A company's branding is an essential part of its marketing efforts, as a brand is the equivalent of a business's personality and identity. Your brand will dictate how your customers recognize and define your business, so it's important to develop a branding strategy that is consistent with the messages you'd like to relay and the reputation you'd like to uphold.
Your company's brand has a lot to do with design elements, like a logo, name, colors, fonts and website design. Your branding should represent your company's story, culture, purpose and experiences. It should be more than just aesthetically pleasing. The following guide will help you focus on the elements of your company that should affect your branding decisions.
Top branding agencies to consider
Here are some popular branding agencies to work with:
Clay
Based in San Francisco, Clay is a UX design and branding agency that has a simple approach: to create digital products that consumers love to use by incorporating human behavior into its UX design. Clay often works with tech companies. It offers clients strategy, design and development on all platforms.
Clay's team takes an iterative and client-centered approach, making use of constant consultation. It also provides web and mobile app development services, UI/UX audits, product strategy, prototyping, and brand identity management.
Ruckus
Ruckus is a full-service advertising and marketing agency that can help you make a valuable first impression on your audience and prospective clients. It offers branding solutions such as logo design and experiential marketing. It also inspects your personal story to determine the best tone, theme, colors and platforms for your business. The Ruckus team provides marketing advice in the form of lead-generation strategies and full-scale campaigns on the platforms of your choice.
Motto
A woman-owned independent branding agency, Motto has experts in digital marketing, graphic design, UI/UX and content production. It can help you elevate your brand through storytelling, naming, brand architecture and messaging. Every part of its strategy revolves around market research and insights. Motto not only provides branded content at reasonable prices, but also offers workbooks that entrepreneurs and influencers can buy to jump-start their branding journeys.
Traina Design
Traina Design is a leading branding agency with over 12 years of experience and a brand-first approach. Its services include branding, website design, e-commerce solutions, graphic design and digital marketing. It makes sure that your brand's values and voice are reflected across your customer-facing platforms. Traina Design develops a style guide for each of its clients that is periodically reviewed and updated. Clients get access to all of Traina's digital assets should any edits need to be made.
BLVR
BLVR takes a unique approach to branding, focusing on finding the belief system of the brand and then successfully using it in brand development. The company offers brand development that encompasses market research, tagline development and voice. BLVR offers an exceptional graphic design service that includes campaign design, sales collateral and packaging. It also offers content development, marketing and analytics.
Mucho
Mucho's branding strategies are governed by market research and consumer insights. It helps companies with branding and strategy in order to promote their brands. Motto creates brand narratives that will elicit emotional responses from your audience. Brand analysis, benchmarking and visualization are the cornerstones of Mucho's success as an agency. It makes sure that its clients' branding is in complete alignment and helps them with brand activation and content development.
Tips to start building your brand
1. Know who you are and what you do.
When you create your brand, you should have a solid understanding of what your company's voice is and what you want to achieve as a business. Your brand should tell your customers a story, so it's important that you know what that story is when you set out to brand yourself.
Additionally, it's important to identify the attributes that best describe your company. To do this, make a list. Then, decide which two words best capture your company as a whole. These two words will guide how you brand your company.
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For example, if you decide that your company is best described as "contemporary" and "playful," you might want to choose bright colors to reflect your playful side, or use a contemporary sans serif typeset or font like Orkney, Aqua or Modeka.
2. Know your audience.
You can't appeal to your audience if you don't know who's in it. Ask yourself questions like these about your audience:
- What industry does my ideal customer work in?
- What type of content is my ideal customer looking for?
- What is the size of the business my customer owns or works in [for B2B companies]?
Once you know who's in your audience, you can better predict what your target market will respond to. This information should also help you build your brand. [Read related article: How to Create Accurate Customer Personas for Your Business]
3. Have a message.
The most successful brands today have a message. It can be that you're environmentally friendly, charitable or simply the coolest thing around. Whatever your message is, be proud of it. Shout it from the rooftops (or your website).
Bombas is a great example of a company with a memorable and meaningful message. Its message has two parts: that its socks are designed to be more comfortable than the competition, and that it donates a pair of socks to someone in need for every pair sold.
4. Be consistent.
Once you've determined what your brand is, everything should reflect that – your logo, your quotes and the way you describe your product. Keep the same tone and attitude across everything related to your brand.
Questions to guide your branding decisions
Ask yourself these questions to guide your own branding decisions or create brands for your clients:
- Does my brand speak to my audience?
- Does my brand tell a story about my company?
- Is my company name memorable and versatile?
- Does my brand appeal to the senses?
- Do my branding choices reflect the values and culture of my company?
- Will my customers have an idea of what to expect from working with us based on our name, logo and other branding materials?
- Does all of my content have a distinct voice that is particular to my brand?
- Is my branding content compatible with different media? Will it look good in print as well as online? Will it be appealing on my website as well as on different social media sites?
- Is my branding simple and iconic?
- Is my branding consistent across everything I do?