Having a brand for your business is the first step in building a reputation. Business branding fulfils many functions and helps to solidify your business from your mission statement to your product or service offering. It offers a visual representation of what your business stands for and serves as a promise to your clients and customers. It’s one of the most important aspects and a major factor when formulating your business plan.
Below is a break down of a few important aspects of branding to consider when deciding on your brand.
What is branding?
Branding is used to differentiate yourself from other businesses, to stand out and be recognisable. Branding is often expressed as a logo or company name using distinctive colours that are used across all brand collateral and assets. Creating a brand for your business makes a lot of sense and the reason that it’s a common marketing practice among many, if not all businesses.
Colours play a major role in branding and can make a massive difference, so it’s important to carefully consider the message and tone that you want your business to send when deciding on your brand. Do your research and look into how colour affects people, for example, what emotions do certain colours evoke? How do I want people to feel when they see my brand? before you make a decision.
Why is branding important?
Branding is all about perception and is the first thing that people consider when choosing to work with a business. It plays an important psychological role and it assists in creating memorable experiences for your clients or customers. Branding provides brand awareness and brand loyalty and helps a brand to go beyond its product or service offering.
Successful businesses like Apple, have used their branding in order to build relationships with people as a way to discover effective means to sell their products. They chose to appeal to the interests and emotional needs of their target consumers and because of that, have gained a fiercely loyal customer army.
Nike took a page out of the same book by choosing to communicate the message and idea that everyone can be an elite athlete if they buy Nike equipment. They don’t focus on selling their sports goods directly and have instead spent billions of dollars on endorsement deals and various marketing deals featuring the world’s biggest sports stars and athletes to get their message across.
The above examples show that branding done well, allows a business to build effective relationships and associations with customers and clients in a relatively very short period of time. People begin to associate what your business stands for as soon as they recognise your logo. Your logo and branding have the ability to sum up what your business is all about in a matter of seconds and that in itself is very powerful stuff! The question is, what message is your brand sending them?
Define your brand
Make sure that you are clear on the message you want your brand to send people. You can do this by first checking all aspects and clearly defining your brand.
Your brand communicates who you are to customers and clients and so it stands to reason that your branding should include strong, effective messaging that encapsulates your business’ core mission and values to those who happen to see it.
To make the process easier, here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- Why does my business exist?
- What qualities do my clients associate my business with?
- What kind of brands does my business look up to and who are our competitors?
Create brand guidelines
Come up with a few keywords, phrases or values that you think clearly defines your business. Look for images to make the process more effective. Choosing everything down to the text will send a particular message so decide on if you want to come across as serious or fun or anything in between and stick to it. Whatever you decide on, use it to inform your brand guidelines. Brand guidelines will help you and your staff to ensure continuity throughout all your business’ marketing materials and assets.
Choose your brand colours
Decide on a few core colours for your brand’s colour palette. These are key and are the colours that will be used to convey your brand’s identity. Choosing these colours correctly will help to communicate what your brand is all about and assist in being recognised by anyone at a glance. Examples of brands who have successfully pulled this off in the past include the iconic Google, Instagram and Facebook.
When deciding on your brand’s colours, research the meaning of colours and choose them according to the order of importance. Your most important colour (what your brand mainly stands for) should make up most of your logo. This colour will serve as the primary voice of your brand. The colours that you choose need to be functional as well as visually effective. Contrasting colours work well together for a striking appearance. Remember that the colours you choose will be the heart of your brand and because of that, should be chosen carefully.
Choose your fonts and typefaces
This is important as you will use this font throughout all of your branding collateral and assets for years to come. When choosing a font, remember that it will form a big part of your brand guidelines. Refer back to and draw on your brand’s essence to help you make the correct decision. Start by thinking of your brand’s main qualities and what type of font would be appropriate to achieve that goal. Take into consideration the type of marketing you want to invest in and how your chosen font will look in your various designs.
Every decision you make should be influenced by the overall message that your brand is trying to convey.
Once you have figured out all of the details and put your brand together it’s time to get the word out. Here are some practical actions you can take:
- Make sure to place your logo everywhere
- Be clear on the key message that your brand is trying to communicate
- Make your brand cohesive. In other words, let your brand extend to every part of your business from your social media to your email signature.
- Develop your brand’s voice. This voice and tone should be applied to all marketing collateral.
- Create a tagline. Something that captures your brand’s essence while being memorable, short and sweet.
- Design a brand template that can be applied to all of your marketing assets. This will preserve your brand’s look and feel throughout and keep it consistent.
- Always deliver on your brand promise to avoid disappointing your clients and customers. People don’t like shady businesses so don’t be one. Simple as that!
- Most importantly, be consistent. If you fail at this, all your hard work and attempts at establishing a credible brand will fall flat.
