What impression does your brand make on your customers?
Brand identity is everything – it is the image you present to people, but it’s also vital in shaping how your customers perceive and remember your business. It’s important to revisit what your business identity might look like as you establish your marketing.
It is essential that your business’ marketing consistently shows what your brand is all about. While web pages are skimmed in mere seconds – your business cards, stationery, booklets, brochures, and more will spend years on desks and shelves in homes and offices. Getting the colours, fonts and other design elements of your branding to look consistent across both print and digital will convey the professional image your company needs to be successful.
Here, we’ll look at eight of the best practices for establishing brand consistency across the board:
1. Choose Your Colours Carefully
There is loads of published research out there that explains the psychology of colour on consumers. While discussing the primary colour for your logo, do choose carefully as you’ll want the other colours to complement each other well.
A professional graphic designer can be invaluable during this process. They understand the impact your colour choices will have on your ideal customers and can convey your brand’s image in keeping with your vision. At Simple Media, we have an expert team who can walk you through this process.
2. Be Unique
It’s best to avoid templates and to try and design your company’s materials from your own ideas. This way, you’re standing out from the crowd and letting your innovative spirit shine.
Using the services of a graphic designer can ensure that each element of your branding (your logo, your website buttons, business cards and T-shirts) is unique, consistent, and reflects your brand image appropriately.
3. When You Logo, Go High
Have you already dreamed up the perfect logo for your brand? Great! You’ll need several versions of it to serve your brand consistency needs. Make a dark one for light backgrounds, a light one for dark backgrounds, a full-colour one, one that’s vertically-oriented, and one that’s horizontally-oriented. Consider having some simple, less complicated versions for other low-key uses.
Consulting a graphic designer can save you many hours in this process, ensuring that your logo design is symmetrical and can be scaled up or down in size depending on where it’ll be used. A graphic designer will also be able to provide multiple file types of each logo version in the overall branding package.
4. Consider Your Overall Tone of Voice
Whether you’re writing your own material — blogs, articles, letters, emails, etc. — or hiring writers, be mindful of the language you wish to convey and keep it consistent. Do you want your writing style to sound conversational? Academic? Formal? Funny? Your company’s tone of voice is also part of what makes a cohesive brand identity. Keep this in mind each time you set out to write & keep it within the criteria when booking a copywriter.
5. Photography, Images & Style
It won’t serve you well to have random, conflicting images across your marketing materials. If you have black-and-white photography in one place, don’t use cartoon clip art in another place. Photography, artistic style and images must be consistent with your chosen fonts and colours.
6. Comic Sans, Papyrus, and Other Deadly Sins
The fonts in your design materials — both in digital and print — can either make your business look amateur or convey a sense of professionalism. Choose fonts that are crisp, easy to read and can be used in a variety of applications. Select perhaps just two or three fonts that can be used throughout your branding, and consider using the entire font family to maintain cohesiveness.
7. Take Special Care With Print Collateral
Print material lives forever – so reflect on how your brand image is conveyed across brochures, flyers and business cards. Do they have eye-catching headlines, a similar vibe to your website, clear fonts? Are your business cards clean, easy-to-read, and simple?
When prepping marketing materials for printing, remember that all graphics and imagery must be converted from RGB colour mode (digital) to CMYK colour mode (print). Use vector-based images whenever possible for crisp results.
8. Achieved Consistency? Now Apply It to Your Social Media
Don’t neglect social media when considering your brand identity. Your profiles and posts should echo the same branding you’ve established in your other marketing. Consistency will make you more memorable and establish authenticity as an overall image for your company.
What message do you want you brand to convey?
A strategy is necessary to achieve effective small business branding and consistency throughout your marketing. This strategy is what will ensure your brand is conveying the right image to your customers.
Whether you’re a startup or an established player who needs a re-brand, our team is here to help you through the entire process. From website design and development to logo design, to content creation and social media strategy – we’ve got you covered. Should you decide to use brand marketing experts to make this process easy, reach out and contact us at Simple Media today.
