Five Things Entrepreneurs Wish They’d Known About Branding
You’re starting a new business and you couldn’t be more excited. You know what you’re doing and you know why you’re doing it. The next step is to make sure everyone else gets the memo: people need to understand who you are and what your business stands for. In other words, get your branding right, right from the word go. Far from being a tick-box exercise, it’s one of the most important tools you have at your fingertips. We talked to a handful of established small business owners to find out what they wish they’d known about branding when they started.
Karina Tes via Unsplash
“I took a step back and asked myself: who am I? What do I stand for? How do I want people to describe my work?”
Get clear on what you want to convey
In order to build a strong brand, you need to know what you want to convey. Aesthetics aren't everything: you need strategy and direction behind your branding. “I needed to first understand who I was (my brand) before deciding how people were going to recognise me (my brand identity),” says Alice Benham, a business and marketing strategist. It’s worth taking some time to get to the core of how you want your brand to be perceived, before going all-in on branding you're not sure about.
Get clarity by asking yourself some key questions, as Alice did. “I took a step back and asked myself: who am I? What do I stand for? How do I want people to describe my work?” she says. “I then clarified how I could create a visual identity to represent that. By going brand first, I created a visual identity with strategy and intention at its core.”
You might feel like you're at too early a stage for clarifying brand values and attributes, but trust us when we say there’s no time like the present.
Showcase personal style
It takes confidence to bring a dash of your personal style to your branding. If you're just starting out, you might feel tempted to go for an ultra-corporate vibe — even if that’s not really ‘you’. We get it; sometimes it's easier to fit in than to stand out. When it comes to branding, however, showcasing your personal style is a surefire way to get noticed.
“I wish I’d known how important it was to showcase my personality and my personal style through my branding,” says Daisy Morris, founder of The Selfhood. “At first, I wanted to appear professional and 'serious' about my work, so I diluted the essence of my brand to appear more established.” Instead of following the crowd, find subtle ways to inject your personality into your branding.
The right branding will attract the right clients
Your branding should reflect the type of clients you're trying to attract. Let's take Glossier as an example. Their target customers are primarily working women and aged between 18 and 35, and their branding is suitably slick yet fun. If you're going for a young freelance audience, your branding will need to reflect this -- and likewise, if you're aiming for a corporate crowd, for example, you’ll want to tone down the slang.
Ensuring your branding is tailored to your audience will help you score more of the right customers. This is something Daisy Morris wishes she'd known earlier: "as soon as I started working with an amazing designer to push out content that felt more aligned to me and my style, I started to magnetise the clients I dreamed of working with, and my engagement improved massively!"
Don’t just follow the trends
If you don't know where to start with your branding, it can be tempting to follow the trends. A few years back, we had the all-pink-everything craze, followed by the all-beige-everything craze. Now, thankfully, small business owners are realising the power of strong and unique branding, and are moving away from the (dare we say it?) tired branding clichés.
Alice Benham is now known for her brand's neutral colour palette. She's famously a fan of everything black or beige, and her audience has come to expect this from her content design to her outfits. It wasn’t always that way: “When I first stepped into business I saw branding as a tick box exercise,” she explains. “I picked out a trend-led colour palette featuring more baby pink than I'd like to admit, got my friend to hand letter a logo, and started using it online.” There’s nothing wrong with trends, but you’ll be better off in the long run if you go your own way.
“In the age of limited attention and instant gratification, having a strong brand identity that grabs attention within the first second is one of the top things to invest in when building a business”
Good branding helps you stand out
Finally, one of the most important things to remember: good branding helps you stand out from the crowd. You don't have much time to let people know how great your business is, and solid branding will give you the best chance of convincing them. Jasmine Douglas, founder of Babes on Waves, knows this all too well. Her business club features bright and bold branding, a refreshing departure from some of her more muted competitors. “In the age of limited attention and instant gratification, having a strong brand identity that grabs attention within the first second is one of the top things to invest in when building a business,” she says.
We couldn’t agree more. Get in touch to learn how working with a Brand Director can bring clarity to brand building.