While you build your brand, remember this: Branding is everywhere and incredibly important. Having a brand style and following it creates trust in your business and more sales. Follow these 4 insider branding tips to build a knock-out brand for your business.
1. Start with what you like
This might sound simple, but not everyone knows this insider branding tip. When you first build your brand start with what you like. Search in and out of your industry for brands that you love. Make a detailed list of what parts you like about what brands. Do you like aggressive brands with all-caps fonts and dark coloring like Harley Davidson? Or comical brands that seem a little out there like Old Spice or Wendy’s Twitter account? Combine what you like to make your own unique brand.
2. Branding for your target market
There is something incredibly important that people sometimes forget. You are NOT your target market. Your target market is a specific group of people that have a problem your business can solve. At one point in your life, maybe you were your target market and couldn’t find the right company. But now you are the right company!
Keep in mind that you may offer the exact same product as a competitor. But simultaneously both of you have completely different target markets. And that’s ok!
For example, TunnelBear and NordVPN both offer VPN services. TunnelBear’s branding is cute, colorful, and fun. But NordVPN has a toned-down, more serious brand for their service. Both use excellent branding for the same basic business. But they have different branding because they have different target markets. Both types of branding work well for what they offer.
It’s fine if your branding doesn’t match your competitors. It shouldn’t. Your branding belongs to you.
3. Visual elements shape the subconscious message
Branding affects how people see your company. But branding is much more than what people see. It’s also how they feel when they see it. There is a lot of psychology that goes into branding that you can’t ignore. People remember feelings. So you want to make sure you’re sending the right ones through your branding. You can do this with your typography, colors, shapes, and other graphic elements.
a. Typography
Typography in branding is about choosing fonts, weights, and the ways they’re used. Typography should make your brand instantly recognizable. Also, consider kerning (spacing) in the logo. Using a generic font and modifying letters is also part of how a brand presents itself through typography.
You might use different fonts for body text, accent fonts, and headers. For the headers on this website, we chose Raleway: since it is a modern sans serif-looking font. The W is “unique” which we like because we are a web-based company and W comes up a lot.
When picking your fonts, choose at least 2. A good place to start is Google Fonts. You can select a font you like, and Google shows you fonts that pair well with it.
b. Color
Colors affect mood and accessibility. Certain colors hold certain emotions, as do different color combinations. That’s why you probably haven’t seen a funeral home with a bright yellow and pale pink color combination. Since this combination gives a “refreshing and pretty” vibe.
Here are a few websites that will help you start finding the perfect colors for your journey:
- Color Hexa: You start with a single color and they give you variations of it.
- Coolors: Generate color pallets. They also provide the color name, CYMK, and RGB color codes.
- Canva Templates: Here you’ll be able to find an aesthetic you like. Then you can use it as the jumping-off point for the rest of your branding.
c. Shapes and other graphic elements
The shapes you use in conjunction with colors also affect the subconscious. For example, a red heart and a black heart won’t mean the same thing. There are many stylistic choices you can make with shapes, logos, pictures, and other graphic parts of your brand. They include:
- Black/White pen drawing
- Realistic or cartoonish
- Flat or 3D imaging
- Using specific filters on pictures
4. Consistency
Branding is about consistency. It’s a vague term about providing a precise look and feel for your business. Having a brand style guide available to everyone in your business is one of the best ways to provide that consistency to your team. With that, your team can provide a consistent brand experience for your customers.
If these insider branding tips aren’t enough for you and you want help with branding, we’d love to work with you! At Technology Aloha, we act as a seamless extension of your business — like an in-house marketing team without the full-time commitment. Contact us today to learn more.
