The Complete Guide to Creating a Strong Brand
A brand is the experience built around your business and the impression your business will leave with your audience. It is the way people perceive who you are, and will help you communicate your personality, your purpose, and your core values. A strong brand makes for a strong and reliable business.
Your brand is made up of a variety of different assets that can help create the perfect experience for your clients. An experience may include visiting your website, seeing your logo and colours and noticing your brand on social media. When planning and designing your brand strategy, you will need to remember the experience you want your audience to have: What is their reaction? How do they feel? What does this remind them of?
The experience is what will define your brand.
If you are a business owner, you want to make the best impression possible. Here you are going to learn the steps needed to take starting with your brand foundation and working your way up.
Step 1: Set your goals
This list will be very specific to you and your business. Here are some examples to ask yourself:
What’s your vision for this brand?
What do you want to achieve?
How will you measure success?
Making a list of your goals will be helpful to remind you of what you’re reaching towards. This is the time to think about why you are building this brand. Are you raising awareness? Building a community? Establishing yourself as an expert? Your goals may change over time, but you should always be aware of them to help you when you are building out and making decisions about your brand.
Step 2: Define your ideal client
Customers and clients are going to be the reason you make all of your decisions - they are the life of your business. Use the guiding questions below to match your brand with the expectations of your ideal client and give them the best experience.
Who is your ideal client? Start by defining their needs and expectations:
What do they desire?
What are they struggling with?
What is stopping them from solving their problems?
How will their lives be better if you solved their problems?
What is their financial situation?
What does their normal day-to-day life look like?
This is the time for you to really get inside the mind of your audience. Find ways to get to know your audience to the fullest extent so there is no second guessing when making brand decisions.
Also read: Get to know your audience
Step 3: Define your purpose and values
Your purpose is the reason you are here and why your business exists. Your values are going to be what levarges your ideas and what drives you to your goals.
Focus on how you are going to explain your product and/or services and how they’re going to target the pain points of your ideal client. You also need to be able to explain not only the services you provide, but the benefits of working with you compared to your competition. What results are you going to provide your clients that they cannot find anywhere else?
Your values are foundational to your brand as they are what you and your business stand for (eg. sustainability). What do you believe in that you want to express through your brand? What are the promises that you will make as a business? These values are what you share with your audience so they can better understand you and how they can better connect with your brand.
Step 4: Develop your brand’s personality and message
Personality and message may also be referred to as style and voice. Your personality is essentially the first impression you give to new-comers, and how you keep your existing audience. Developing your brand personality is about building relationships and how you will bring your core values and purpose into play.
Establish your message or voice before moving into the design phase of your branding. This is where your strategies on how you will communicate your values and purpose to your ideal clients will come into play. How are you going to showcase your personality and tell people why they should be working with you? This is the part where you get to tell your story. Who are your services for, what you do, and how you do it.
You will be using all of your design elements (website, social media, business cards, etc.) to express your branding message. It should all be connected to look like it is part of one collaborative personality or style.
Step 5: Design
All of your design elements are to be considered as your brand identity. Your brand identity helps to visually support your personality and message while attracting your ideal market.
LOGO
Most people think this is the first step when developing a brand. Now that you read through all the previous steps, you should now have a better understanding as to why these next steps are left to the end.
Whether you are hiring a Graphic Designer to create your designs or you are creating them yourself, it is still very important to learn why your logo and other branding elements are important.
Your logo is the visual representation of your brand. This is the part where you take everything that you learned in the previous steps, including your purpose, values, personality, message, and turn it into a graphic. Your logo is going to showcase the tone you want to set for your target audience.
What some people forget is that when they are designing a logo it MUST be recognizable, versatile and timeless. It needs to carry your message.
If you are hiring a Graphic Designer, work with them closely so they can best understand your goals and personality. Let them get to know you and the ideas you have for your business. Remember that they are there to turn your vision and ideas into a reality by creating graphics that represent your business. There are a lot of benefits when working with a graphic designer, but just remember, if you cannot give your designer a clear vision of your message and thoroughly explain your personality, they will not be able to deliver what you want.
COLOUR PALETTE
When selecting your colour palette, remember it should be less of a personal preference and more of a strategy that will best support the personality you want to showcase. Choosing the right colours will demonstrate the mood and set the overall tone of your brand.
If you are unsure about how to find the right colours for your brand, consult your Graphic Designer, or use resources link Pinterest, Color Space, or Coolors.
TYPEFACE
Your text and the typography style you choose to represent your brand, is just as important as the colours and logo you choose. These are no strict rules about what typeface can and can’t be used to represent your brand, but always remember your ideal client and what they might be expecting from you as a brand.
Your typeface suite should coincide with the style and tone of your logo. The image below showcases different font styles and how you can pair them with each other. For example, if you choose to use a serif font, you may choose to pair it with a sans-serif font. This will give your brand a confident and balanced feel to it.
The best way to organize your fonts and typography is in a Branding Guide or a Style Guide. A branding guide will essentially hold all of the information about your logo, colours, fonts, etc. This guide will also lay out all the rules and restrictions your design elements may have, like where you can/cannot use them, how they must be displayed, etc. If you are working with a Graphic Designer, they may provide a complete branding guide for you in the end.
There are a few things to consider when deciding your fonts and typography:
Is your client going to be able to read important information (without straining their eyes)?
Are people able to quickly read longer pieces of text?
Is this font accessible on multiple platforms (custom fonts may not also be assessable if designing items on third-party platforms)
Is it timeless?
Just like your logo, your typefaces and typography should be universal across all of your branding elements.
OTHER BRANDING TOUCH POINTS
Other branding touch points could be items like a business card, packaging, label stickers, merchandise, proposal packages, in-store signage, guides or other sales and marketing documents.
Take as many opportunities to visually showcase your business’ personality, and strengthen your clients’ relationship with your brand. This is your chance to find new and unique ways to deliver your services while other businesses are sticking to what they know.
Step 6: Develop a website
You have your messaging and you have your brand visuals, now it’s time to build out the brand experience. No matter what your business, if you don’t have a website, you are missing out on many chances to build relationships with your audience and growth opportunities.
Your website will act as the main resource for your ideal client to gather information about your services or product. When using social media platforms, podcasts, and other resources to promote your business, it is a means to drive traffic back to your website. Your website is the home of your brand and where it lives in the digital world.
This website will give you the opportunity to customize the experience you want to give to anyone who comes across it. Carefully consider the visuals, the copy (text), and the path a user will take when they first land on your website.
Is it clear what you offer?
Do they know how to purchase from you? I.e. online shopping cart, consultation request form, etc.
Do they have enough information to be interested in doing business with you?
How long will it take the user to get from A to B?
Is it easy for your viewer to navigate through the website to find the information they need?
Keep your messaging clear and your brand personality consistent and strong.
Also read: 10 free ways to drive traffic to your website
Step 7: Your marketing strategy
Your branding and marketing strategy will always work best when they are developed together. Branding gives your business a voice and tells a story; marketing gets your brand in front of the right people.
Your marketing strategy will explain everything from how you are going to showcase your brand; whether that’s with paid advertising, organic social media reach, email marketing, etc.
Remember that not all marketing methods work for all businesses. Refer to the steps in this guide to help you find the right method that best supports your brand and your goals.
Creating a brand is a long-term strategy and getting started in the right way is important. Begin with a strong vision, identify your values, have clear goals, and go through a branding process such as the one provided in this guide, to help you build a successful brand and strengthen relationships with your clients.
