Every brand has a beginning, and more often than not, that comes with little experience and can feel like a minefield. This, paired with a low budget or lack of funding can feel like an impossible task, but it can be done. Even if you have an amazing product or service, poor branding can hinder your growth and progress. Creating a brand on a budget can be difficult, especially if you can’t afford to hire a professional to help develop your brand.
Branding is essential for any business standing out in your industry as it helps to differentiate your organisation from the competition out there. If you are not differentiating, you are going to struggle with meeting your audience. In this article, we will go through some tips for defining your brand without a large budget.
Define Your Brand Identity
Brand identity is all about how you present yourself to your audience. If your brand was a human, it would be identified by its personality and appearance, so for a brand, it needs to include signature visuals that will be consistent throughout your branding whilst using language to influence your marketing.
Before defining your identity, it is crucial to do thorough research on your audience. You also need to be able to determine what your customers associate with your brand and what they do/don’t like about your brand. You could do this by contacting them and asking your loyal customers or alternatively, using a survey tool.
For beginners, it can sometimes feel overwhelming, so break it down and work from there. Here are some things you should be considering.
- What value are you creating for your customers?
- What are your customer’s needs and wants?
- What do you stand for as a brand?
- Why should people use you over your competitors?
- How do you differentiate from your competitors?
These questions are fundamental to your success, so take your time and try and be as honest as possible with yourself. If you are struggling to define your brand, speaking to a design agency Leeds based will ensure that you get this step done correctly.
Sort Your Brand Visuals Out
Your logo identity’s visible elements consist of your brand, typography, and colourings. It is able to additionally consist of any imagery so as to constitute your corporation, such as organisation snapshots or stock pix.
determine what fonts, shades, and brands you need to define your brand with and hold all of them collectively in a document-sharing platform like Google Drive. Here are some tips for deciding on those visual factors:
Fonts: Choose fonts that resonate with your brand for your website and design. Serif fonts look professional and timeless, whilst sans serif look more casual. If you are aiming to be inclusive, opt for sans serif as this style of font is easily readable by neurodivergent people such as dyslexia.
Colours: Colours are extremely important as they portray feelings which will also be affected when people look at your branding. For example, red express passion or anger, whilst green represents calming nature, so it is essential to pick the correct colours. There are many guides out there to pick the best colours for your brand.
Logo: For your logo design, you should be incorporating both your fonts and colour decisions to create a uniform brand logo. Doing this on your own can be difficult, so having a graphic designer to help you will ensure that your logo is perfect.
Get To Know your Competitors
To improve your brand strategy, understanding what your competitors are doing is going to give you that competitive advantage. Brand monitoring is relevant in every step of the branding process but especially important when creating a brand strategy as it helps you to make more informed decisions. Check out what your main competitors are doing well, and what they could be doing better. Then when you have a good idea of what your top competitors are doing, you have a list of things that you need to be doing.
There are many tools out there to help, but when you are on a budget, you can do a lot of the work yourself. To do this well, it is important to understand that although some brands sell the same product, they may be positioned differently. This is why you need to be careful about who you decide are your main competitors. See what they are doing correctly and what they are not doing well, find out how customers feel about the brand, look at pricing, resources and whether they offer anything for free or a reward for commission etc. Once you have gained knowledge, it then becomes easier to find out what you need to be doing.
Update and Optimise Your Website
If there is one thing that you need to get right, it’s your website. If this is not done well, you could hinder results and result in your customers dropping off due to the bad design or bad user experience. A bad website includes poor user experience and useability, badly written content, out-of-date information, an ugly design and much more, so it is essential to have a well-thought-out website. You need to understand that your website is like your shop front, so you need to show your worth by communicating with your customers in a way that resonates with them.
Keep up with your Brands Industry
Keeping up with your industry trends is an essential part of running your business successfully. This doesn’t mean checking a couple of articles each month to see if your brand is relevant, but looking for trends to follow, what will your industry be doing in the next couple of years, and what discrepancies are going on in your industry.
The world is continually evolving meaning that your business will need to be evolving with it. If you are not following trends, you could face being left behind in the dark which is not where any business wants to be. Follow trends, commit to them and differentiate from your competitors in how you do it.
