Develop your brand identity

1. Conduct market research to determine your target audience, understand your competitors, and define your brand's unique value proposition.

Use your analytics platform of choice to review your existing audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors to help clarify who makes up your target audience, or consider a tool like HubSpot’s Make My Persona. Use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to research the competitors in your industry. Then, comparing the information you’ve gathered about your target audience and what your competitors bring to the market, determine what your brand can offer that no one else can. Highlight the unique values that set your brand apart from the rest.

2. Define your brand's mission by considering the values that are most important to your business.

What goals do you want your brand to accomplish that make a positive impact on your greater community with the products or services you offer? For example, part of your brand’s mission might be to reduce carbon emissions by implementing environmentally friendly practices into every aspect of your business’s operations.

3. Identify a color scheme and set of fonts that will remain consistent across your brand's messaging.

When choosing your brand colors and typeface, consider how each of those elements might evoke certain emotions within the viewer. For example, bold fonts and striking colors might elicit feelings of confidence, while a loose, scripted font and cool toned colors might inspire a more fluid or casual feeling. These design elements should remain consistent in various areas such as your website, social media content, ad campaign imagery, email signatures, and print material such as brochures or business cards. This will help tie each piece of media into a recognizable representation of your brand.

4. Design a logo for your brand that will represent your business and align with the other aspects of your identity.

Your company logo is one piece of your overall brand identity, so its design should match well with the color scheme and fonts that you chose earlier, as well as the more abstract elements that make up your brand identity like the values your business stands for.  If you do not already have one on your team, consider hiring a graphic designer to create a professional logo. Otherwise, you can use a tool like Canva, Hatchful, or Logo Makr to create one yourself, or software like Gravit Designer or Adobe Illustrator if you have more advanced design skills.

5. Define your brand voice to determine how the language you use to represent your business and engage with your audience should come across.

Determine what kind of language your brand should use to communicate across all of your marketing and distribution channels, including your website, email campaigns, social media, ads, and also direct engagement with your audience. The characteristics that make up your brand voice will depend on your industry, target audience, and your brand’s personality. Taking these factors into consideration, you can determine whether your brand voice should be serious, passionate, sarcastic, laid-back, humorous, casual, welcoming, or any other number of characteristics.

6. Develop detailed brand guidelines that outline the dos and don'ts of how to represent your brand.

Creating a comprehensive brand guide is a good practice to ensure that your whole team can access the information and understand the specific details about what makes up your brand identity.  It’s important to have a document that covers every aspect of your brand identity so that every team member can help maintain its consistency in every representation of your brand. Make this document available on the cloud through Google Docs or similar.

7. Incorporate your brand identity across every channel and monitor it to maintain it over time.

Keep your brand identity consistent and monitor its perception by regularly reviewing your web analytics, brand mentions, and comments on your social media channels, and feedback from your audience. Consider using a social listening tool like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to help track conversations around your brand on social media. You can also enlist the help of surveys, forums, and review sites to analyze what people are saying about your brand. Compare the public perception of your brand with your brand identity to make sure the two match up over time. If they don’t, identify the specific areas where your brand is getting off track so that you can adjust and fix the problem.