to find the information they're after). It also presents a wonderful opportunity to highlight brand and product differentiators that could convince them to convert.
For example, check out how Eachnight utilizes its Best Mattresses resource for brand differentiation. First and foremost, the business provides an in-depth explanation of its product review process. It employs videos and visuals to create an engaging content consumption experience. Most importantly, it emphasizes the expertise of the authors of the article, pointing out the fact that they're medical experts, sleep coaches, and mattress owners who can genuinely testify to the quality and performance of each reviewed item.
Or, if you're aiming to prove your brand's superiority in terms of a very specific competitor, why not take inspiration from Databricks? This SaaS brand knows that there are several viable alternatives to its solution. So, to win over its ideal customers, Databricks creates a feature comparison table that addresses highly specific use cases. This allows the brand to stand out as the better choice for its target audience. Plus, the design strategy acts as a great way to set and manage customer expectations — especially in the SaaS industry, where meeting client needs plays a key role in customer retention.
Sometimes, the best way to use web design to differentiate your products, services, or brand isn't to highlight characteristics that set you apart from your competitors. Instead, it's to allow your target audience to experience the distinguishing benefits of converting with your business first-hand.
In fact, if you can accomplish this early on during the buyer's journey, you can establish your brand as a dependable and trustworthy entity. This web design strategy may even help you position your solution as the one your target audience evaluates all others against.
With this in mind, one simple differentiation tactic you can use in your web design strategy — especially if you run a service or SaaS business — is to allow instant and easy access to your solutions.
This is precisely what Topview does on its homepage. Instead of forcing web visitors to go through a complex process of learning about the AI video marketing solution, the brand instantly invites prospects to create a video from a link or file with a single click. It's easy, uncomplicated, and highlights the exact benefit that sets Topview apart — it provides users with a high-quality video without forcing them to get involved in the creation process.
Lastly, as you explore design tweaks that can help create differentiation, don't forget about the type of content consumers consider most authentic and trustworthy — user-generated social proof.
So, why not use customer feedback to prove that you offer superior solutions (and a better customer experience)?
By using web design to highlight social proof throughout your website, you'll address and remove some of your prospects' primary conversion obstacles. You'll also provide them with unique content that will help them comprehend the value you offer — without forcing you to adopt an aggressive sales-oriented approach.
The best part about this differentiation tactic is that it can be extremely easy to implement, both for ecommerce andservice businesses.
For example, something as simple as showing off reviews in an attention-grabbing spot — similar to what Mannequin Mall does with its flyout element — is a great way to emphasize your brand's credibility. Or, you could take a step further and even incorporate UGC into your product pages.
Or, if you sell a service and not physical products, why not produce and spotlight content that shows the role your solutions have played in helping your customers reach their goals? Case studies and success stories are exceptional content formats you can add to your website. They give you the necessary space to communicate how you deliver value to your audience.
What's more important, these resources are easy to add to your existing web design, whether by creating a dedicated Case Studies page or featuring specific articles on your homepage — which is what Revenue does below.
