There’s more to creating a strong brand identity than just coming up with a memorable logo and a catchy tagline. Here are three tips to can help you create a brand identity that will make your business memorable to your customers and target market.
1. Have a deep understanding of your brand
Doing a SWOT analysis helps you understand your brand better. To create a SWOT analysis, you have to create a quadrant and assign a list for each division. These lists are:
Strengths - What advantages do you have over your competitors and what do you better than anyone else?
Weaknesses - What are aspects in your businesses that needs improvement?
Opportunities - What opportunities does your business have?
Threats - What are your competitors doing that you should watch out for and what obstacles does your business face?
Several tools for SWOT analysis are available online but one I’d recommend is Creately . You can pick a template for a quadrant and assign a color code for each. If it’s your first time to do a SWOT analysis, the software can even take your through a tutorial and some tips. Creately is very convenient to use, even for first time users.
It also helps to get other’s perspective on how they see your brand. It is not enough that you make a wild or ‘educated’ guess about this. You have to really know what they think. Talk to your team, stakeholders and customers. Do they see your brand in the same way you would like them to see it? If not, then knowing people’s common perception of your brand will help you identify what needs to be adjusted so the right brand identity will come across to your audience.
2. Define your brand
Now that you’ve completed a SWOT analysis and talked to the right people about your brand, the next step is to define your brand. Nobody else should define your brand for you - not even your audience.
It is good to be able to define your brand in a single sentence. To get that sentence right can be time-consuming but it’s unwise to jump to a marketing strategy without it. Take the time to answer some questions that will help you define your brand like:
,- What is your company’s mission? Mission statements come in different forms and styles but common characteristics among well-written ones are brevity and memorability.
- What are your product’s core services and features? Define the basics and foundations of your business so that you can keep these in mind as your company grows.
- What is your value proposition? A great value proposition defines areas of your business that substantially outperform your competitors.
3. Communicate your brand with visuals that best represent it
It’s good to start with creating logo design. A common advice when it comes to logos is the simpler, the better. If your five year-old nephew can draw it, then that’s how you know it’s simple enough. You must also pick the colors appropriate for your brand and product. Most important of all, it should be a memorable visual representation of your brand.
From a logo design, you can move on to other marketing collateral like calling cards and most importantly, your website. You have to make sure though that your brand look is consistent across all platforms and mediums.
Coming up various things like logos, marketing materials and websites require sufficient knowledge and skills in different disciplines like design and coding. You don’t necessarily have to hire a full-time staff to fill in these roles, especially if you will only need them on a per-project basis. An option for you is to hire freelancers on crowdsourcing sites like Freelancer.com where you can quickly and conveniently find a freelancer with the right set of skills to get the job done to your exact liking.
Enjoy our weekly installment from Sebastián Siseles, the international director of Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and projects posted. View previous posts here .