Brand building is something that’s difficult, if not impossible, to put a price tag on—the actual ROI a company gets from a well-designed, impactful brand can’t truly be measured. Because of this, many non-marketing leaders initially see little incentive to invest the time and money it takes to build a cohesive brand.
The truth is that a cohesive brand has the ability to lend invaluable credibility to your solution. The look and feel of your branding becomes synonymous with your company’s name, and good branding creates strong associations between your product and the value it provides.
Inconsistencies in your brand personality or tone can create friction in the user’s experience. It’s important that all of your assets are on-brand, so you don’t distract from your messaging and miss out on opportunities.
Especially as an organization grows, branding becomes increasingly important. It promotes brand recognition, which is what gives users that “aha” moment where they subconsciously connect the dots between your visuals and your core message.
A Step-by-Step Guide
Look & feel
Establishing your branding early on helps you stay consistent throughout all of your marketing efforts from the get-go. At this point you may have a rough draft of your logo or a few different ideas for color schemes, but now it’s time to finalize your logo, brand colors, fonts, and graphic style.
Hopefully, you’ve recruited or outsourced your visual designer by this point. But at the very least, developing a memorable brand requires an understanding of:
How to establish a direction for your brand
Basic graphic design principles
Which colors and elements work well together to represent your brand personality
What kind of variants will be needed for different usages (for example, digital vs. print)
Logo
Colors
Choosing the right color scheme for your company comes down to how you want to define your brand personality, and of course your brand personality should align with what you know about your ideal customers.
We recommend choosing at least 3 main colors to use throughout your branding. It may seem like a small detail, but choosing the right color can actually increase brand recognition by up to 80%. For EBQ, we went with a colorful yet modern palette that is somewhat playful without overshadowing our professionalism and business expertise.
Some interesting facts to consider when choosing the signature colors for your branding:
The color blue appears in 61% of logos for top technology companies, which implies a higher level of effectiveness and sense of credibility for tech branding.
The color black is said to represent traits like “luxury” and “formality” in branding.
Perceptions of colors are not universal and can vary from culture to culture. You may need to tailor your branding depending on where your buyers are located.
Fonts
Fonts affect the readability of your content, so you should give careful consideration to even the small nuances, like whether you’ll use a serif or sans serif font (fonts with or without the fancy little feet attached to the letters).
Brand guidelines
Once your branding elements are finalized, it’s important to create brand guidelines that document your style and can be shared with anyone who creates visual assets for your company. Here are some snapshots straight from the book of EBQ brand guidelines:
Your brand needs to be portrayed clearly and consistently across all channels, and a detailed set of brand guidelines ensures that your website and content looks the same whether you do it all internally or hire someone else to design it for you.
