How Do You Start Branding
Starting out something feels easy or simple to plan but… as soon as we initiate or start working, your brain runs dry. Sounds familiar…? Alright, let’s get into it.
Business Owners Perspective
I’m going to start the explanation in your perspective or in other words, in the business owner’s view. I have experienced that the business owners are more excited than being practical when they are to get their brand into the market. Why I say that is, most commonly they tend not to trust the designer, no matter how good the designer is and forcing them to be biased for their likes and dislikes which makes this process hard for the designer as well as to themselves. Therefore, before starting out anything, I suggest you to clear your mind and try to neutralize yourself to allow others to put in their ideas into your success. Example: We do trust doctors to treat us right…? We don’t try to treat ourselves or tell the doctors that I don’t want to trust you just do as I say… LOL (joke with a meaning I suppose).
That’s being said, we’ll move on to the next step.
Business Plan
We are really good at planning, don’t we? Before starting a business, we tend to cover all the aspects and put the ideas together precisely to avoid any mistakes. It’s really good to be clear on what you’re going to do to make your venture successful. When creating a business plan for your business, the following guidelines would help you to prepare a clean and brief business plan.
- Type of the business (Ex: Financial, Construction, Healthcare etc.)
- Keywords that could define your business (Ex: If you’re starting out a financial business, you can define your business with keywords such as strategy, planning, investment, currency etc.)
- Business Name (It’s always good make your name short and sweet if you’re not attached to any name that is more important)
Business Name
It’s advised to make your business name as unique as possible since identifying your business starts at this very point. Around the world there are many different companies under many different names though they stand out for their own in some way. In the modern age, we do know that, it’s extremely important to make your business visible on the internet and easy to be found on your niche market. Therefore, making your company name different but can be related to your industry is the way to go. It’s advised to define keywords which describe your business environment before thinking of a random name for your business. In this way, you can come up with many names and narrow them down till you get the perfect puzzle piece.
Naming your company takes time but it’s worthy to have a good name to start with rather than changing the name after the branding process has been started. Why I said that is, when designing your logo, you could be going on with a letter mark logo such as IBM, NASA, Wanner Brothers, Louis Vuitton etc. or a wordmark logo such as Google, FedEx, Coca Cola, Mobil etc.
Changing your name at the middle of your logo design process or even after completing the whole branding process will waste your money and time for nothing, since creating a brand with an experienced designer is not cheap. With that in mind, we’ll be moving forward to the logo and its design process.
KEYWORDS: In this case, relatable words that would define your business name
Logo
Once the company name has been finalized, we are moving on to the logo design. As we have been working on this industry for a very long time, it’s very important to do a thorough analysis on your niche market where you’ll be in competition with few or more competitors. Therefore, it’s quite important to decide the type of the logo design that benefits more. As a professional creative director and the co-founder of Design Nation Inc. I would be suggesting you to allow the designer to do the survey and decide what type of a logo design could really be the game changer.
Having said that, your input is also extremely important to the logo design process since it would give the designer some more insights. Also make sure that you give some breathing space to the designer to be creative, as there is a very fine line between contributing and disturbing the design process which affects your final product.
Branding Materials
A business is always supported by many other materials based on the logo design such as stationary, website, social media profiles, flyers, banner etc. All these individual sectors can be explained deeply under a separate topic. Apart from that, professional designers are capable of illustrating the logo on relative and realistic branding materials to get you the exact idea on how the designed logo would work on real life applications. They also define how to use the logo which avoids any complications. Therefore, it’s safe to follow the guidelines provided by your designer in any need. I would personally advise to follow a single designer or an agency for your branding process, because keeping the continuity of the brand which initiates with logo design is crucial.
Expose You to the World
Alright, we’ve come so far but yet it’s not finished. Creating all the necessary things precisely wouldn’t help you to get noted if you keep silent. Its utmost important to deliver a smart marketing campaign with full use of the branding materials we’ve been left with. Planning a smart marketing campaign is a whole new subject that can be run deep into, which I’m planning to discuss in a separate article.
Last but not least, I would like to leave you with few general keywords for your smart marketing:
Keywords: Social-media, smart-marketing, back-tracking, smart-advertising, influential-marketing, brand shout-outs, trend-listing
So, let’s tell the world about your business and reach your destiny.
