How to Create your Brand Identity and Maintain it with Digital Marketing

The consistency of all successful brands is the power of their brand identity. If your product isn’t right or your company culture and advertising aren’t up to scratch, then your branding can only take you so far. However, a well-designed brand identity partnered with a fantastic company culture can have the ultimate monopoly above competitors within your industry. Here we will go through how to create your brand identity and maintain it going into the future.

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is a way in which companies connect with their consumers. Strong brands identities will stand out from the crowds. Think Uber, Facebook, Apple & Nike. For all of these brands, you can imagine their logo and their brand identity just from thinking of their brand’s name. They all have competitors but stand out because they are industry leaders, innovators and their branding are embedded within their company, marketing and culture.

A brand identity should be appealing to the senses. It should be memorable and project originality in its meaning and concept. This all comes from the design process in which extensive research and highly skilled design talent, specifically in branding are required.

Your brand identity is not just a logo but an entire system that surrounds the way in which you visually market your brand. This is why you should hire professionals to create your brand identity. They can assess and create a structure for everything branding related, from the exact brand colours you use, shapes, logo variations and in which context to use these elements. They study your target market in-depth and come up with the most effective visual solution for the company that you are.  

The benefits of a strong brand identity

A clear brand identity gives public awareness of your brand and its values, with a strong brand identity you can build brand equity, create customer loyalty and also make more comfortable for your sales team to sell your brand with clarity.

Your brand identity will help showcase and create your company culture. It gives the world an idea of what to expect from your business and builds trust among clients and company partners. It helps your employees and future candidates align themselves with your positioning and core values. This helps to ensure that the right people are working for your company and can filter out those who may not be a great fit.

A strong brand identity will provide simplicity around branding and marketing decisions. This will save time and frustration around consistency as you will be able to reference the branding guidelines for each decision.  

How to create your brand identity

When you approach a design agency for your branding, it is a good idea to provide the agency with as much information on your business and what you are looking for in your company branding. This will help them give you the best result possible.

Here are questions to think about and share with your design providers:

• Where is your logo going to be used?
• What are your companies differentiators and value propositions?
• What is the companies tone of voice?
• What kind of additional icons will you want to include in your brand identity?
• Does your brand already have specific colours and if so, what is the colour codes?
• Who is your target market? Do you have examples of personas that would purchase your product?
• What is your brand mission?
• What kind of photography and graphic styles do you think your audience will find appealing?

Once you receive the first drafts of your new brand identity designs, you will want to show it to people who are likely to be your target market and get their opinion. Showing business stakeholders is also essential as they will have the most input and views on what the branding should be. Though in saying this, it is always a great idea to trust your design agency to create the ideal solution and understand how to create your brand identity.

Maintenance

Throughout time, you need to reassess your branding and ensure that updates are made to stay “in with the times”. Google is an excellent example of this, for if you look at their branding from 1998 or any of the variations before, you can imagine how outdated it would look today.

When updating, you will need to make the changes across the board and recreate new updated brand guidelines, then distribute these guidelines to all staff and stakeholders so that they can be inline and up to date with the new assets.

Create a spreadsheet of all the items that will need to have updated branding. This includes social media posts and profiles, website, marketing collateral, videos and presentation slides.  

Want to know more about how to create your brand identity? Whitehat Agency can help you, contact us today to book an appointment to see how we can create powerful branding for your company. See our case studies for examples of our previous clients.