Size doesn’t matter when it comes to branding. Branding is, as we like to describe it, the business heart. It is where the feeling and the personality of your brand sits and where it gets pumped through the whole business body.
Your brand is the responsible for making you different from your competitors and puts you in your customer’s mind. It sets your positioning and pricing which will attract the right clients, and these will get emotionally attached to you. They will trust you and become loyal customers.
– But how do you set a strong brand?
With consistency
Consistency will help your brand not to get diluted, so your customers don’t get confused. Will help your to create an organised brand that feels trustworthy and recognisable. And these five steps will help you achieve it.
1. Get your social media align with your site
Your website and your social media should have the same feel. Apply the look and feel of your site to your social media. Use the same type of imagery for the profile banners and your logo for the profile pictures. Twitter lets you change the colour scheme, align it with your website.
2. Get everybody involved
Share your brand guidelines with all your employees and train them on how they should use the fonts, imagery and the colours. Take them through the personality of the business, so they can also use the same tone of voice. When you have everybody on board, they become brand ambassadors that will defend your business.
3. Periodical check ups
You should keep an eye on the company’s assets such as website, marketing brochures or annual reports, to ensure that visually looks well branded as well as the content is using the correct tone of voice.
Sometimes is a good idea to have one person in charge of the brand, someone that understands the values and the guidelines and who can lead the others to use the brand correctly.
4. Stick to it
With the amount of visual input we get exposed at the end of the day, it’s not that strange that we get inspired. Refrain from changing your look and feeling unless it is very necessary. Changing your core branding may confuse your customer, and it will slow, down the process of establishing your brand. Look how Coca-cola has had pretty much the same look for decades.
5. Fonts, colours and imagery
Have your one or two fonts installed in all the company’s computers. The colours breakdowns and an imagery bank will help that all your brand looks consistent. Formulate the way you use those three elements. For example, this font is only for titles. Soon all the assets will be consistent and recognisable.
Roundup
Consistency is reiterating the same message and imagery over and over until it gets into people’s mind. Now, this doesn’t mean to repeat yourself. Means finding your tone of voice and your look and feel though colours fonts and images.