A brand identity represents your brand’s face, value, and vision, among others. This identity pulls people in as they show what value your brand can add to their lives. The same brand identity gives your converted consumers a sense of belonging, which is a fundamental human need.
You’ve heard about good brands generating customers, but you haven’t heard this. A good brand generates advocates. Word of mouth is a crucial marketing weapon that can’t be bought like Google Ads.
Building a business with a well-known, respected, and trusted brand name would take a lot of work. But every single drop of effort is worth it.
Here are the most important steps in creating a brand identity that tells people what they need to know about what your brand has to offer:
1. Research.
There’s no denying that doing more than enough research on your target audience and competition will give you more concrete ideas as you strategize the development of your brand identity.
Having a grip on what the consumers you want your business to have wants and needs will tell you all about what you need to offer them and in what way. It’s not easy to drop advertisements your target audience won’t take a second to look at. That’d be a waste of money.
They all want different things. That’s one of the main reasons why you can’t do too little research. You won’t figure out what they want and how to provide them if you have no idea who they are and what they want.
Another part of the crucial research a brand identity creation requires is to figure out the trends among currently established and rising brands in the same industry. You have to find out who stands out and how to help your business navigate and stay relevant.
Keeping an eye on your competitors will also help you learn to brand strategies that work and those that don’t. Doing this will save you a lot of time, effort, and money.
Make sure you don’t skimp on research and do it as much as you can. You never know what you’ll find.
2. Design the logo and template.
After spending hours on research, you have the ideas you need to take the next step. That’s to design a logo and create a template for it.
If you’re well-versed with photoshop and other design software, coming up with ideas you can choose from and improve over time won’t be hard. But if you’re more of a management type entrepreneur, you’re probably not into designing things yourself. Fortunately, you can work with a company that creates brand designs. They’ll help you come up with ideas, and they are aware of what designs are ideal for your brand and what it wants to achieve.
You think that branding is all about a remarkable logo, but that isn’t all there is to it. It’s just the most recognized part of your brand identity. Your packaging and the way you present your products is also a crucial part of your brand identity. Think McDonald’s. You’ll recognize their iconic “M” from anywhere. That should be your brand identity inspiration.
Apart from your logo, you have to create a template that goes with it. Templates are incorporated in emails, business cards, and letters. This gives your business a more professional, unified, and credible feel.
3. Know what to avoid.
In developing a brand identity and using solid research to back ideas, it’s difficult not to take inspiration from other brands. Unfortunately, not all of those ways received good reactions, and some were totally thrown out of the window by the public.
Knowing what you should steer clear from as you get into developing your brand’s identity is just as crucial as knowing what to do. For example, you don’t want to get too into luring consumers in that you rely on misleading tactics and bring up false expectations about your business. This will decrease your reliability, resulting in bad word of mouth from clients.
Following your competitor’s branding ideas will also bring about many problems for your business. If it’s a well-known brand, people and the brand you’re copying would definitely notice, and you’re most likely going to face some problems, with a mix of legal ones.
Another thing to avoid is the loss of consistency between your offline and online brand identity. Even if you focus on the online establishment of your brand identity, you’d still want your efforts to be seen the same way offline. Not 100 percent of your target audience are online, which means you have to consider offline ones similarly.
With these ideas in mind, you can create an identity that is genuinely unique for your brand. You can stand out and be better than your competitors.
