Imagine you spend hours working on a new product or developing a service. Launch day comes, and you’re ready to make sales, but you hardly make any sales. While many things may have caused those results, your might need to assess your brand identity. If your branding isn’t strong, it can be easy for customers to forget about you and choose your competition instead. Fortunately, you can go through the following steps to develop a stronger brand identity that helps your business grow.
Review Your Current Branding
The first thing to do to help create a strong brand identity is to review what you already have. If you already have some sort of branding, consider how that’s helping or hurting your growth.
Maybe your branding doesn’t attract your ideal customers, or it doesn’t give off the right tone to your audience. Perhaps you don’t have a strong brand, so your brand seems all over the place.
If you don’t have a brand identity yet, you can move on to the next step. Either way, you want to make sure your new brand identity will capture your audience’s attention and encourage them to buy.
Consider Your Ideal Customer
Strong branding requires you to know your ideal customer well. You should nail down the one type of person you want to sell to work work with in your business.
Think about the products or services you offer and who would need or want them. Consider how old your ideal customer is, what their job is, and where they live.
Figure out what your ideal customer does or doesn’t like, especially when it relates to your offers. For example, if your ideal customer doesn’t like super whimsical stuff, you should keep your branding more professional.
If you can’t figure out the details about your ideal customer yourself, ask your audience. Send out a survey for people to fill out, and review the answers to learn how you can develop your new brand identity.
Research Your Competition
Next, you should do some competitor research to see what other businesses are doing. Consider if other companies use certain colors or fonts and how they have designed their logos.
Look at their website to see how they incorporate their branding. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer and determine if the branding would make you want to buy something.
Use your research to consider how you can brand yourself better so that you’re more memorable than your competition. That way, you can get customers to come back to your site.
Another thing you can do is look at brands in other industries, especially brands that you like. Figure out what those brands are doing to capture attention and how you can adapt that to fit your business.
Select Fonts and Colors
Once you learn more about your customers and competition, it’s time to start developing strong branding. You should come up with a set of two or three fonts to use on your website and in social media posts.
Make sure the fonts you select match the vibe that your customers want from you, whether that’s professional or fun. The fonts you use should also be easy to read so that customers will recognize your brand when they see the font.
Choosing colors can also make a huge difference for your brand identity. If you cater to business professionals, you may want to use black and white.
However, if you sell cosmetics, you might want to include reds or pinks in your branding. As with the fonts, make sure your colors accurately reflect your brand and make sense for your audience.
Design a Logo
Using the fonts and colors you choose, you should create a good logo. If you aren’t a designer, you may want to hire a logo design specialist to help come up with ideas.
They will have a better idea of what works, and they can bring your logo idea to life. A good designer will be able to make a logo that looks good when small and large.
That way, you can use your logo on all of your marketing materials or digital signage, and the logo will be legible. And it will help with brand recognition when you can’t use your full brand name.
While you can design a logo yourself, it might not be as good as what a designer can create. If you can’t hire a designer yet, you can create a placeholder logo and hire someone later.
Develop a Brand Guide
Another crucial part of your brand identity is your brand guide, which includes your visual elements and your brand voice. You should create a brand guide for you and your team to use.
Everyone can refer to the guide when creating content for your website or social media. That way, you can make sure everything you share is cohesive and sounds like the same brand.
If everyone uses their own personal voices, the posts may not sound right together. You might create a lot of confusion for your audience, which can cost you customers and sales.
Incorporate Your New Branding
Finally, you’re ready to incorporate your branding into everything your business does. Update your website with your new fonts, colors, and logo so that your brand is clear for all of your visitors.
Make sure everyone who needs one has a copy of the brand guide. You might also want to hold a meeting where you go over the guide and answer questions for your employees.
That way, you can help your team learn how to incorporate the brand elements into the content they create for your company. And you can make sure that there aren’t any confusing parts to the brand guide.
Brand Identity Done Right
As a business owner, your brand identity is crucial for the success of your company. It can mean the difference between a bunch of sales or none at all for your next launch.
Your brand identity includes your logo, colors, fonts, and tone. Without a strong brand identity, you can confuse customers and your team, but it’s easy to develop an identity that makes sense.
Are you ready to share your new brand identity with the world? View our digital signage plans to spread the word about your business.
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