Researchers have found that it takes 5 to 7 impressions for brand awareness to truly occur. For this reason, businesses spend thousands of dollars if not millions invested in creating a noteworthy and memorable brand identity.
If you are in the early stages of crafting your brand identity or looking to create a new brand there are some important tips and factors to keep in mind. Read on for an important guide to crafting out a long-lasting brand identity.
Creating a Target Demographic Avatar
There’s an old marketing outage that says if you’re speaking to everyone you’re speaking to no one. This is especially true when it comes to creating your business’s brand identity.
Before you begin to craft out your brand identity it’s important to know exactly who you’re speaking to. This will then become the center of all your branding and content efforts.
One clever way to do this is by creating a target demographic avatar. This exercise stretches beyond creating a normal demographic audience. It creates one unique character that you can refer to throughout your marketing strategy.
For example, your marketing avatar should have a name, an occupation, hobbies, and even a family. The more detailed you can get on your avatar the easier it will be in creating valuable content to speak to your avatar.
Once you’ve completed your avatar, use it to check any of the branding or marketing information before it hits the public. If it doesn’t seem like something that your avatar would relate to, it may not be the kind of content you want to run.
Know Your Message
Politicians have platforms, businesses have messages. Now that you know who you’re speaking to, it’s important to know what kind of message you want to send.
For example, while Dove skincare may be considered a beauty product, its message to its female audience is to embrace their natural beauty.
Know what message you want to send out and the best way to communicate it. Your message may revolve around benefiting the environment, enhancing your health, or even taking time for yourself throughout the day.
Again, this should be a message that’s important to your target avatar. Stop and consider what your tact target avatar stays up late at night thinking about. This is a great place to derive your message.
Creating a Logo
The logo is often the first thing a person will notice about a business or brand. While many believe the logo should be a relatively easy thing to create, there are a number of factors that go into a beautiful and recognizable logo.
Color psychology is a major source of a local foundation. This is due to the fact that each color will help evoke a specific emotion. For example, red is a color that is often associated with the feelings of passion and in some cases even anger. Blue is a feeling of respect and loyalty.
Since you already know what your message is, it should be easy to decide what kind of emotion you want to invoke with your logo. Use that foundation to decide on your local colors and if necessary combine different local colors.
Finally, when it comes to creating your logo try to avoid cliché symbols. Designs such as light bulbs, globes, and gears have been played out for quite some time.
Remember, the point of your logo is to stand out. Replicating another logo will defeat the purpose.
The good news is once you’ve identified your logo you can add it on to anything from pens to promotional gloves.
Your logo will be one of the most memorable elements of your brand so be sure that your 100% happy about it before settling on the design.
Creating a Signature Look
Branding takes place across multiple platforms. Everything from social media to your website will be some reflection of your brand and the message you’re attempting to get across.
Because it is important to have a signature look that makes even your photos instantly recognizable on any feed.
This can be done by always using a certain filter on your photos or by making sure your photos always include your brand’s primary colors.
Some brands can even be recognized by a specific font style that’s used. You can even hire a marketing company to design a specific font that only belongs to your business.
A Recognizable Voice
Here’s a fun exercise to try out. Consider a famous, well-known celebrity, dead or alive that could be the human embodiment of your brand.
Typically, the celebrity also tends to fall within your target demographic. However, once you have identified this individual it’s important to keep that voice in mind when creating all of your content.
This will help you resist the urge to jump onto branding trends that are not aligned with your establishment.
So if the person that identifies most with your brand is Morgan Freeman and your writing content that sounds like it would come from Jack Black, chances are you’re going in the wrong direction.
The Very Best in Branding Experience
Brand identity is one of the most important elements of the business. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most complicated elements to nail down.
The good news is, once you have identified a key brand identity, you can begin to incorporate a number of branding ideas that can help your brand stand out among the competition. Check out our blogs for more ideas on how to highlight your brand identity.