As a small business, your brand is what sets you apart from the crowd. Unlike big-box companies, you can’t afford to be unoriginal or uninspired. You need to ensure you allocate a large enough budget to build your brand upfront. Not only will this help get your name out there, but it will also help build your reputation among established businesses, save money in the long-run, and bring in new clients and customers with ease. Your brand needs to be unique, memorable, and easily digestible to a broad audience.
DESIGN + PURPOSE = THE CORNERSTONES OF YOUR BRAND DEVELOPMENT
The foundation of any good brand is good design. Good design will help you to convert clients and customers more comfortable. If you are a small brand, you need to ensure that your packaging stands out amongst the name brands and gets noticed. It needs to tell your story and represent what your company stands for. Is your company funky and trendy? If so, a conservative and very linear brand design would not be doing your business any justice.
Although your logo will be essential to gain traction among new buyers, your overall branding is so much more than that. It provides the viewer with a story about who and what you are, what you stand for. It is the very beginning of the customer experience, like seeing your future spouse in a crowded room moments before you meet for the first time. It has to draw your customers in to make the first move.
WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ASKING YOURSELF
There is no one-size-fits-all way to brand your business. You’ll need to consider every unique offering you have and how to market that with design. What mediums will you be using to advertise, and what is your overall budget? Identifying who you’re targeting and how much you’re willing to spend will make the process that much easier.
You’ll always want to know how your branding is used. Will your branding be web-based only, or will you need something to translate onto a print or even a billboard? To have a harmonious brand that is consistent, it must extend beyond just a logo.
BRAND INCONSISTENCIES
Few things can kill a business better than brand inconsistencies. It may not seem like a huge deal at first, but if you start out using red and white in one lane of marketing and advertising. At the same time, everything on your website is blue; it’s going to look unprofessional and unsettling to future customers. Branding colours set and convey the mood and emotion of your business. When selecting colours to represent your brand, it is essential to consider the feelings that each colour holds. For example, red is not a colour that conveys trust; it is the colour of excitement, anger, and typically is used for brandings such as Coke, Target, and Cannon. If you are in a profession that relies upon building trusts like a lawyer or a dentist, you’re not going to select red as the primary colour of your website, as this will send the wrong message to your clients. You want to choose a colour scheme that supports the emotions you wish to invoke in your clients.
Typography or the font you choose to use is typically overlooked. Typography is a huge business mistake; the wrong font can quickly convey the wrong message and cause you to lose conversions. Think of it like this, you’re looking for a lawyer, and you visit a website, and this is the font you saw:
There are a time and a place for child-like fonts and it is more likely in your child’s letter to Santa, a site focused on family and young children, not here.
This cute and bubbly font doesn’t say, legal professionals. You’ll want to make sure that the message you’re conveying matches the font it’s displayed in.
Ready to breathe life into your brand? We can help! Contact us, and we can chat about how we can help you develop cohesive branding for your small business.