That’s an easy one – it can positively affect your bottom line! The right brand identity design can make or break the success of your business, so you want to make sure that you invest in a thoughtful and detailed brand strategy to ensure that you get off on the right foot as you launch your new business.
1. Understand Your Market
A brand identity and branding strategy does not just represent a company. It represents your target customer. A strong brand will position your company in the market, give you a unique voice, and ensure customer loyalty. Understanding who your target customers are so that you can focus on creating messaging that resonates with them is key to developing a successful brand positioning strategy for any size business looking to grow from the ground up.
2. You’re what people say about you
Branding a business is about identifying who you are, what you do and what your message is. The more that people can get to know your company, the more they will care about your company. Your brand messaging needs to be simple and direct so that there’s no room for interpretation. It needs to capture the essence of who you are in a very short amount of time. The best brands use two or three core messages to communicate with their target audiences. For example, Under Armour: Protects You From The Outside To Keep You Warm On The Inside or Red Bull: Fueling You Everyday. Some brands might focus on luxury or service quality while others might prefer to present themselves as corporate innovators, all of which is great.
3. First Impressions Matter
Brand development is crucial. Brand identity design and brand strategy should be the first thing you develop for your business or startup because it has the potential to make an unforgettable impression on your customers. Just a few years ago, people might have said that branding didn’t matter, but today we know better. How do you know if your brand matters? What’s the best way to know? You need to ask your customers! If people don’t buy from you, then they are not interested in what you offer. It doesn’t matter how good the product is or how much they like you, if they don’t want what you’re offering then all your branding can’t help them buy it.
4. How do customers feel about your logo?
Formalising your company’s brand can offer numerous benefits, but here are the three major ones to keep in mind. First, creating a visual identity system ensures that your customers will be able to identify your brand from the get go, helping them feel connected with what you’re doing. Second, when you invest time in developing a strong brand voice (i.e. personality), customers will have an easier time navigating what you do because they’ll understand what you’re about and how to interact with you. And lastly, investing in branding demonstrates both confidence and clarity of vision: to people looking at it from the outside, this may instill trust that should lead them to try out your product/service.
5. Communicate the reason for your existence
Branding is the process of creating a consistent look, message, and identity that’s memorable. It is important for any business or startup to think about who they are and what they’re selling right at the very beginning of their venture. A strong identity should be able to communicate quickly who you are as a business, why you exist in the first place, what your products or services are, and how people can become customers. For the digital side of a business, this means choosing an iconic colour scheme; finding an easy-to-read font; defining your voice with content marketing; designing custom images for social media posts; all that good stuff! Your website design should reflect these choices by following specific guidelines with structure.
6. Keep It Simple
This is a time to remember why you wanted to create your own business in the first place. You have a grand idea that needs an identity, so what’s stopping you from starting? The answer is branding, but not in the way you’re thinking of. Branding goes beyond just logos and slogans. It incorporates everything down to letter fonts and blog posts, all of which we’ll explore as we embark on our brand identity design journey together. But don’t worry, it’s much easier than it sounds! It may seem counter-intuitive for some companies who are barely scraping by with budgets to allocate funds for design, but it will pay off with dividends.
