How To Give Your Small Business a POWERFUL Brand Identity
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What Is a Brand Identity?
Essentially, a brand identity is to create a personality for your brand, it’s what distinguishes your company from others using specific aspects which set them apart.
Why It’s Important to Have a Brand Identity
Having a strong brand identity helps to build presence, trust and a genuine connection between you and your customers.
However, identity is more than your logo, font, colours and an appealing aesthetics, it is also your values, your mission, and the message you hope to convey to your audience.
How To Create a Brand Identity?
Create an avatar
As much as it makes sense wanting your business to reach as many customers as possible, the reality is, you can’t please everybody, and your brand identity needs to be able to translate a clear message to the type of customer you are speaking to.
It would be confusing to create a brand where you’re trying to reach out to the young woman who is on a lower-paid job and doesn’t have disposable income and at the same time market to the woman who has a higher-paid job who has disposable income, of course both ladies can be customers, but you should only be focused on one.
The best way to figure out who your target customer is, create an avatar of what your ideal customer looks like. Write down in detail as much as you can about what they are like.
Think about:
Where they work
How much they earn
What their hobbies are
What stores they shop at
Do they travel, to which destinations
This will allow you to hone in on the exact customer of who your brand is targeted at.
Colour palette and font
Now for the fun part. Colours are important because this is how your customers will identify your brand amongst a sea of others.
Have you ever been driving and you see a flash of yellow and red and immediately you know there is a McDonald’s nearby?
We all know what those colours together mean, we don’t even have to see the golden arches clearly, we already know.
That is how important it is when deciding what colour will represent your brand. You could simply choose your favourite colour; however, I would urge you to think about it more deeply.
Believe it or not, there’s something called ‘colour psychology’ which many graphic designers and marketers use to trigger a particular response from their consumers.
Look for a colour psychology chart online to find out which colour represents your brand the best, I would suggest using no more than three complimenting colours.
In terms of the font, think about the overall concept of your brand, if it’s super luxury you might want to pick something italic, a brand which is more modern and contemporary may work well with san serif.
If in doubt, use Google, there are so many ideas and so much inspiration to find on the internet alone.
Your Logo
Otherwise known as the face of your brand, your logo is what will go everywhere with your business.
Your logo needs to be clear, easy to recognise, and cohesive.
Because it will not only appear on your website, it will be branded on everything from your business cards, to your packaging, to the invoices and receipts you send to customers, suppliers, wholesalers, etc.
Develop a tone of voice
Once you’ve established who your customer is you now need to develop a tone of voice. A tone of voice is the way you translate your message through the way in which you speak to your customers.
Ideally your tone of voice should match your brand personality.
For example, if your brand is young and fun you might use light-hearted language such as slang and street terms, if your brand is high end, you might choose a more professional tone, a brand which is laid back will use a tone of voice that is conversational.
Think about whether you want to use humour, or add bullet points and statistics? All of these factors are vital to your brand identity since the language you use will be used across your business, so you want to make sure you develop a tone of voice which runs parallel to your brands concept.
What Makes a Brand Identity Powerful?
Consistency vs Flexibility
To avoid confusion among your customers, it’s important to be consistent with your branding. This means keeping your colours, font, tone of voice and logo should be the same across all platforms of social media, marketing materials, and advertising.
If your brand colours are bright, bold, with neon pinks and yellows and suddenly you send out a newsletter which is navy and black, not only will your customers be confused, they may not even recognise you at all since those colours aren’t usually associated with your brand.
With that said, times are changing, fast, and those who do not keep up will be left behind. Find a balance between consistency and flexibility.
Millennial pink had its moment circa 2015, since then these tones have slowly drowned out over time. If you are too rigid and reluctant to change according to the direction of aesthetics, customers may see your brand as outdated and start to lose interest.
Be wary of doing anything too drastic, implement small changes slowly so not to completely throw your customers off guard.
Do not copy and paste ideas from your competitors
Quite frankly, everyone copies someone or something, nothing is original, whether it’s in business, content creation or personal taste, we find inspiration everywhere we go and apply it to what we want to create.
Nevertheless, there is a difference between inspiration and a direct copy and paste. When you copy you will always be a few steps behind in branding because you rely on the frontrunners for ideas, you also lose your own identity in the process.
The last thing you want your business to look like is a knock-off version of another.
Look to your competitors solely for inspiration, if you feel stuck coming up with your new, innovative ideas, look around you, inspiration can be found in music, art, travelling, reading books, listening to podcasts, even a conversation with friends.
Values and Mission
It’s easy to get carried away with creating a brand identity, so much so, you forget your why you are creating this brand in the first place. Keep your values at the forefront of your mind and always remember you why.
Why did you start this business, what is missing from what’s already out there, what did you want your message to be, how are the products or services you sell going to help people, why should they buy from you? Analyse the brand as a whole to be sure you are going off track from the message you initially set out to send.
Track and Test
For your brand identity to be powerful you will need to test different ideas to see which work well. You might not get much followers or engagement back from social media but find you get lots of return in the form of feedback and sales from your newsletters. This indicates you should double down on your newsletters and put more attention there.
For branding via social media, you’ll find your community tend to respond better to particular pieces of content than others. Use the in-app analytics to see what is doing well and what is not working, drop what isn’t working and focus on what is, this will allow your branding to appear stronger.
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