One of the most common mistakes for an entrepreneur is not building a professional brand identity for yourself. Whether you’re selling a product or service online or in shops, a brand identity is very important and is often overlooked. Nobody will value you and see you as a professional if you don’t have a professional appearance and identity.

“A logo isn’t important, my product is so good it’ll sell itself”

Wrong! The amount of people that overlook the importance of a logo is crazy. A logo is the first thing a customer sees from your brand and is a huge factor when the customer decides if he will do business with you or not. Designing a professional logo is important, customers tend to trust brands with good logos and not ones with logos made on Microsoft Word for example. A logo is a visual symbol that represents your business, make sure it’s clean, powerful and sends the right message. Design the logo first and then everything will follow.

Tips for a good logo:

• Clear readable text (if you’re using text)
• Stick to 1 or 2 primary colours, don’t go crazy on the colours

Clear targeting

Knowing who your target audience is/or will be, helps you tailor your brand’s identity towards them and connect with your audience. This is very important, for example, you won’t want to waffle a lot and use jargon in your item descriptions if you’re selling products online aimed at teenagers. Know who you’re selling to and cater towards them. This will eliminate the possible chance of miscommunication between a brand and its customers.

“What is a brand guide?”

Seeing how competitors are engaging with their audience on social media, will help give a major insight into your industry and help cover lost ground in catching up to them. As competitors will share common demographics, you’ll be able to see useful information, such as the types of posts they are creating and much more.

Remember Mary and Tom? We forgot to mention they’re businesses are about 5 mins away from each other in a busy area of East London. They both own American style-diners and both have websites and are using Instagram. This is a perfect example of knowing who your competitors are and what they are doing with their online presence, so you don’t fall miles behind. For example, Mary might want to consider going to a web design agency to build her diner a brand new website, as she’s seeing posts and ads pop up for Tom’s new website around her feed.

For you to even be asking that question, means you’re doing it wrong! A brand guide will contain everything you need to carry your brand forward in a professional and consistent manner. It will contain:

• Logo Usage
• Colour Pallete
• Theme
• Fonts & Typography
• Imagery
• Icons
• Message
• Ethics
• And more visual assets

If you stick to your brand guidelines, you’ll see how much easier it is to present your brand in a professional manner. It will help you heavily when designing visual items and content. It will also show customers you’re serious and have a plan. It’ll help you stick to your theme and colour palette and not overcrowd your visual items with a handful of colours, which doesn’t work well!

Brand guides will help remind you of your message and the language you should be using when communicating with your customers. It will also help you with ethical practices to make your user experience a pleasant one. When your brand guide is final, stick to it! Having a brand guide and not using it, is like not opening your umbrella in the rain.

Why wouldn’t you use it?!

Create a plan

Make yourself a plan for the future, where do you want your brand to be sitting in the market the following year? Where do you see your brand in 5 years? The plan will contain answers to these questions and much more. Even if you don’t achieve your objectives, it’s good to know which way to steer the ship and this helps you move forward and not backwards. Remember this is for you and your brand, your customers will not see this, however, they’ll reap the benefits of a well-oiled business because of it.

Want to learn more about brand identity? Get in touch with us today!