brand style guide Archives

5 signs that your branding is broken

Your brand is your business’s identity. So, your branding is the reflection and culmination of your business’s personality, appearance, voice and overall vibe.

It takes about seven seconds for consumers to make an instant decision about whether or not they like and trust your brand. Keep in mind that consistent branding across all channels can increase your revenue between 10 percent and 20 percent. Brand consistency means that consumers get the same impression and experience when interacting with your business regardless of the marketing or communication channel.

A successful brand is clear, compelling and consistent.

Check out our nine tips if you need to build your brand from scratch.

But it’s entirely possible for a brand to not work how it’s intended, which can impact your overall consumer engagement and sales conversion rate. The following are five signs that your branding is broken.

No brand style guide

Think of a brand style guide as the rulebook for how your business presents itself to the world.

You can use your style guide as a reference to help maintain branding consistency no matter which of your team members is involved. About 59 percent of consumers prefer to buy from brands they trust, and consistency is a huge part of that.

Your style guide would include key branding elements, a collection of visual examples and more, depending on what you want and need.

Check out our five tips to create a brand style guide for your small business.

Your branding is visually inconsistent

Your visual brand identity includes your logo, company colors, chosen typography and any imagery that exudes the look and feel of your brand across all marketing channels. That includes your website, social media accounts and anything else.

As previously mentioned, a brand style guide can make a big difference on this front.

When done right, your company becomes unique and recognizable among your competitors. Visual branding consistency helps put your target audience at ease and builds trusting relationships over time.

Ask yourself:

Does your website reflect who your business truly is?
Are your typography, photo selections, colors and logos matching across all channels?
How do your visuals make your audience feel? Positive or negative?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then you know where to start.

Visuals are powerful. Check out these six ways that visuals can increase your email conversions.

Big drop in the middle of your sales funnel

Acquiring leads simply feels good for any small business. But if your increase in leads doesn’t result in an increase in revenue, there’s a disconnect.

If you’re noticing a drop within your sales funnel, it could mean that what you’re saying in your marketing is different than what you’re actually offering. Your messaging could be too aspirational. Take a look at where that conflict could be happening. Something inconsistent is happening in the messaging with your leads.

That being said, if you’re struggling to even get leads into your sales funnel, that’s a signal that your branding is broken as well. It means that your brand is not resonating at all with your target audience.

Check out the seven benefits of using a sales funnel in your digital marketing.

Obsession with your competition

Understanding your competition can benefit your business and marketing strategies. But there’s a difference between understanding your competition and obsessing over your competition.

If your branding exists mostly in relation to your competitors, who they are and what they’re doing, then you’re living in their shadow and not creating your own presence and identity.

Some signs of this include citing your competition in your marketing messages or spending a majority of your marketing planning discussing your competition.

But again, there is a time and place for analyzing your competition. Find out more about what a proper competitive analysis is and how you can start yours.

Lack of repeat business

If you’re bringing in new business but can’t build customer loyalty, this is another sign that your branding is broken.

Just a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to at least a 25 percent increase in profit. You want to keep your customers purchasing from you once you acquire them. But as important as it is, customer retention is a big challenge for many businesses.

There could be a brand disconnect that is holding your growth potential back.

Check out our six tips to improve your customer retention rate and grow your revenue as a result.

In conclusion

If your brand is broken, you can definitely fix it. You don’t have to ride it until the wheels fall off of it and your small business. While rebranding may cost some time and money upfront, the potential to reach more clients and generate more revenue is worth it.

Just make sure that you:

Define your business’s purpose, vision, mission and values.
Identify better, compelling brand messaging.
Upgrade all visual elements as needed.
Develop (and use) a brand style guide.

As you’re evaluating the effectiveness of your branding, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 steps to determine your brand personality

Brands have personalities just like humans do. But if you’re a little unsure how to define your particular brand personality, you’ve come to the right place.

A brand personality involves the human characteristics of a brand, which your customers can relate to and connect with. Every brand can and should have a voice, color and other attributes that evoke different emotions.

Without a defined brand personality, consumers will have a harder time figuring out whether you’re the right business for them. That’s definitely not a decision you want to complicate.

On the flip side, a strong brand personality can increase your brand loyalty and customer retention. (Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.)

Remember, your brand only has seven seconds to make a good first impression.

About 46 percent of consumers in the U.S. say that they would pay more to purchase from brands they can trust. In addition, about 64 percent of women and 68 percent of men have felt an emotional connection with a brand. This can occur when you grow interest, trust and optimism from your potential customers and customers.

Essentially, there are five types of brand personalities:

Sincere, generous, thoughtful, honest, wholesome, cheerful, down-to-earth, warm and value-oriented (such as Cadbury, Hallmark and Amazon)
Excited, easygoing, lively, trendy, imaginative, spirited, daring, intrigued and youthful (such as Mountain Dew, BuzzFeed, Red Bull, Tesla and Nike)
Rugged, rough, outdoorsy, adventurous, athletic, tough and sporty (such as Jeep, Harley Davidson, Woodland and Yeti)
Sophisticated, elegant, luxury, charming, high-class, timeless, glamourous and renowned (such as Dolce & Gabbana, Mercedes, Chanel and Rolex)
Competent, accomplished, reliable, successful, intelligent and authoritative (such as Google, Microsoft, Volkswagen and Intel)

Not only does a defined brand personality resonate with your target audience, but it also can set your marketing strategy path. Once you know “who” your brand is, the opportunities to share that become clearer. Your brand’s personality will help you make the best decisions for every aspect of your business.

The following are five steps to determine your brand personality and better connect with potential customers.

Understand your target audience

So much about branding drills down to the people you’re hoping to reach and serve with your products and/or services.

By digging into the demographics and behaviors of your ideal customer, you can get a better sense of how your brand could relate to that customer. The more relatable you are to him or her, the better.

Keep these questions in mind:

Who is your audience?
What journey are they on?
What are their core desires?
What are their characteristics and behaviors?

Not exactly sure who your target audience is? Our seven tips can help.

Identify your brand’s role

Once you understand your target audience, it’s time to determine what role your brand should fill for them. For example, your brand could be your audience’s guide, motivator, friend, protector, inspiration or something else.

Before you jump to any conclusions, consider how your products and/or services affect your customers’ lives. Here are a few questions to help you identify your brand’s role:

Is your brand more of a leader, or does it play a supporting role in customers’ lives?
What special effect does your brand create in your customers’ lives?
If your brand had a personal relationship with your ideal customer, what type of relationship would that be? A family member? Friend? Someone else?

Brainstorm related characteristics

Once you decide on your brand’s role, list out all the characteristics that role exemplifies as it relates to your target audience.

Don’t hold back when listing characteristics. The point is that you get every thought written down. Quantity over quality.

Once you’ve exhausted all possible ideas, review your list and fine-tune it. Highlight what really speaks to you. Consider whether there are any related characteristics before you narrow down to your favorite characteristics that resonate most for you.

Visualize your brand personality

It’s time to create a mood board to visualize your brand personality, starting only with your favorite characteristics that you brainstormed earlier.

In the simplest sense, a mood board is a collage that contains a variety of images, text and any other items that ultimately will define your brand and communicate your brand personality. It also can help bring this developing personality into focus.

You can easily create a “mood board” using Pinterest, where you can easily pin visuals that represent your characteristics. The goal here is to bring your brand personality to life.

Just like when you were brainstorming characteristics earlier, now is the time to gather more than you need and then fine-tune to what feels best to you. This can include images, colors, visual metaphors (such as a tiger for being “fierce”), art, words/quotes, letters, texture, patterns and shapes.

Also, be sure to include any brand guidelines, such as your brand colors, fonts, logo and any other related brand materials that you have. If you are still developing your official brand, our nine expert tips can help.

Develop your brand voice

Now that you’ve visualized your brand personality, you need to develop a brand voice that supports and conveys that.

How do you speak to your target audience? Once you have an idea, it’s time to outline specific guidelines that highlight your tone, the type of multimedia images you would share and even jargon use, among other considerations.

Check out our eight tips for reflecting your brand’s personality through your brand voice.

In conclusion

Your brand personality can be pivotal in helping you stand out from your competitors. It’s worth the time and effort to understand it for yourself so that you can then communicate it through every asset in your digital marketing efforts and beyond.

Of course, we recommend setting a brand style guide to keep your brand personality, voice and more consistent across platforms and over time. This consistency empowers a stronger digital marketing strategy.

Check out our five tips to create a brand style guide.

As you begin to nail down your brand personality, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 tips to create a brand style guide for your business

Branding directly impacts the success of a business online, so you’ll want to consider creating a brand style guide if you don’t already have one.

Think of a brand style guide as the rulebook for how your business presents itself to the world. This includes your logo, fonts, colors, nature of photography and more.

Check out our nine expert tips to help you build a brand from scratch.

You can use your brand style guide as a reference to help maintain branding consistency no matter which of your team members is involved. Consistency helps you build a trusting relationship with consumers.

About 59 percent of consumers prefer to buy from brands they trust.

The following are five tips to help you create a brand style guide for your business.

Collect visual branding examples

One of the best ways to convey the presence of your brand is through visual examples.

Consider what reflects your branding the most. This can include ads, emails, social media posts and so on.

If there is a particular point you want to make sure gets addressed, be sure to collect the visuals to communicate that aspect of your branding to your team members.

It’s about visually communicating the look and feel of your brand.

Define the essential elements of your brand

Traditionally, you’ll want to identify six essential elements of your brand in your brand style guide:

Brand story

This includes your company’s vision and mission statement that introduces your brand to the world and conveys your purpose in so many words. See our five tips to create an effective mission statement for your business if you don’t already have one.

Logo guidelines

Beyond what your logo consists of, think about how your logo should look in different environments. For example, a simpler icon version in addition to a full logo, overall spacing, minimum sizing, logo proportions, a black and white version in addtion to color and so on. Include all of the approved versions of your logo in your brand style guide, as well as an explanation of when to use which version where (as applicable).

Brand color palette

Even if you already have one main branding color and a secondary color, you should make sure that you identify at least one more color to give your brand flexibility.

Many brands opt for about four colors. Think of a lighter color for backgrounds, a darker color for text, a neutral color and a color that pops. They should complement each other.

Font guidelines

Font itself can become its own rabbit hole, but it is very important to put careful thought into choosing the font that best reflects your brand’s personality.

Once you have at least two fonts chosen (can certainly be more than that), you’ll want to be very clear in your brand style guide as to whether an entire typeface family can be used or which specific typefaces can be used.

In addition, you’ll want to communicate when, where and how every font should be used with your brand. Be as clear as possible, including the alignment to be used and any specific spacing.

Image and photography guidelines

This can be one of the more difficult sections of your brand style guide, so take your time. It’s likely easy enough for you to identify which images suit and reflect your brand well, but it’s just as easy for a team member to not have the same natural eye as you.

The goal is to steer your team in the right direction. You can do this by including a selection of example images and sharing the reason behind those examples as well as what your brand hopes to achieve in every image.

Brand voice

Your brand has a personality of its own, much like a person. The more you can share as it pertains to the overall writing style for your brand, the better.

In this section of your brand style guide, you can detail best practices, illustrate your brand personality description with key adjectives, include do’s and don’ts, etc.

Not sure what your brand voice is? Check out our eight tips.

Think about the bigger picture

Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to dive deeper into certain areas where your branding is relevant.

For example, if you create physical products, what should your packaging look like? How should the layout of your website appear? What makes a branded appearance for a post on any given social media platform?

Brainstorm every possibility that is relevant for your business. Then, pick away at the answers so that you can include them in your brand style guide.

Get organized with a brand style guide outline

Once you’ve compiled all your essential branding elements and visual examples, it’s time to outline your entire brand style guide so that you can stay focused throughout.

In addition, your outline will make the creation process more efficient.

You’ll also need to decide the format of your brand style guide. It can be a digital PDF, printout, webpage, etc. In general, make sure that it’s easy to update and distribute to your team.

Expect brand evolution

The only guarantee in life is change. Never assume that what you decide about your brand today will be right for your brand in 20 years. Just think about Apple. It’s definitely not the same-looking brand from the 1980s (or even earlier).

Consider your brand style guide a living document that you should revisit at least annually.

To help with inspiration, check out the brand style guide for Starbucks or Zendesk.

As you begin to create your brand style guide, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.