Make Your Business Memorable: How to Create a Brand Identity

For any business, at any stage of its life, growing a strong brand identity is one of the most important features for marketing success. To market a memorable brand, you need to be able to define your brand and everything about you which makes you unique; this means, as a starting point, knowing what you are as a business, your tone of voice and what best defines your brand is going to be an important beginning step to making your business memorable and in-demand.

When considering how to create a brand identity, here is a peek inside our strategic process at Anthem Branding that can help you as a guide.

Market Research

Our first step starts with getting the right data on the market you’re in and the details of that space. We take time to learn where your brand can stand out, what may be missing in the market, and map out competitors. A major finding from this part is learning more about your target market(s) and customers. The results are our guide; the rest will follow so you can remain as competitive and relevant as possible.

The Visual Elements

In the same way that a person’s own personal style reveals a lot about their personality and values, a business’s visual design choices and visual identity are key to revealing a certain type of identity. Creating your identity through visuals is simple. It is about making vital design choices that will make a positive impact on your consumer market.

You should explore the following ideas when it comes to the visual for a helpful brand style guide.

Logo Mark

Logo marks, sometimes called pictorial marks, are essential parts of branding for a business. When done right, the logo mark effectively communicates and identifies your company and service, and what it stands for, through the logo alone, without the need for your company name or tagline. As well as being recognizable, a brand logo mark should also be memorable.

Examples of a logo mark include the bitten apple for Apple, the swoosh for Nike, the blue and white lowercase f for Facebook, or the mermaid for Starbucks.

When it comes to a logo mark, it isn’t just about the aesthetic appeal, however. A logo mark should also work to fully incorporate your company values, match with your brand personality, and also stand out from others within the market.

Thinking of ways to make your brand logo mark unique is key to standing out and sticking in the mind of your consumers. Even if your logo mark is similar to many, think of ways to give it a unique spin, such as having the only black and white logo for your industry.

If you’re uncertain of where to start in regard to creating a brand identity with visuals and logo marks, then branding agency services may help.

Word Mark

Not to be confused with a logo mark or icon, a brand wordmark, pulls in the company name where the name itself is strategically designed, like the iconic script for The New York Times, the block type of FedEx, or the primary colors of the Google wordmark.

Color Palette

Color is a big part of any brand. Think of large and successful companies like Coca-Cola; when you think of them, you may instantly think of their iconic bright red color scheme. This may then lead you to associate anything red with Coca-Cola, which shows the strength of their branding technique. You want your chosen color scheme to be associated with your business.

That being said, creating a brand identity with a color scheme isn’t about using the boldest and brightest. While having an eye-catching nature is a good thing, it’s also more about sticking to your business tone. If more subdued colors are essential to your brand identity, then make sure your color scheme is in keeping with that. Your website could be black and white only, or your packaging could only ever be these two colors.

As long as it’s consistent with your chosen brand identity, it will work.

Website Design

A lot can be judged about a business by the way its website is designed. A lot of this is about useability, speed, and interesting, useful, and relevant content, but on the surface, your visual design needs to be the best it can be. It also needs to best reflect your company and completely match your established brand identity system

Key elements of an effective website design when considering your brand identity include:

1. Your logo and company name clearly displayed at the top of every page.

2. Your chosen color scheme in keeping with your colors as a business (it will be ineffective to use colors completely unrelated to the scheme of your brand).

3. The right font choice, perhaps one which matches the font used for your logo or tagline if applicable.

Business Cards

Even in a world that has primarily switched to online working, business cards are still essential tools for any growing company. How you choose to design your business cards will affect how successful you find creating a brand identity. The way a business card looks and feels can make all the difference to a person deciding to take one, deciding to keep it, and deciding to use it.

Creating a Strong Brand Personality

This delves deeper than your initial visual elements and explores your brand personality as a whole. What is at the core of what you do? What is the message you are trying to put across, and how are you trying to say it? All of this is key to creating a brand identity: knowing who you are as a business and why you do what you do.

Brand Voice

Creating a brand identity using your voice means choosing a tone of voice for your business and always sticking to it. Your brand voice can be an essential part of your brand personality.

For example, if you have an informal or quirky product, your brand voice should match that. You can then use an informal and quirky brand voice to market your business and incorporate this tone of voice into everything you do, such as social media posts and comments.

Build a Brand Identity Which Encompasses Many Different Things

While you want your brand to be memorable when creating a brand identity, this doesn’t have to mean only pushing one logo, one image, or one tagline. The more associations you can inspire in the mind of your consumers, the more effective your brand identity will be.

Considering the brand Coca-Cola again, their brand associations include red, the Coca-Cola truck, ribbon, campaigns such as ‘share a coke’ and the iconic Coca-Cola Santa during the holiday season. All of these are associations for the same brand but still as effective as each other.

Brand Image

Your brand image is how you are perceived by your consumers in the market. You need to create a brand that will have a positive impact on the market, as well as working to develop your brand to be one that consumers can trust — the more positive your brand image in the consumer market, the more successful your brand identity.

Using Your Content Marketing

Social Media

What you choose to post on social media is one of the key steps to creating a brand identity. Through social media, all your posts, shares, actions, and comments should best reflect your tone of voice and values.

Blogging

Are you wondering how to create a brand identity with blogging? The content you choose to display on your website’s blog should always help to encourage the right message and values of your brand.

Think about topics that are relevant to who you are and what you do. Like with your social media postings, be sure to consistently carry in the guidelines around your brand's voice and tone. Use your blog to further add value to your customers with helpful and useful information related to your products or services. This will help tremendously with brand awareness, engagement, and trust.

Defining Your Product or Service

Using your product or service to define your brand is perhaps one of the most important areas to consider. Your product or service is one of the key aspects of your brand and what is going to prove you to be a high-quality company that can be depended upon. Defining your product or service and how it can best appeal to the consumer will be imperative.

A branding agency can also help you to define your product through things such as corporate merchandise and design.

How to Create a Brand Identity: The Conclusion

Successful brand personalities consider all of the areas explored in this guide: the visual, the values, and the product. You need to explore and plan every aspect of your brand within a dedicated strategy to fully understand who you are and how what you do makes you unique.

Contact the team today if you need branding services to support your brand identity.