In the bustling marketplace of today’s business world, one thing stands as your unique identifier — your brand. Your brand is not just a logo or a catchy tagline; it’s the heart and soul of your business. It’s the promise you make to your customers and the emotions you evoke in them.
According to research, people develop solid impressions just seven seconds after an encounter, and it may just take one-tenth of a second to determine traits such as trustworthiness. With this in mind, it’s clear how powerful good branding can be and the importance of a good first impression.
In this guide, we’ll look at how to build a brand that conveys the essence of your business and helps you build meaningful connections with your customers.
What Is Brand Identity?
To put it simply, your brand is the big picture. It’s your visual assets, stylistic choices and tone used in your messaging — it’s all the things that impact the way your brand is seen by your target audience. It tells your customers who you are straight away and differentiates you from your competitors.
How to Build Your Brand
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Do Your Research
Your first step on your branding journey is to do your research. Find out things like who your target audience is and their unique pain points. Learn who your competitors are and look at what they’re doing. Is it working, or does it need to be improved?
Here are some easy research methods which will help inform your branding strategy:
- Google your product or service: take a look at who is ranking in this space; these are likely to be some of your direct competitors.
- Take a look at competitors’ social media accounts: how do they communicate with the audience? What kind of responses are they getting?
- Look at subreddits for competitors: looking at forums such as Reddit is a great way to identify pain points if you’re launching a similar product. Use this to research how customers talk about the product and their feelings toward it. Can you make it better?
- Create buyer personas of your ideal customer: get specific and include things like age, occupation, family and education. Keep these personas in mind every time you communicate with your audience.
2. Establish Your Brand Positioning
Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to consider how you’re going to enter the market. Begin by creating a positioning statement that’s one or two lines that detail who you are and what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and it may be something as simple as: “We’re a hairdressing company offering affordable haircuts in [x].”
When creating your statement, think about how you’re going to stand out against your competitors. What are your USPs? Why are customers going to choose you over their competitors? This will help to inform your personality and tone of voice. For example, “affordable” in the statement above would make your messaging more friendly and approachable. Whereas if you were offering “luxury” haircuts, you’d use more sophisticated language.
3. Choose Your Business Name
Now you’re equipped with the knowledge of who your audience is and your unique market position, you’ll need to decide on a business name. The right name should tell your customer who you are, so make sure you choose something memorable that will invoke the right emotions.
To help you get started, there are a few different types of business names you can choose from:
- Descriptive: include words that describe the business.
- Emotive: inspire emotional responses.
- Compound: combine words together, such as “Facebook”.
- Origin: names of where the business started or who created it.
- Initials and acronyms: easy to remember and catchy, BMW is a great example.
- Made-up words: words that mean nothing but sound great, for example, Adidas.
Create a list of names you like the sound of, and then use our name checker tool to see if they’re available to register with Companies House. You should also check the domain using a company like GoDaddy to see if it’s free and how much it costs to buy.
4. Write Your Tagline
Your slogan should be brief enough to fit into smaller spaces like bios and ads yet be descriptive enough to tell customers exactly who you are. Make it easy to remember and make sure it fits in with the rest of your brand.
Your slogan could be things like:
- A metaphor
- An attitude
- Description of what you do
- A key benefit
- Catchy saying.
Your tagline doesn’t have to be set in stone; it can change as much as you need. Coca-Cola has undergone 45 slogan changes over the years to evolve with the times. Their first ever tagline in 1886 was simply “Drink Coca-Cola”, and the latest is now “Real Magic”.
5. Choose Your Brand’s Look
Now it’s time for the fun part — building your brand and choosing your look. It is vital to get this down before you start creating your website and setting up any social media accounts.
Colours
When choosing your colours, you should always make sure they’re different from your competitors, as you don’t want to make things confusing. It may even be a good idea to choose something completely different and contrasting so you really stand out.
But did you know that aside from making you stand out, colours can portray a feeling? This unique science is known as colour psychology, and it’s really quite powerful. Here are the meanings behind certain colours:
- Yellow: optimistic and warm.
- Orange: cheerful and confident.
- Red: exciting and passionate.
- Purple: creative and smart.
- Blue: trustworthy and strong.
- Green: healthy and peaceful.
- Black/White/Grey: balanced and calm.
If you’re starting a business that sells camping gear, you may want to pick green for the peaceful connotations. Whereas if you’re starting a spa, you may wish to choose white for your branding to take advantage of the feelings of calm and balance.
Fonts
Fonts are often an overlooked part of building a brand, but they can communicate your personality just as well as images. For example, bold styles can communicate strength, serif brings feelings of authority and script fonts are generally construed as being playful.
Don’t make things confusing and choose lots of fonts; instead, pick one for the body and another for the header, making sure that they complement each other.
6. Create Your Logo
Think of your logo as the face of your business. It’s the first thing customers will see when they encounter your brand, so be sure to make it stand out. It should be completely unique so your audience can tell it’s you at a quick glance. It will also need to work at all sizes as your logo will be present on your website, social media profiles, favicon and potentially your product packaging, too.
There are several different types of logos to choose from, some of the most popular ones being:
- Abstract: shapes and colours rather than meaning.
- Mascot: a person’s face or animal; this can humanise your business.
- Emblem: usually circular and combines text with imagery.
- Lettermark: symbol from one or more letters of a brand name.
- Icon: a visual representation of the brand.
- Wordmark: just the name of the brand.
- Combination: may include a mix of two mediums, such as text with an icon.
7. Integrate Your Brand into Your Business
Once you’ve finalised how you want your brand to look and feel, it’s time to integrate your brand into your business. Start by creating a style guide, as this will help to ensure your voice and presence are consistent throughout. Make sure you include how you want your brand to look and feel, and remember that your personality should shine through in every word, image and post.
8. Monitor and Learn
There’s a possibility that you won’t get your branding right on the first try, and that’s okay. Monitor how your brand performs and gather feedback from your customers about how they feel about your brand — and don’t be afraid to change things if it’s not working. Logos can be changed, taglines rewritten, and colour schemes reworked. Your brand shouldn’t be static; it should be relevant and evolve with your business and the times.
Ready to get started with your new business? Register your company with Mint Formations today and get your new venture off to the best possible start. If you have any questions, please get in touch with our team, and we’ll be happy to help.