The saying goes “You live by the sword, you will die by the sword”. You can apply this notion to branding your company. If you don’t pay any attention to the way your company looks and feels, you seem unprofessional, and unpolished, driving away potential customers. Certain industries that require trust need perfect branding to generate business, like financial services and healthcare services.
Branding should mirror the values of you and your business. Some companies are more flexible with branding to give off a fun vibe while others are rigid to display professionalism.
When developing branding, if you are unsure of the process, we’d recommend seeking help from a professional. Branding will have major cost and time implications down the line, especially for marketing if you get it wrong.
Choose The Right Color
The color you choose represents the logical and emotional side of your company. Certain colors have certain meanings. You don’t want to pick colors that are too over the top because your customers will become uneasy. You can always look back to your buyer persona and use that to decide what colors might resonate best with your audience.
On the contrary, you don’t want your colors to be too bland because nothing will stick out on your website. Your colors should have an objective. You can always look back to your buyer persona and use that to decide what colors might resonate best with your audience.
The best way to explain this concept is to look at real-life examples.
McDonald’s
McDonald’s Yellow and Red along with symbolic Golden Arches has a psychological effect on customers.
The color yellow is associated with happiness. It grabs attention and is easily visible during the daytime. Mix that with red, and what does that remind you of? French fries and Ketchup. Their coloring reminds you of the happiness you feel when you eat their food.
Dunkin Donuts
Dunkin’s main competition is Starbucks. Starbucks’ color scheme is composed of green, black, and teal. These colors make you feel relaxed, ready to sit down and crank out some work.
When was the last time you saw people diligently working at Dunkin? Probably never. They want you to get in, purchase, and get out.
Pick The Best Font
The font you pick for your branding is very important. Making sure the font is legible is of the utmost importance.
There are some do’s and don’t when selecting a font.
Of course, the font needs to be legible. If you rely on a font style that is extremely cursive or has fancy symbols, people will have a hard time reading it. Pick a print-based style.
The color also has to be appropriate. Having neon green words against a purple background will be difficult to comprehend and project unprofessionalism. Stay true to your color guidelines.
Avoid having your fonts super small. The reader shouldn’t have to strain their eyes to read your text. On the contrary, don’t use super large fonts because there is simply not enough real estate for you to possibly get your message across.
Fonts for Digital Marketing
Pick a universal web-based font if you can. On the marketing side, fonts don’t always translate well digitally. If you create an email using your email builder using a custom style font (i.e fonts downloaded from Google or Adobe Cloud) chances are that the font won’t render properly in certain email service providers (ESP) like Outlook.
Unfortunately, there is not much you can do as a marketer to fix this issue. Your first option is to use an image-based email. That means taking a screenshot of your custom font, saving it as a png, and overlapping the text image on a photo background to be used in the email.
We highly do not recommend this method. Emails that are mostly images have a hard time loading since their file sizes are so large if the images are not optimized properly. If an email doesn’t open promptly then that increases the chance of the email bouncing or causing the recipient not to click or subsequently open further messages.
If you choose this route, make sure you select the option to “view the email in a browser”. Also, include a plain text version, and use alternative text describing the message communicated through the image.
Your other option is to use the default fonts in the email builder. Most builders use fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman, and Georgia. These fonts are pretty much built into every system and can be rendered universally by every email service provider.
Use a Professional Looking Logo
Your logo needs to be memorable. This is a great way to separate yourself from the competition. I would suggest spending time and resources to get this right.
Companies have gotten creative with their logos, often including subliminal messages. For example, FedEx has an arrow between E and X.
All in all, the easiest way for you to draft up a logo is to draw it yourself. Spend time doodling until you find a logo idea that you like. After that, go find a graphic design freelancer on Upwork to take your logo design to the next level.
You can find a good freelancer for about $100 if you are on a budget. If you find a person willing to work with unlimited revisions, hire this person right away. Otherwise, most free freelancers charge by the hour and for extra revisions. Hence, it is important to have an idea and be clear with your intentions because, in the end, it will save you time and money.
Try Using Your Photography
Photography plays a huge role in your brand identity. Pictures help tell a story that words cannot. If you have pictures of happy people on your website, that is a great way to say that your service is great and that you are friendly.
Where you can go wrong with photography is not having any or using imagery that is not authentic. Stock photography isn’t always the best to use. If you can, use original photography customized for your business. Anyone with a trained eye can determine that you are using photos that are not yours.
We highly recommend taking pictures of your business in operation. Take pictures of the interior or exterior of your storefront. Use imagery of the surrounding area. If original photography is something you desire, the best investment you can make is purchasing a DSLR camera. They run for around $350. These cameras take the best photos. But with cell phone cameras getting more advanced, an iPhone camera will suffice.
If you want to use stock photography, we highly suggest you look into purchasing a license to Shutterstock. Their selection of paid photos is pretty good and you are unlikely to find duplicates on the same photo because people tend to use free photos from sites like Pexels.
One way you can make stock photography your own is by editing the photo. You can find a graphic designer on Upwork for fairly cheap or you can try to do it on your own using applications like GIMP or Adobe Photoshop.
Tying everything together
Once you finalized your brand identity, you need to compile everything into a document. This document is called a brand guideline. The brand guideline will function as a bible for your company image. This guideline should be distributed amongst the team and should be followed to the letter. If you deviate from the guidelines, that will look unprofessional. Everything should be nice and streamlined across the board.
Conclusion
Branding should not be taken lightly. If you get branding wrong you will face serious cost & time implications in terms of having to redo marketing materials. Be sure to have a scope or plan on what your business’s coloring, typography, logo design, and photography should ideally look like. Get help from a branding professional once you have the basic framework drafted up.
