Facebook's iconic blue color and Nike's swirly swoosh. Whenever you come across the swoosh and the blue visuals, you always associate them with those specific companies and their products and services. The ability to immediately link these type of visuals with a particular company results from the power of branding. These organizations built a brand that has global recognition. That's why you can recognize some iconic brands from among millions of brands out there. And your ability to identify a brand in the glimpse of an eye serves that company just right.
This article focuses on how to create and enhance your brand identity to have an impact on your customers. The article will also focus on integrating the concept of identity while building your brand. Below is a well-explained list of the most effective steps to take to ensure that you build your strong brand identity in no time.
What is brand identity?
Brand identity is a crucial part of the success path of your website, company, and your products and services. Your goals, mission, vision, and values are all carried forward by your brand identity.
People signify their identity through the clothes they wear, the music they listen to and the type of friends they hang out with. Brands express their identity by looking, sounding and behaving in similar ways as their target customers.
How to find the identity of your brand?
Before we dive in the details of brand identity we need to do some conceptual work. The purpose of the following tasks is to help you define what your brand is all about. With these insights, you’ll be able to build a stronger brand with a clear and consistent identity.
Find your brand’s tone of voice.
When we say “voice,” we mean the personality that your brand represents. Finding a voice that is right for your brand is a challenging task. Here’s a useful game that will put you in the right direction:
Try to imagine an ideal conversation with one of your clients, a dialogue in which everything works out just as you planned and the customer is falling in love with your brand. Which aspect of the conversation makes that conversation so successful? What are the emotions that you were able to evoke when talking to that customer? What is the vocabulary that you used in the conversation?
Now take it even one step further - imagine the conversations that your customers will have with their own friends afterwards and how they will endorse your brand to them. How do you want people to talk about you? Which key words and emotions do you want them to transmit to their friends. Working through these questions will help you understand what tone, attitude and mood you want to display in your branding.
The core values of your brand
To create a brand identity, you need to determine the core values of your brand. It is not all about the profit, but the short-term and long-term goals. Apart from the money aspect, try to build a long-standing connection with the users. Give customers a strong reason to believe in your brand.
Highlight the added value that your brand offers towards clients. Perhaps your business empowers them to become more confident? Or are they supporting the environment by purchasing your sustainable products? Maybe your services can guide them towards relaxation and mindfulness? Or an evening at your restaurant offers the opportunity to enjoy time with family and friends?
Make a list of the core values that your brand can promote and think about how to connect them to your brand’s voice.
Create your story, mission, and vision
Building your brand identity around a story will help you interact with your audience on a deeper level. People easily relate to a story if you tell it in their tone of voice.
We’re not talking about creative writing here. What you want to do is to communicate your specific perspective (as an individual or as a company) in an authentic and relatable manner.
There are two different angles you want to incorporate into your story. The first angle focuses on you: What inspired you to take action and start your company? What are you hoping to achieve with it?
The second aspect you want to include focuses on your target audience: Where does your brand fit into their lives? What are you offering them, and how do you envision your interactions with them?
Paint a picture that is so clear that future customers can easily step into the image you’ve created.
Create the perfect online brand identity in 9 steps
You have completed your brand identity research. So now it is time to actualize your ideas and put all your findings in a website or webshop that will convert curious visitors into customers and loyal fans.
The look and feel of your website plays a significant role in building your brand identity. So your website design will be essential in creating a visual appeal for the users. When designing the website, enhance the visual appeal by following these steps:
Determine the best design
If you would imagine your website as a person, which sense o fashion would you like it to adopt? Would it be a professional look or more hipster style? Would it look classy or sporty? The answer to this question will give you an insight into determining the visual expression of your brand. The visual appearance needs to align with the tone, vision, and goals that you have already set for your brand identity. Have a look at these 25 homepage design examples and get inspired!
Design a meaningful logo
Your logo should be a summary of everything your brand stands for. Wow, ok, that's a lot of pressure. Keep in mind that you have to do this in a stylized way, so don't over complicate it. Think again about the Nike swoosh. The swoosh empowers the story which tells you all about the brand identity.
But do keep in mind that your logo is as important as your business name. It helps to capture the essence of your brand more memorably. You can create the logo yourself or seek the help of an expert logo designer.
Select an effective color combination and font layout
A great combination of fonts and colors goes a long way in enhancing your brand identity. This article will help you in selecting the perfect combination of brand colors.
And this typography guide will be beneficial in helping you to find your ideal fonts.
These steps do not cover all of the visual branding that you’ll have to do for your company. You’ll encounter more of these small brand design tasks during the creation of your website, when you design ads, prepare social media visuals, etc.
What these broad steps aim to achieve is to define the overall visual language that will guide you through all design tasks that will follow.
Find a fitting tagline
If you had to describe your brand in just a few words, what would you come up with? A tagline is a brief statement about your company and what it has to offer. In addition to being short, the tagline also needs to be catchy and alluring.
It’s meant to attract people to further interact with your brand. The tricky part is coming up with a tagline that is both simple (you don’t want to confuse anyone with it), and intriguing. As an example; our tagline is “We are here to guide you through your digital adventure.”
Write your story and the brand's story.
Remember the part in which you developed your brand’s story and vision? You’re about to take it even a step further. The physical act of putting it in writing will help you sharpen and refine your storytelling. It’s just not enough to have a compelling story. You need to be able to share it in a captivating way so it engages with potential customers. We recommend that you write a short version (about one paragraph long) and an extended one (three to five paragraphs). You’ll need to have both available for different platforms and different marketing purposes.
Create a matching blog
Writing a blog can really lift up your brand building activities. Blogs will give you more creative freedom than most marketing tools. You can use a more personal tone of voice and show a lot of the “behind-the-scenes” activity of your business. In other words, it’s a powerful way to communicate your brand identity towards your prospects and followers. Have a quick look at our blog post where we will get you started with 11 blog post ideas to write about.
Evaluate what is right for your brand
Different brands have different ways of communicating their brand identity. find out which marketing channels you can use to communicate your well crafted brand identity and which ones will undermine it or have little impact.
For example, the brands that have more visual content may benefit immensely from Instagram posts and advertising. In contrast, the brands that are content-oriented will least benefit from such a platform, and it might need to consider other platforms such as Linkedln to post their stories and advertise towards their potential clients. We explained how to use the main social media platforms in an easy to read blog post.
Build up your online presence
Social media and other online platforms offer avenues with a large number of people to communicate your brand identity. Social media channels and newsletters are essential in communicating with customers and potential clients. Just exercise the proper voice, words, wording, use consistently your brand colors, and you will attract more people to like and follow your brand.
Also, social media marketing is very dynamic and it will give you room to experiment with all your advertising techniques. Note that costs of social media marketing is considerably small in comparison to offline marketing so it is the perfect testing ground before you launch a new offline marketing campaign.
Use Offline marketing techniques.
It is a worthwhile venture to explore offline marketing opportunities. Assess the various offline opportunities that are available for your type of product. For instance, sporting brands can sponsor sporting teams. Also, trade shows and conferences with other business owners can be an excellent platform to learn as well as give your brand exposure.
Essentials to remember when building your brand identity
Be consistent in your website and blog activities: When you create a long lasting brand identity, consistency is vital. Use your logo, colors, keywords, tone, and voice in a consistent way.
Simplicity: Keep everything as simple and as straightforward as you can. The main goal is to let your customers recognize your brand almost intuitively.
Check if everything is working correctly: After following all the above advice, ensure that you get the desired results. The sole intention is to grow your business, so make sure that your business is growing as expected. And if it's not working try to find out which aspect of this whole exercise isn't working.
We hope that these 9 tips to build a strong brand identity will make it easier for you to interact with your audience. Do not hesitate to contact our team if you have any questions.
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