Branding is an essential component of doing business, but it extends to far more than simply knocking out a logo on Canva and calling it a day. Instead, it involves a far more nuanced approach that consists of all manner of things, from the fonts you use to the color scheme you will use to portray your brand via its various marketing channels. As you might imagine, this can seem like a pretty insurmountable task for businesses looking to scale and professionalize, making it something that is often pushed to the back burner while you focus on other things.
However, doing this will only be to your detriment as your brand can actually help you increase engagement and develop a loyal customer base that is able to follow you around the internet safely in the knowledge that they are patronizing a company they trust. In this post, you will learn a few ways to go about generating a brand identity you are proud of and that will make a genuine impact.
Smart Approaches to Identify the Best High-End Branding Services
Research Reputable Branding Agencies
Research Reputable Branding AgenciesAs touched upon in the introduction, for most smaller business owners, creating a brand tends to encompass developing a logo and perhaps a few other ancillary bits and pieces that they can slap onto their social media pages and place as the logo on their website. If you are just starting out, this might be enough, but as soon as you start to make real money and want to expand to greater things, you will need the help of a professional branding agency.
According to this company offering creative brand solutions in Melbourne, you ought to look at the branding process as a combination of both art and science with the end game to help your customers perceive your business in a specific light (of which you obviously want to control). When you hire a branding agency to perform this task on your behalf, you can lean on their prior experience and will end up with a result that would be impossible to attain by yourself.
To get the best results, you will need to contact a local agency and set up a meeting whereby you can discuss what you want to achieve and listen to any ideas the agency may already have based on experience. Just remember that setting up your brand is an ongoing process and will involve you providing a very clear brief to any agency you hire and consistent contact to ensure that everything is going smoothly (i.e., so that you can see the progress they’re making on your brand identity)
Understand Your Brand Identity Clearly
Before you go headlong into the branding procedure, it will pay dividends to spend time determining how you want to be perceived. This may sound like an obvious point to make, but when you sit down and really start thinking about it, you’ll quickly find that it takes a bit more brain power than you first imagined! To do this, you will need to follow several steps:
- Consider your mission and values: In order to present a coherent image of your company to others, you first need to know what you stand for and what your values are. For example, you might want to portray a homely image of a company set up by something that values the environment, or it could be a clear commitment to the happiness of your customers.
- Know your audience: It is no use creating a brand image that appeals to senior citizens if your target market is young kids. This might seem like an over-the-top example, but it shows how badly you can get things wrong if you don’t put in the effort.
- Create a story: Your brand should create a narrative that reaches out to those you serve and speaks to them in a way that nudges them towards your business rather than your competition.
Create A Cohesive Visual Aesthetic That Can Travel Around The Online And Offline Worlds
Part of the reason you ought to hire a branding agency with plenty of experience in the dark arts of branding is that they are better able to devise a coherent aesthetic that you can use in all of your marketing and promotional efforts wherever and however they might be used. Moreover, these assets will be used both on and offline, which means that you need to use slightly different processes to create them. Your online branding will typically be designed with RGB color in mind, as that is the color model used online.
Conversely, if you are planning to print business cards and leaflets with your branding on them, you will need digital assets created with the CMYK model that printing companies can use to ensure the correct color. These all need to be identical as they follow your brand around, and this is only something that comes from experience and an understanding of branding in general.
Making a brand for your company is no mean feat, and unless you know what you’re doing, it can hinder your progress rather than help. In most cases, you ought to consider using a brand agency to help you define your company and come up with an identity that you can use in all aspects of your marketing efforts.
