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When you’re building a brand, it’s important to cut through the online noise and create an identity that resonates with your target audience. By following a few key steps, you can establish a brand that will attract and grow your customer base, no matter where they find you online.
To build a brand identity, spend some time thinking about:
Understanding your audience
Your mission and vision
Messaging and voice
Visual identifiers
Where your brand will show up online
All of these factors feed into your brand strategy and will help you make decisions about how you talk to potential customers, your logo and website design, and more.
What is branding?
Branding is a holistic way to develop, maintain, and evolve a brand’s or individual’s reputation. It starts with a detailed understanding of the audience or customer base of a person or brand and shows up in the way that brand presents itself.
It’s common to think of branding as being synonymous with logo design, but a logo is just one part of creating a successful brand.
1. Know your audience
The first step in building a brand is getting to know your audience. Spend time researching these key questions to understand who your brand is speaking to.
Who is most likely to love what you have to offer?
What drives their behaviors?
What will encourage them to click through to your website?
What will convince them to convert or make a purchase?
What will turn them into loyal customers or promoters of your business?
What will convince them to come back to you if they drift away from your brand in the future?
If you already have a website and social media presence, you can start to answer these questions by looking into your website analytics. Are there specific search terms that drive people to your website? Do certain pages or links get more traffic or clickthrough?
See what people are saying about your brand on social media too. Start by searching your brand name and tags for specific feedback. Then check out how your competitors interact with their customers to see if there’s anything you could mirror in your small business.
If you have more than one target customer base, you can segment your audiences. Segmenting involves creating smaller audience groups by more detailed characteristics, such as demographics, tastes, and buying behaviors. For example, a frugal college student might interact with your brand in a different way than a 40-year-old professional with disposable income.
Once you have a comprehensive idea of the kinds of people who make up your audience segments, you can build a brand that speaks to their needs and interests.
Learn how to identify and understand your target audience
2. Define your mission and vision
What inspires you to do what you do as a business? What is your ultimate end goal? The answers to these questions will help you name your brand mission and vision, respectively.
A vision statement is a big-picture explanation of the impact your brand or business will have on the world. For example, “We want to create a future where it’s easy to live a sustainable lifestyle.” A mission statement speaks to how your brand will fulfill that vision. For example, “Building sustainable households by making eco-friendly products affordable and accessible to families across the U.S.”
A clear mission and vision give your brand a sense of purpose and show your target customer base:
What you intend to do for them: What desire or need you’ll fulfill or what problem you’ll solve
How you intend to deliver on that promise: The features of your products or service delivery that make them valuable
Why their world will be better as a result of engaging with you: The impact of your product or service
You can also create company values, which help your audience—and employees—understand why your mission and vision are important to you. Brand values will bring a sense of authenticity to your mission and vision, and to your overall business.
3. Develop your brand message and voice
The way you talk to your customers and followers is a key part of your brand and its marketing strategy. Your brand message and brand voice are two separate parts of building brand awareness.
Your brand message is a uniform system of expressing your company’s value proposition. It’s also known as your brand narrative. A strong brand message tells the story of your company wherever it shows up, presenting your target audience with consistent information that will build trust in and understanding of your brand.
While your brand message is what you say about your business, your brand voice is how you say it. Your tone of voice will both express your brand personality and mirror the personalities of your target audience segments. A consistent tone of voice builds confidence in your brand and helps you make decisions about messaging across platforms.
Get our full guide to creating your brand message and voice
4. Identify your brand touchpoints
Brand touchpoints are the places where someone interacts with your brand. For most brand or business owners, these are part of your online presence. A person might experience multiple brand touchpoints in a single day. For example, they might see a:
Paid ad on a social media platform
Blog in search engine results
Product on a marketplace or in a brick-and-mortar store
It’s important to deliver a positive experience for your audience at every touchpoint.
The easiest way to track brand touchpoints is online, where you can follow a customer as they travel from email marketing campaigns or social media pages to your website. To see how customers interact with your brand online check your website analytics.
For example, you might find that people visit only a single page on your site before leaving, which leads to what’s called a high bounce rate. That might be a sign to redesign that web page or update the copy on that page.
5. Create a visual identity system
Ever passed by a fast-food restaurant and known what it was before you even saw the signage? That restaurant’s visual identity creates an instant connection in your head between its design and the products they sell. Branding can be expressed in taste, touch, feel, sound, and smell, but it’s more likely that most of your brand interactions are visual.
A visual identity for your brand mainly consists of these design elements.
Logo design
Color palette
Typography
Brand images
Logo design
A business’s logo is the visual essence of its brand. Whether it’s a typographic representation of the name, an icon, or a symbol, a logo is an important first impression of your brand. Make your brand memorable from the very start by designing a logo that stands out.
It’s easy to develop a DIY logo with a logo-building tool, like Squarespace’s free logo maker.
Color palette
The color palette you choose for your brand is a set of colors you consistently use in your brand images, logos, and other designs. To choose your brand colors, think about how you want your brand to make your audience feel.
If you want your brand to excite your audience, brighter colors might make sense. Cooler, more muted colors would make more sense if you have a more soothing brand. If you’re still not sure, do some audience research to understand which feelings and colors resonate with your target audience.
Different colors will connect people with different sets of emotions. Try a few different color schemes on your website to see what works.
Typography
Typography is the set of fonts associated with your brand and how they’re styled. Similar to color palette, choose your typography based on how you want your brand to make people feel.
A brand that wants to create feelings of excitement might go for a bold, blocky font. A more soothing brand might go for a more standard font or choose to style text mostly as lowercase.
You can easily try different fonts on a Squarespace website and decide what suits your brand. You might apply one font to your logo, another to your headlines, another to your subheadings, and another to your body text. Just make sure they’re complementary on the page, as they’re the real finishing touch of your visual brand.
Imagery
From illustration to product photography, brand imagery helps you to craft a consistent visual experience for your audience.
Consider the shapes, textures, lines, and patterns that you’ll incorporate into your visuals. These small details will keep your aesthetic consistent. Design choices can help express the mood of your brand as well. For example, bubbly borders around images imply a playful personality for your brand whereas a more subdued line-only border may be a bit more serious. Regardless of the direction you choose, make sure your visual appearance aligns with your overall messaging and brand personality.
Get our full guide to brand visuals
6. Maintain your brand reputation
Branding is an ongoing project that doesn’t stop when you launch your brand or business. Great brands have to be nurtured and maintained. That means continually analyzing the performance of your brand assets to ensure your business reputation is improving.
Get feedback from your audience through email sign-up forms, customer surveys, social polls, and more. The more you understand what resonates with your audience, the stronger your brand will be.
Don’t be afraid to update or refresh your brand as you change and grow, either. The brand that suits you when you launch your business could be very different from the one that fits where you are in five years.
This post was updated on June 1, 2023.