Building a brand identity from the ground up is by no means an easy task, but a crucial one: with millions of businesses in the market and more emerging every day, a powerful and effective brand identity is a must for your company to stand out. It is what makes you unique and recognizable, earning customer loyalty.
If this is your first time developing your brand identity, there are several things you need to know about the process. To help you with that, in this article, we cover six essential ways you can build your brand identity in 2021.
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Understand Who You Are and What Your Purpose Is
This is a key step in building your brand identity, and it should guide all your next steps.
What is a brand's purpose? In short, it’s the reason why your brand exists, beyond the purpose of making money. Maybe it’s sustainability, or maybe it aims to create a more inclusive product that a larger number of people can enjoy. Brand purpose connects you emotionally with your customers and shows them that as part of achieving your business goals, you aim to benefit society.
To simplify the process of understanding your brand identity, there are several questions that you can ask yourself. Here are they:
- What values and beliefs are at the core of my brand?
- What makes you unique?
- Why are you doing what you are doing?
- Why should people care about your business?
Think through these questions, and you’ll have the base for understanding your brand purpose.
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Research Your Audience and Competition
These two crucial steps go hand in hand: to understand the target audience of your brand in its initial stages, knowing who your competition is is essential.
Let’s start by researching your audience. If you don’t have a prior presence in, let’s say, on social platforms, or your business is brand new, understanding what your target audience is can be a little tricky but not impossible.
Start with specifying what the problems your product or service solves are. For example, if you are selling sustainable gym gear, your target audience is narrowed down to people who lead healthy lifestyles and care about the environment. Think about what other interests they may have, what their behavior might be, and the demographics they are representative of.
Then, take a look at your competition. What is their offer, in what ways is their product similar or different from yours? Conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to understand where your company stands in the market.
Then, conduct thorough research of their audience. There are a plethora of competitor analysis tools you can use for this. Depending on how similar your products are, chances are your competitor is targeting the same audience as you.
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Design Your Visual Style (Logo, Typography, Color Palette, Shape, Tagline)
Once you have your values nailed down and a good grip of what your competitors and potential customers are, the time has come to develop your visual style.
Choose a color palette - Colors are a key component when it comes to visual branding, as they set the mood of interaction between the brand and the customer. They also decide how your brand will be perceived, according to color theory. So, by choosing the right colors for your brand, you can control how your customers see your brand. Want to be perceived as elegant and serious? Go with black. Wish to evoke a feeling of trust? The color blue is your friend. Are you developing a sustainable brand? Green is your friend. Research and understand color psychology and use it to your advantage when choosing a color palette.
Design a logo - Your logo is the face of the company. It’s the first thing people notice and what they will remember when thinking of your company. Think of brands like Nike, Apple, Puma: chances are, their logo is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of those brands. Work with professional logo design services or use online logo maker tools to develop a unique brand mark that will represent your values.
Select typography - Next is choosing your brand font. To go with the right option, you will once again need to know your brand personality. Whether it’s serious or playful, choose the fonts and pair them accordingly. Study the traits of each font family. For example, Serif fonts are classic and traditional, so they may not be the best option if you position yourself as a modern brand. Whichever font style combination you end up using, make sure it’s readable and easy to understand.
Pick shapes - Shapes, too, are an inseparable part of creating your visual identity. Choosing in advance the predominant shape of your brand, whether it’s a circle, rectangle, or square, will later save you time and energy when you are working on your social media designs, website content, or presentations. Experiment with the large selection of random shape generator online tools available online to see which one works best for you.
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Develop Your Brand Voice
Your brand voice is the way you talk and interact with your customers. It can have any style as long as it represents your brand values and speaks to your customer. For example, in luxury brands, customers more often than not expect a professional brand voice to express the sophistication of their product. Whether it’s witty, professional, or friendly, make sure you keep it consistent across all channels. This is especially important to know for your social media management team: being extremely professional on one platform while over-the-top witty on another will confuse your customers.
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Develop and Use a Brand Guide
The next step of developing your brand identity is creating a brand guide. Think of it as collecting all the information about your brand a potential employee needs to know. It should include how you use your logo guidelines, your color palette and how to use it, a list of your fonts and pairings, all the information about the voice of your brand, and how you use it on different promotional channels. Ideally, someone who is new to your brand should create content that feels like you after they read your brand guide. This will ensure consistency across all your brand platforms. You can even go as far as make a tutorial video about how to use your brand guide to show it in a more visually engaging way.
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Start Marketing Your Product to Make Your Brand Come Alive
It’s time to start marketing your company. Ensure that the values, brand voice, and brand style are consistently part of the content you are creating. Your brand guide can help you with this greatly, significantly simplifying the process, concentrating your attention on the styles and visuals you can use. Whether you are creating a social media post or crafting a thumbnail for your next YouTube video, make sure it includes everything we’ve covered so far.
Key Takeaways
Creating a memorable brand requires time and consistent effort: you don’t simply create it once. You should always be there to monitor your brand to preserve its identity and make sure that the perception of your audience about you doesn’t change. But the effort will be worth it, as your audience will start to recognize you among the sea of other businesses instantly, which will keep them coming back.
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