Making Your Business Your Own: Top Tips for Building Brand Identity

Having a brilliant idea for a small business is only the first (and some would say the easiest) step on the road to success. Much hard work follows to turn the dream into reality, and harder work still to get people to buy what you offer. At some stage along that process, you need to ensure that when potential customers think of a product, they think of your product. Even more important is that an existing customer remembers and returns to your product—and recommends it to others. That is the role of a brand identity.

Know Your Customers

The first step towards building brand identity is to know to whom you are selling and to build a picture of the sort of style that will resonate with them. A good place to start would be by studying your competitors’ approach. This will show you what other businesses, appealing to the same market, have found successful. A market of hard-bitten business executives will need a style very different from a market of dewy-eyed romantics.

Know Your Core Values

Knowing what works for your competitors is one thing. Knowing what will make your product or service stand out from the crowd is a different matter.

Spend some time, alone or with your team (if any), listing what are the distinctive things that you bring to the party. What are your values as a business and what distinguishes them from those of the rest of the field? What is your mission statement? What sort of experience are you going to offer to your customers?

If you can, invent a tagline which is memorable and which sums up what is distinctive about your business. It will take a while to get this right, but when you do get it right it can form the core of your branding strategy.

The Look and the Feel

You are now ready to build that unique identity that will resonate with your potential customers. It will be something which says that you understand their requirements, but also that you can supply something which is otherwise lacking in the field.

Fonts: choosing the right fonts can seem daunting. There are so many choices, and to the untrained eye they look very similar. As a rule of thumb, the more formal your customers are likely to be, the more you should favor a serif font—the more relaxed, the better a sans serif font will work.

Colors: in choosing your color scheme, the customer is still king. Put yourself in their shoes, and imagine your brand name on a page, a website, a hoarding, and your packaging. Try it out against a variety of background colors; at the very least, it should work well against both white and black.

Logo: generally people’s visual memories are much better than their verbal memories, so your logo is a vital part of your identity strategy. Before you settle on anything or turn to a professional designer, you could play around with an online free logo maker. It will give you a sense of what you are looking for, and you may even come up with the perfect result by yourself.

Getting It Out There

Once created, your brand identity needs to be established in the marketplace. Before you do, double-check that your branding is not infringing anyone else’s trademark. At some stage, you might want to consider registering a trademark for yourself.

For nearly all businesses today, a presence in social media is required, and you should set up an account on all the main ones. The thrust of social media is to create a link between your brand identity and the real people with whom your customers will be dealing.

Your own website needs, of course, to be designed to reflect your carefully constructed identity and the needs of your typical customers. Not everyone will arrive at your home page, so every page needs to be instantly (but discreetly) recognizable as your brand.

Remember that you live in a constantly changing world, and give yourself a schedule to review your branding policy regularly.

All by Myself?

There is much that you can and must do, as an individual or as a small team, to lay the groundwork for your brand identity. However, it is unlikely that you will have all the skills necessary to cover every angle. For some aspects of design, or for bringing the whole thing together, you may be well advised to enlist professional help. Your brand identity is too important a thing to leave to chance.