Getting started with business branding involves much more than just choosing your favourite colour schemes and fonts. Your business branding is a key element in how professional your business looks, sounds and feels to potential customers.
More often than not your branding provides the first impression of your business and we all know how important those first impressions can be!
Branding is a huge topic in itself, here I’ve put together a basic 5 step guide to getting started with business branding…
Step 1 – Clarify Your Business Purpose
The best place to start with planning of almost any kind is with your business foundations. If you’re not already clear on this, now is a good time to clarify…
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- The purpose of your business
- Your business mission statement
- The beliefs/values that are important to you and your business
- What results your product/service provides for your customers
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Step 2 – Identify Your Ideal Customer
To attract your ideal customer, you will need business branding that appeals directly to him/her. In order to do that you will need to first identify who he/she is.
If you have a product-based business, determine who buys the type of products you sell, why do they buy them and what problems does buying these products solve for them?
Alternatively, if your business is service-based, determine who gets the best results from your service, what makes them hire a professional in your field and again what problems does your service solve for them?
Step 3 – Consider the Type of business image you Want to portray
What do you want your business to be known for? Think in terms of the field/industry that you work in, your main product/service category and your niche.
When a person or potential customer initally comes across your business, what first impression do you want them to have? How do you want people to feel when they encounter your business on a regular basis? For example, inspired, positive, calm, relaxed, etc.
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer and consider how your business branding can portray this image for them. Think about the branding elements that are appropriate.
For example, if your audience is mostly stressed out parents and you want your branding to induce feelings of calm and control, bright vivd colours full of life and vibrancy, such as canary yellow or neon pink, might not be the most appropriate. Instead, you could opt for more neutral and calming tones like earthy green or sea blue.
Step 4 – Personify Your Brand
So now you know what kind of image you want your branding to project, contemplate the type of person who would have this effect.
In other words, if your business brand was a real-life person what would they be like? What would they look like? Would it be a man or woman? What would they sound like? Where would they live? What phrases would they use? How old would they be? What characteristics would they have? Etc.
If you can humanise your brand in this way, it will help your audience to understand and relate to your brand.
Create a Strong Brand Identity that your customers love
Step 5 – Create Your Business Styleguide
Bring all this information together to create your styleguide (sometimes called a brand board) for your business. This is usually a basic one-page document for reference purposes, that is made up of your branding elements. You’ll want to include fonts, colours, patterns/textures, image styles, themes, your logo, etc.
This is a really simple way to help you stay clear on the visual elements of your brand. Allowing you to remain consistent with your professional business branding.
The 5 steps outlined above will help you in getting started with your business branding and you’ll soon have a professional image that your customers love to come back to again and again.
Are you stuck in the new business planning stage? Use my success planner to find some clarity…
When you decide to start a business, you’ve got a lot of moving wheels turning at the same time and it can be challenging to keep it all organised. If you’re spinning your wheels and getting nowhere, take a look at my new Business Success Planner…
Where I’ll walk you through the steps necessary to starting your business. From choosing what kind of products/services to offer, to identifying your ideal customer, to putting packages together, to throwing a launch party (and so much more in between).
With these exercises and a little quiet time, you can have your plan of action in place by the end of the weekend!
