Branding, Digital Marketing

Your brand is the first impression of your business. Your logo, mark, tagline, colors, and even typeface evoke feelings from prospective clients. Often clients come to us wondering how to build a brand that truly captures their vision and evokes the right feeling and experience from the first look. This post outlines four of the most critical things to consider as you build your brand.

1. Know Your Audience. The most important aspect of building your brand is knowing who you are trying to reach. Your choices should show an understanding of the personality, needs, desires, and demographics of those you want to convert. For example, you wouldn’t want to market a high-end pharmaceutical company with bubble letters, pastels, and animal illustrations. Rather, professional, clean marketing and positive imagery would better capture the audience. Building an effective audience persona ensures you’re marketing is tailored to gain the right leads.

2. Know Your Competition. To gain a competitive advantage, you need to know who you’re up against, specifically their value proposition, and their key differentiators. This will help you to distinguish yourself within a competitive landscape. If you don’t have a specific business in mind, you can Google the type of services or goods you offer and see what local businesses are populated. Analyzing their website, social media accounts, and reviews will give a good look into how you need to position your business to differentiate yourself and gain quality leads. This will also enable you to decipher what colors, fonts, or imagery works and what doesn’t for your product.

3. Know Your Why. A business is nothing without its mission, so building your brand should include your “why.” Sure, all businesses want to make money, but that won’t get you sales or conversions. Your brand should fulfill a need and add value to a customer’s life. For example, Lush has bath and body products that people can find at any chain store, but their commitment to their ethics of natural, organic, and pure ingredients sets them ahead of their competition. Know your “why” and talk about it frequently so the perfect prospect can find you.

4. Know Your Look. This is where first impressions play in marketing. Once someone looks at your brand, even if they know nothing about it, they judge it. So, it is important to carefully choose colors, fonts, and imagery that makes sense for who you are and who you want to be. Consider color psychology when determining your palette and match your brand colors to how you want your customer to feel. As for fonts, it depends on your tone of voice. Serif fonts come across as cleaner and more professional while curvier fonts like calligraphy could be used for more feminine brands like wedding venues. Making sure your design and palette choices are identifiable, unique, and make sense for your brand can seem overrated, but it is key for first impressions.

Consistency is essential in building trust and reputation. Once you decide on a brand image, you can implement it across all channels: social media posts, web design, email templates, and more. If you need to alter your brand as you grow, that’s fine! It is completely normal and doable for a company to do a rebrand as they expand or change values.

What are some of our favorite logos and brands? Stay tuned! In our next blog post, we’ll highlight our favorite brands (including a few of our own) and why we believe their choices make sense for their overall brand and marketing strategy.

If you need assistance with building your brand or rebranding, give the team at FatRabbit Creative a call! We can make your brand dreams a reality.