When bringing a startup company to life, there’s a lot you have to do. You’re creating something out of nothing, and you must work hard to capture the hearts and minds of your new audience.
You’ll need to turn to many different channels to get content out to your consumers. This will be essential for your growth marketing strategy. But when marketing on so many different platforms, there’s one thing you need to focus on above all.
Consistency.
That consistency comes naturally when you build an everlasting branding package that details everything about your company and how it’s represented. Failure to have a branding package in place before launch can lead to disorganization, inconsistency, and confused prospective customers.
But what is an everlasting branding package? Why is it so important to your continued success? And how can you build an everlasting branding package for your startup company?
Read on to find out.
What is an Everlasting Branding Package
An everlasting branding package encompasses all visual and tonal elements of your brand over various platforms that will stand the test of time.
A successful branding package is all about consistency. Your logo, color palette, typography, website, etc., must all be aligned and have the same style so that your audience can easily recognize the brand.
All-in-one platforms like Tailor Brands help entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners launch their business ideas with AI tools, design suites, website builders, and more, making the business branding process seamless. These platforms are beneficial if you’re looking for multiple solutions in one place.
The branding package must be carefully laid out with your target audience in mind. It must speak to their wants, needs, and pain points while being easy to follow from one platform to another.
For example, the branding on a landing page that you’re using for a Google Ads campaign should match the branding and tone of your website. The dissonance can be jarring for potential customers if the two are wildly out of sync.
Consistent branding creates a sense of familiarity and comfort, which in turn breeds customer loyalty.
Why is an Everlasting Branding Package Important?
There are many reasons why organizations look to create everlasting branding packages. Look at some of the most well-known brands in the world — Mcdonald’s, Disney, Coca-Cola, Nike — they all have particular branding packages from colors to fonts to the overall tone of content.
A cohesive visual identity built around your brand can become a valuable asset. This can be factored into discussions should you decide to sell the company or bring investors on board at a later time.
When providing a service, especially with a customer service element, your brand image has to be visible and present within every detail. This is true even with a virtual receptionist for your office. Despite not being physically present at your location, their work uniform should still be in tune with your business color palette if anyone sees them during online meetings.
This is why companies that specialize in brand development and design offer such bundled services. Powerful branding leads to powerful loyalty and continued business.
Take Kudos, for example. This is a company that offers a smart wallet that maximizes your credit card rewards when you shop. It has created a consistent brand image with a color palette that varies between blue and purple tones, along with an appealing logo and graphic elements that are used throughout its website and social media platforms.
How Can You Build an Everlasting Brand Package?
Understand Your Audience
Before making a single decision regarding your branding, you first need to do a lot of research on your target audience. Who are they? Where are they? What do they like?
Your personal vision for the startup company could be completely wrong for this audience. If that’s the case, you’ll need to switch gears and change up your plans quickly. You’re not trying to sell to yourself. You’re trying to reach these very specific people.
Start by creating customer profiles highlighting key demographic information that could contribute to your branding. If you serve an extensive demo, consider segmenting your audience and creating buyer personas for each group.
In your buyer persona, you should list a slew of information, including your target audience’s:
- Age
- Location
- Occupation
- Marital status
- Gender
- Preferred social media platforms
- Interests
- Dislikes
- Ethical concerns
- Salary
- Buying habits
Sometimes you’re not marketing products specifically for the people who will be using them. You’re marketing to the people who make purchase decisions.
For example, suppose a financial institution wants to create a debit card for kids. In that case, its branding must be oriented to children and their parents, who ultimately will make the purchase decision for their child.
Come Up With a Style Guide
Once you understand your target audience, it’s time to start laying out what your specific brand style looks like.
This is particularly crucial if you are thinking of hiring an outside professional design service for your branding package. You’ll need a style guide ready that helps these third-party designers visualize exactly what you have in mind. When putting together your style guide, you can create a mood board with different images or use a collage maker to include references to what you’re looking for in terms of style, colors, fonts, and so on.
The style guide should discuss your overall content tone, branding colors, the emotions you’re trying to elicit in your audience, sample images, and so on.
Remember, your brand design must reflect itself and your brand’s long-term goals. For example, Divbyzero, which mainly talks about business, marketing, and SaaS examples, prefers using red and black colors, which are mainly associated with activity, motivation, and power. You can see this in the image below.
These branding decisions, along with the reasoning behind them, should be spelled out in detail within the style guide document.
Create a Powerful Logo
Your logo is incredibly important to your continued success. It needs to be powerful and appropriate, easily recognizable in a way that can instantly be associated with you and your company.
When designing a logo, work your brand colors into the design and think about your target audience. What would resonate with them? What kind of imagery creates the emotional response that might urge them to place their trust in your new company?
Another reason why the logo design is so important is that it’s a decision you’re going to live with for a very long time. The logo should be everlasting — something that isn’t going to become dated quickly or fall out of style. It should also be something universal that can be tweaked or updated in the future without changing the overall look and feel.
Think about the McDonald’s golden arches or the Nike swoosh. These are evergreen logos that have seen very little change over the years. These are logos that can appear without the brand’s name, and you’ll instantly know what you’re looking at.
You should strive for that when putting the finishing touches on your logo design.
Develop Your Brand Tone
All brands need a tone that they abide by, one that speaks to their customers and conveys the emotion and personality that are needed to close a sale.
Again, this boils down to your specific audience and their sensibilities. If you’re appealing to an older and more academic crowd or a B2B audience, you’ll want to take a more professional tone. If you’re trying to reach a younger consumer crowd, it might be best to let your proverbial hair down and take a more relaxed and casual tone.
When it comes to an ecommerce start-up, product descriptions are everything, as they are meant to educate your audience and display your tone for all to see. A great product description can convince customers to buy from you instead of a major competitor.
But crafting descriptions that are both accurate and compelling can be time-consuming — especially if you have a lot of products. That’s where an AI writer tool comes in. These tools can help you quickly create accurate and persuasive product descriptions, allowing you to engage with your customers more easily. But even if you’re using one, remember that you might need to rework it a bit to ensure your target tone is hit.
Develop Email Templates
Email marketing is a tried-and-true effective form of digital marketing outreach. But you want to make sure there’s a sense of familiarity with your email messages. That’s why your branding package should include email templates that will make communications seamless and uniform.
An email template should include a letterhead, space for images, font and color requirements, and an email signature. If you have certain phrases or slogans that should be worked into the message or a specific sign-off, then that should also be a part of the template.
You can also create some reusable copy that can be personalized to each recipient, as well as a follow up email template. This allows you to communicate consistently while also adding a personal flair to your messages. Ensure your employees fully understand the tone and are willing to use it while communicating with your audience.
Create Social Media Images
You should set certain parameters regarding branded social media images. For example, do you like a specific kind of illustration style? Do you prefer black and white images over color? Do you want to include the company logo in the corner of every image?
All of this should be laid out in your style guide. Armed with that information, your graphics team can create a slew of social images that fit within the theme of your branding. Your social media marketing team can peruse through the library of images, crafting posts around the various themes on display.
Develop a Business Card Design
Your company business card design is an important part of your branding package. The card should capture the tone, color palette, logo, and overall identity of your organization. Everyone within the company, from the CEO down to sales representatives, should be using the same business card design.
Workshop a few different designs on a service like VistaPrint and test them out with your audience members. See which designs get the best results. Your design should be memorable and stand out, especially at a networking event where attendees might end up with a slew of cards by the night’s end.
Just make sure you don’t go for style over information. Your prospective customers need to be able to find the name and contact information on the card easily.
Design a Customer-Friendly Website
Finally, you need to bring all of the various elements of your everlasting branding package together on your website, creating a central online home for your business that shows off the color palate, imagery, and tone you’ve worked so hard to create.
The brand design you implement on your site should evoke the same association that you want your product or service to have.
For example, Hims & Hers, as shown in the image above, sells antidepressants online. Each product landing page is designed in such a way that they leave visitors with a sense of calm and order.
Conclusion
Starting a business is exciting, but it’s important that you not forget several key steps that are needed to get your new company off the ground. Chief among them is the formation of a well-thought-out and everlasting branding package.
To review, when building your branding package:
- Understand the audience you’re serving
- Come up with a definitive style guide
- Create a powerful logo that will stand the test of time
- Develop a brand tone that appeals to your target audience and lay it out clearly
- Create templates for email marketing to ensure that you’re always showing consistency
- Create social media images that can be implemented along social platforms
- Develop a business card design that’s unique yet informative
- Design a customer-friendly website with all of your brand decisions in mind
By following the steps highlighted above, you’ll be able to hit the ground running with consistent branding that will make your customers feel secure in trusting you for their future business.
The post How to Build an Everlasting Branding Package for Your Startup appeared first on Design your way.
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