How to Build a Strong Brand Identity

How to Start Building Your Brand

1. Do Some Research

Researching your industry’s landscape before you settle on a brand identity will help you determine where and how you want your company to fit in. Start by researching your competitors and get familiar with how they present their brand. By seeing how your competitors behave, it’ll help you figure out how you want to be perceived by your target audience. For example, if your biggest competitor’s website features a lot of the color red, you probably want to differentiate yourself with your own unique color.

Speaking of target audience, you want to research what kind of people you want your product or service to reach. Then, you should research what your target audience might enjoy, dislike, want, and need. You’ll be able to build your brand to attract your target audience, and you need to understand them first before you start building.

Customers are crucial to your company’s success. You want to come up with a few buyer personas of your ideal audience. Try to consider what kind of brand your potential customers would want to communicate and collaborate with.

Keep in mind how your competitors interact with their customers and whether or not your potential customers would rather interact with your competitors instead of you. You want to create a strong brand identity that you know will attract potential customers.

2. Start Building and Designing Your Logo and Color Scheme

Your research will help you develop the voice you want your brand to have, and it will give you an idea of how you want to share your voice with your target audience. Once you’ve developed your voice, you can start designing your brand (the fun part).

Create a logo that represents your brand identity and make it recognizable. You may need someone skilled in graphic design for this step. Your logo is going to be featured on every online platform, including your website, and on any ads and business cards you create. It should incorporate any color scheme that is going to be present across your website.

For example, HubSpot’s logo is orange and they make a point to include that color throughout their website and their social media pages. It makes them easily recognizable and creates a cohesiveness across different platforms.

Image: HubSpot Blog

HubSpot uses the color orange on their website in their pictures, their call-to-action buttons, and even in their logo. They also use their logo within their name to make it even more recognizable.

Their social media profile pictures are also orange and also feature their logo. In the image below, they even make their Instagram Story Highlight cover photos orange as well.

Image: HubSpot Instagram

HubSpot also does a great job of consistently including orange within their Instagram feed to create a consistent aesthetic. It makes their Instagram look more attractive and delightful for their audience to look at.

Image: HubSpot Instagram

Once you have your logo and color scheme designed, create some templates for emails, letters, and business cards. You want to, again, make sure to include your logo and your company colors to create a consistent image of your brand.

Consistency is key when designing your brand identity. It’s crucial that your brand can be distinguished easily amongst all of your competitors. It will create a strong brand image and contribute to how your target audience views your company as a whole.

A consistent brand design gives the impression that your company is consistent across your marketing channels, your sales process, and customer service processes.

3. Introduce and Integrate

Now that you’ve researched your industry landscape and you’ve designed your brand, you want to introduce it to the world. This is where you can see how well your hard work pays off. The best way to do this is to start creating content for your target audience. This is the best way to show off your brand’s personality and attract your audience.

Make sure your content reflects who you are as a company and as a brand. Any blog post you write, any Instagram photo you post, any webinar you create should reflect your brand’s voice.

Create a brand story to connect with potential customers and nurture relationships. A strong brand story will create an emotional connection with your audience. Your story should not only appeal to your audience’s emotions, but also call them to take action.

Coca-Cola, for example, has created a really strong brand over the years. From their products to their social media presence, not only is there consistency, but Coca-Cola sells itself more as a lifestyle brand than as a soft drink company. Their mission and purpose is “to refresh the world”, “to inspire moments of optimism and  happiness”, and “to create value and make a difference”. This is clear and consistent across their marketing efforts, especially on social media.

This tweet from Coca-Cola’s Twitter was for this past Father’s Day. They created a video that got over 1 million views for their campaign #ShareaCoke. The video displays how you can #ShareaCoke with your Dad on Father’s Day to show your appreciation. It is an inspiring video, full of happiness, that adds value to their customers’ lives.

Image: Coca-Cola Twitter

When you’re integrating your brand, you want to promote and advertise your products and content. One great way to promote your brand is through social media. Creating social media accounts across different platforms will help you reach a wider target audience.

Social media allows you to deliver engaging content to your followers and establish connections. Communicating with customers has never been easier than on social media. Customers can reach out through comments or direct messages, and you can gauge how successful your marketing efforts are based on your follower count and the reactions of your followers.

4. Keep an Eye on Your Brand

Once you’ve launched your brand, keep an eye on how people are responding and interacting with you. Tracking and analyzing your performance will help you gauge the strength of your brand identity. You’ll then be able to decide what improvements or changes you need to make to be more successful.

Similar to how you track and analyze your marketing efforts, you can send out surveys, use Google analytics, and monitor social media comments to get a sense of how people feel about your brand as a whole.

Consistently maintaining your brand identity can be a lot of work, but the results are definitely rewarding. Customers will instantly recognize who your company is through all of your branding efforts.