The Importance Of Branding
Branding has never been more crucial. It’s the heart and soul of your business, the essence that distinguishes you from the rest. On ‘Build Your Digital Community’ Episode 9 with Ali Hicks-Wright, a brand strategist and the owner of Amari Creative, we learn about the importance of branding and how to build a consistent brand online. Ali shares what is important about branding and how to leverage it within your business – especially if you are just getting started!
What Is A Brand?
The term ‘brand’ varies among different business owners, coaches, and online influencers. To Ali, branding is your vision, your voice, and your visuals.
This includes having a brand suite, which contains your logo and variations of that logo, your fonts, and your colours. A brand script will contain the foundation of your brand’s written messaging. It is essentially a guide for the tone, voice, brand bio, brand story, personality, keywords & phrases, slogans, and taglines associated with your brand. Additional visual items include your website and your social media.
These are the foundational pieces of your brand’s messaging and knowing how your brand speaks to its audience. So many people think branding is just a logo, when in reality it is a larger ecosystem of elements that work together.
Why Branding Is So Important
We interact with brands multiple times throughout the day and there are certain ones we are drawn to more than others. Colour alone can increase brand recognition by up to 80%. This connection you are creating is so dependent on the visuals.
As a business owner, whether you have a personal brand or a business name, your band is what allows your ideal customer to connect with you and ultimately choose whether or not they want to work with you. You can have nearly identical business models, however, it is your brand that attracts the right customers for you versus your competitors.
Branding is all about the first impression and you as the business owner only have one opportunity to do that right.
The Correlation Between Branding and A Functional Website
Branding is your foundation, while your website is where you showcase all of the things that you do. First, you need to get clear on the vision – what’s the goal / strategy? What are your values? What is your mission? Who is your ideal customer? Then, you determine how to speak to that audience through your brand voice. Finally, you bring it all to life via the brand visuals.
Ali stressed that your voice is the most vital element here. Everything can look visually flawless, however if your voice doesn’t speak to your ideal customer, it won’t resonate with or convert them.
When you build a website, you want to take the brand and elaborate on it while using your vision, voice, and visuals. This is what allows your business to come to life. You need to be strategic about what content is being placed on the website because that content is what will ultimately drive the design.
A Note For New Business Owners
New business owners shouldn’t feel that they need to have their brand 100% figured out from the very beginning. A brand is never stagnant, it is always evolving and changing over time.
Use your time to get clear on your vision and your customer. The reality is, as a new business, you are going to work with people who likely aren’t your ideal customer. Over time, you will better understand your zone of genius and the types of clients who are best for you.
Getting Started and Determining What Your Brand Could Look Like
Get clear on your vision and who your ideal customer is. A great exercise is creating customer personas who you name and flesh out into a full character. Build your brand around these people.
Then, start thinking about colours. Create a consistent palette of four to five specific colours that you use across various outputs. This establishes consistency and, therefore, trust.
Resources For Branding
Amari Creative has their own workbook that walks you through their entire branding process in A DIY manner. You can use this to map out the vision, voice, and visuals for your brand.
Canva is a great resource for colour palette and font inspiration.
Pinterest can also be a wonderful place to gather inspiration for your brand visuals.
Paletton is a free resource for building out colour palettes.
Be creative with what’s possible and take that first step!