The branding process is much more than just cranking out a logo and pasting it on everything; it’s about creating a cohesive brand identity.
That’s why, for many, there’s a lot of confusion about your brand and its meaning. And there’s even more confusion about where to begin your branding journey.
We’re here to put those questions to bed.
So, let’s start with a quick refresher on branding. In simplest terms, your brand is your company’s reputation. And, of course, your reputation is people’s perception of your business. By extension, your brand is how your audience perceives your business. And while you do not have direct control over their final perception — you have complete control over the actions your business can take to influence and sway those perceptions a certain way.
That process of swaying those perceptions a certain way is called branding (which includes your brand strategy). And since those perceptions will make or break whether they decide to buy into your business, they’re pretty important!
This is why it’s all the more important to start the branding process for your business the right way.
Unfortunately, many businesses begin with an ineffective approach to their branding. Poor strategy may result from a limited budget, time constraints, or consulting with someone who has little to no experience with branding strategy. Unsurprisingly, a disjointed approach results in a confused perception of your brand, which leads to people not taking you seriously.
To illustrate, imagine you decide to wear mismatched clothes on your first date. You’ve chosen to wear a suit jacket, swimming shorts, and steel-toe boots — and while there’s a time and a place for each of these, they probably don’t belong together as an outfit.
Implementing the right approach to the branding process is a lot like having a wardrobe for your business that’s filled with consistently crisp suits. That way, regardless of your chosen suit, you know your business will look sharp and dressed to impress.
Fortunately, we have six steps to ensure that you’re starting the branding process the right way!
Table of Contents
What is a Brand and Brand Identity?
A brand is much more than just a name or a logo; it’s the unique identity that sets your business apart from the competition. It encompasses the values, personality, and message that you want to convey to your target audience. Think of your brand as the reputation of your business—how people perceive you and what they think of when they hear your name.
Brand identity, on the other hand, is the visual and verbal representation of your brand. This includes your name, logo, colors, typography, and tone of voice. A strong brand identity is essential for building a successful brand because it helps establish your company’s reputation, build trust with customers, and differentiate you from competitors. When your brand identity is clear and consistent, it creates a memorable impression that resonates with your audience and fosters loyalty.
Defining Your Target Audience
Understanding your target market is a critical step in building a successful brand. This involves gathering data and insights about your ideal customers, including their demographics, interests, behaviors, and pain points. By doing so, you can create detailed buyer personas—fictional representations of your ideal customers—that help you tailor your brand strategy to meet their needs.
Researching your target market allows you to develop a brand voice, brand positioning, and visual identity that resonate with your audience. It helps you understand who your ideal customers are, what they care about, and how they interact with brands similar to yours. This knowledge is invaluable in creating a brand that stands out and connects with your audience on a deeper level.
Some key questions to ask when researching your target market include:
- Who are my ideal customers?
- What are their demographics, interests, and behaviors?
- What are their pain points and challenges?
- How do they currently interact with my brand or similar brands?
- What are their goals and aspirations?
Step 1: Hiring the Right Branding Team
The most important step to branding your business is to ensure you’re hiring the right talent for the job. This can either be a freelance designer, a branding agency or even your own internal team of creatives. Regardless of who you choose to work with, it’s imperative that they are experienced, professional, and reputable. Hiring a team with an experienced Creative Director should be at the top of the list.
Hiring professionals well-versed in developing branding strategies and identities is crucial for getting the job done right the first time. There is a massive pitfall in trying to build your brand DIY.
Nowadays, there are many easily accessible design tools. This also means many businesses offer design without specializing in it. We always recommend comparing portfolios. The difference will be noticeable when comparing something excellent against something mediocre.
Design is everywhere, but quality design is harder to come by. Without a background in the creative process, developing a comprehensive and effective branding strategy is difficult, if not impossible.
The design and branding process is much like any other skilled profession. Watching a master carpenter handle a challenge is impressive—they find elegant solutions with ease, thanks to years of experience and muscle memory.
Just as master carpenters craft lasting pieces, experienced design teams bring the same intuition and expertise to their work. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to fix something at home, only for it to turn out like a 3rd-grade science project.
That’s why hiring professionals in their field is the smartest way to ensure the job gets done right.
Step 2: Branding Research & Your Logo
The next step is to design (or redesign) your logo. Starting with your brand logo may not always seem obvious, but it’s incredibly important to perfect it first because it sets the foundation for the rest of your branding strategy.
At Mighty Fine, we always follow a set of best practices whenever we begin the logo design process. We’re not magicians, even though we may make it seem that way!
We always recommend going through that process step-by-step because you cannot guarantee good results without it — resulting in wasted time and money if you need to get another logo.
So, how do we avoid that from happening? Any creative agency or graphic designer worth their salt won’t just begin sketching right away — they will first take the time to learn about your business in-depth. The goal is to understand the client’s business as well as they do. That’s why creative agencies like Mighty Fine can effectively conceptualize the proper treatment for your logo and branding strategy.
We begin the research phase of the branding process by employing what we call a Branding Questionnaire. The document lists specific questions: your business’ history, target audience, direct competitors, and of course, your core values.
We also ask aspirational questions about your business. We leverage the information gleaned from the branding questionnaire throughout the entire branding process, as it’s crucial in conceptualizing how to make your brand stand out.
We also conduct industry research to identify trends and, more importantly, prevent commonality with comparable companies in your market. From there, we’ll have a follow-up meeting to ask questions and clarify necessary details.
Armed with that knowledge, we can start designing your logo confidently. You can read more about the specifics of the logo design process. Once your logo is created, it’s time to develop your branding strategy.
Step 3: Developing Your Branding Strategy Process, Brand Positioning & Establishing Guidelines
Your branding strategy is much more than just putting your logo on everything. It’s only one piece of the branding puzzle.
For example, if your advertisements are green, your website is yellow, and your fleet of vehicles is pink, anyone dealing with all three will be highly confused. At the very least, people will question your credibility. Simply having your logo visible isn’t enough.
That’s why your business needs consistency.
To ensure consistency, you need a unified design approach on ALL touchpoints of your business. This means every visual aspect of business: your website, your advertisements, videos, and so on.
This is essential because consistency in your brand strategy clarifies the customer’s expectations and shows how your brand differs from the competition. This is why we always consider brand design consistency strategy key, as it builds trust, memorability, recognition, and credibility — among other benefits.
But how do you enforce this?
Establishing clear dos and don’ts for your branding approach and marketing efforts ensures consistency. The best way to do this is by creating comprehensive brand guidelines. These guidelines serve as a reference for maintaining brand consistency across various platforms and marketing materials. The best way to do this is by establishing a design system.
Developing Branding Guidelines
Your branding guidelines are essentially the “laws” for your branding efforts. Among many other things, it specifies what fonts and colors may be used, along with the correct ways to use your logo. In general, it lists all of the rules for designing on-brand content.
And that’s another benefit of working with a professional design agency — they know it’s the law of the land to create client branding guidelines. In the future, when you create any new advertisement or marketing assets, you will have a team that consistently understands how to execute your brand vision.
Benefits of Branding Guidelines
Your branding guidelines can be shared with vendors or anyone helping you promote your brand. This will help any agency better understand who you are and ensure they don’t misrepresent your identity. There must be no brand confusion when someone is interacting with your brand.
Think about Coke, Nike, or McDonalds. They are always on-brand and have zero confusion when they see the logo or an advertisement. I like to use Coke as an example. You only need to see the iconic red with a silhouette of their bottle, and you immediately know what it is without seeing a name.
But your branding process approach shouldn’t be entirely visual — the next step is considering your business’ brand messaging.
Step 4: Creating Effective Brand Messaging and Brand Voice
While your branding guidelines mainly cover your branding strategy (font, colors, proper logo usage) — another part should include the rules for your brand messaging.
Brand messaging is how you convey your brand’s value proposition and language. A crucial aspect of this is your brand story, which allows you to communicate authentically and emotionally with your customers. It’s how you make your customers relate to your business and brand — and inspire them to take action!
As such, we recommend our clients go through the brand messaging process. After all, your visual identity is incredibly important, and so is how you (literally) communicate with your customers. We develop brand messaging like your logo — our initial branding research serves the same purpose in figuring out the blueprint for your brand’s voice.
Is your brand buttoned up, serious, or more playful? Maybe it’s a combination of voices. Don’t let others define your brand; get it right from the start. Developing a brand voice makes it easier to write copy in the future – the foundation has been laid.
To understand Brand Voice, consider how you communicate with your friends, loved ones, clients, colleagues, etc. Naturally, there’s a different way you talk to all of them. You wouldn’t speak to your clients like you would with casual acquaintances.
Your brand voice is carefully designed for your target audience and feels authentic to your company’s value and overall persona. That’s just good copywriting 101!
Step 5: Building a Website With Your Branding Strategy
By now, the essentials of your branding strategy are clearly defined.
Your logo? Check. Branding guidelines? Check. Brand messaging and voice? Check!
Now that all the rules have been set, all that is left is executing that vision. And the most important place to start is on the web. We cannot overstate the importance of having great web design nowadays. Seriously. It’s that important! How many assets advocate for you 24/7 to a worldwide audience?
It’s crazy that we have to remind people of this. However, we still hear things like “we are too busy” from those who don’t put much into the website. If you don’t have something that stands out on the web, there are so many missed opportunities – you never know when you’ll land the next whale. You’ll tell your potential audience to bounce and explore the endless options available to everyone.
With the correct combination of keywords and phrases, and a strong focus on brand marketing, there are many ways to increase the likelihood that visitors will stumble upon your website. Your first impression is the only one you get.
Unfortunately, this is also true for your competitors, which makes it all the more important for your website to stand head and shoulders above them. Having a site design that’s “good enough” doesn’t cut it anymore.
Part of your strategy during the branding process should be delivering the best possible web experience for all your virtual guests…
As a whole, the web is too deep of a dive to cover here. But two tried, and true ways to deliver outstanding results on the web are having a design system for your website and having a superb user experience — we call it UX in the business. Both are crucial for converting as many potential customers as possible!
Step 6: Leverage High-Quality Assets
Once your website is on brand and super-charged, it’s time to move on to leveraging the power of media. Having professionally produced media before making your website is gravy — because high-quality assets like photography and video only serve better to enhance your website and branding efforts. Not to mention, they aren’t just one-and-done… they can be used throughout various collateral!
For example, a professionally shot product photo can be leveraged on your website, printed advertisements, or even on your social media accounts. And the same is true for other professionally-produced assets, such as video or motion graphics.
However, it’s essential that these assets follow a set style that aligns with your branding strategy and brand values.
For example, if your business sells children’s toys, it won’t make sense for all of your assets to be moody grayscale photos and videos with dramatic lighting. Opting for bright themes and colors (especially within your brand’s palette!) will naturally evoke a more nurturing and playful feeling.
However, it’s also essential to know when to break the mold if you’re trying to achieve something specific, like selling cell phones for their video capabilities — Apple’s Creative director filmed children having a snowball fight as if it was a blood-pumping action movie for a humorous effect.
That’s why it will always benefit you to work with a creative team that knows how to navigate those waters.
Final Thoughts
While we broke down these six steps you can start taking to begin your branding process journey, we know it is still a lot to take in. There are numerous rules, conditions, and exceptions to consider in your approach, which can be overwhelming — especially if branding terminology is new to you.
Whether you are creating your logo for the first time or your business is going through a rebrand. Establishing a strong brand identity helps cultivate a base of loyal customers who are likely to return and support your business. Of course, Mighty Fine is always here to help if you need a creative agency to diagnose the right branding strategy that is custom-tailored and unique to you. Don’t be shy to reach out with questions about taking your brand to the next level — it’s what we love to do!
