1. Develop a unique proposition
Make sure you have a unique name, it will help you to stand out more. Check companies house to see if your name is already in use and do your own local research too. Does anything show up on Google? The last thing you want are your customers confusing you with a competitor and going elsewhere!
2. Find your ideal clients
Who are your tribe? What do they do, where do they live? Really delve deep and find out what makes them tick. You can do your own research, surveys, look at social media insights data, google analytics... there are lots of tools out there to help with this. Finding out what appeals to your customers will help you to target your brand to them. The aim is to figure out who your ideal client is, so that all your marketing messages can talk directly to that ONE person. You want everything you say to really resonate with that one person so that you become their obvious choice.
3. Figure out what benefits will you bring to your idea clients
What problems will you solve for your ideal clients that they just can’t live without? How are you going to make their life easier for them? Remember: People don’t care that the local Accountancy firm can use the latest software or financial knowledge to do their books for them. What they care about is how they will feel, when all that hassle is taken off their hands and the firm has saved them a big lump sum in tax money.
4. Think about your brand personality
Are you a quirky, young startup, or a traditional company? Are you approachable, or very corporate? Maybe you want to portray a fun, warm side? Working out your brand personality is important because you will need to translate this across everything you do; not only in the look and feel of your brand, but in the tone of voice that comes across in your marketing literature or social media.
5. Decide how you want your target customers to feel about your brand
Emotion plays a massive part in buying behaviour and influences how we feel about certain brands. Colour psychology can influence how people feel about a certain brand or product. For example, blues will promote the feelings of security and authority, while red will spur people to take action. It is associated with power and urgency. Thinking about colour in this way will help to match the brand to the personality.
6. Get the right look
Font choice is everything and will massively influence how your brand is perceived. Traditional serif fonts could be the way to go for an upmarket, professional / traditional look, whereas a san serif choice might be favoured for something a little more modern or cutting edge. Perhaps a softer, more rounded font choice might be the best option if you wanted to come across as a an approachable, friendly business. It’s worth spending some time over font choice to really make sure your brand achieves the overall feel you are going for and hits the right spot with your ideal customers.
7. High quality assets, high quality service.
Make sure you create, or hire someone who can create high quality files for you of your finished brand assets. There’s no point putting all this time and effort into the research side of things, only to end up with a poor quality, pixelated end product which looks cheap. It will reflect badly on your business and the service you provide. As a minimum, you need to ensure you have a high quality vector version of your logo which can scale up to any size.
Need some help creating your brand? Drop me a message to find out how I can help.
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