Whenever business branding is mentioned, what comes to the mind of most people especially is creating beautiful logos, taglines, business cards, and other marketing materials. Although these materials are part of brand making, there’s a lot more to business branding than meets the eye. It’s those hidden strategies and rules that successful businesses have leveraged to build successful and reliable brands people can trust.
If you’re starting a new business, branding is one of the key things you must focus on to define your business for your audience, build a strong name in your niche and grow to become a game player in your industry. There are secrets to this and these secrets are what the likes of Apple and Coca-Cola took advantage of to become a global names in their industries. This article features several design rules we’ve compiled by studying different successful brands to help you brand or rebrand your business and impact the way customers view your business. These rules will help you understand what you should be looking for when branding your business. Even if you’re not the designer, these rules will give you an expert opinion in providing feedback to your brand designer.
1. Conduct a Competitor Research
The first and most important thing you must do as a new business owner in building your brand is to establish a solid design foundation for your branding. Doing this requires pure creativity and setting a baseline by conducting competitor research. Take your time and research businesses that are already successful in your niche. Start by taking notes from the list of your top 10 competitors. Since this is your niche, you should already know who are your top 10 competitors. However, if you’re not sure, a well-refined google search can help you narrow your competitors to the top 10.
Pay attention to what these top successful businesses in your niche are doing. Discover what’s already in the market and find ways to bring something new and outstanding and relay this to your designer. When researching your competitors, the idea is not to create what is already in existence but to understand what works and doesn’t work. With this research, you can get a feel of the industry, see why your competitors are successful, and design something new and unique, hence carving out your own space to build a name and strong force for the brand.
2. Less is more
Most times, you might be tempted as a designer to add multiple elements in your brand design in other to buttress your point, make it stand out, and attract your audience. Although this might sound like an ideal strategy to you, adding too many design elements creates the opposite result. Most times overdone brand design detracts from the message you’re trying to send across.
Take a look at the top brands in different niches, one thing that is common amongst their logs is simplicity. Your branding doesn’t have to announce so much about your industry or services. It’s rather more effective when it’s subtle. Take a look at the UPS, Apple, ABC News, and IBM Logo. These brands and many more of the best brands in the world have very simple marks or logos that represent them. They’ve made a mark in people’s minds and you can easily picture what their brand looks like without any visual reference.
To ensure simplicity, an important piece of advice from Printsouq would be;
To start by laying out your ideas, then you can simplify the concept. And rework it again with some creativity and you’re more likely to get a simple and memorable brand. Remember, your logo doesn’t have to tell all the story about your brand at once, these stories can also be conveyed via other campaigns and usages.
3. Direct your branding to your ideal customer
Don’t make designs that appeal to you. That’s only a very effective way to fail when branding your business. Some designers also make this mistake. Rather than make branding designs that appeal to the ideal customer, it’s directed to the business owner. Your brand designs are not about you. For example, the fact that you like blue or a start icon doesn’t necessarily mean that those should be in your designs.
Doing that would be a bad idea!
Every category of buyers or audience has visual representations that speak to them. Find out what these representations are. Study your audience and find out what appeals most to them.
4. Make your Design Appealing
In as much as we talk about simplicity when it comes to designing your brand, it is also important to make it catchy and appealing to the eye. To make a design appealing doesn’t necessarily mean adding more elements. It is possible to have a simple, yet catchy design.
Remember, with the advent of businesses having an online presence, customers are now exposed to a wide variety of content. So if you’re targeting these customers, you must be sure to create outstanding and catchy designs that will make them stop strolling and have a proper look.
One of the ways to do this is to create a unique color for your brand making sure it’s a color that speaks to your audience. According to a study by the University of Loyola, Maryland, color increases brand recognition by 80%. Color is one of the simplest ways to create a brand identity for your business.
Consider other appealing elements to the brain and add them to your branding effects. For example, a look at most of the business cards on Printsouq, you’ll discover that some of them have lots of white spaces while many others maintain touches of white on them. This is because white gives an impression of good taste and sophistication.
5. Keep it together
One important aspect of branding many new businesses and designers tend to miss is developing a cohesive or consistent design across all their materials or branding deliverables.
Every of your brand materials should work together to tell a story about your brand. They should be like little pieces of a puzzle fit together to form a picture. From the logo to the business cards, letterhead, t-shirts, website, signages, brochures, newsletters and every other thing that showcases your brand or business should have a similar look.
You can easily make this happen by using consistent design elements like font styles and colors. Over time, this will register in the mind of your audience so that they can tell your brand at a glance.
If you’re looking for some business cards or business marketing ideas, a look at some of the templates available on Printsouq will be a perfect way to start. Take your time, edit them to your taste and have them give you a professional print that will capture the eyes and minds of your buyers.