If your industry is a pie, your business is a slice of that pie. The question is, how large of a slice do you have?
If your dream is to claim a bigger slice of the pie this holiday season and beyond, it’s critical that you stand out from the competition. Otherwise, your business will crumble into nothing more than a few crumbs.
In fact, research shows that half of new businesses fail during their first five years. If you want your brand to stand out to customers, you’ll need a striking visual identity that they won’t forget.
Here are a few steps for creating a winning visual identity for your brand.
Let’s get started!
1. Find Some Inspiration to Create a Winning Visual Identity
To create the perfect visual identity, you first need to explore what inspires you.
Post various inspirational items to an empty wall in your office, and then reflect on them. Which items make you most excited and reflect you the most accurately?
Some of these inspirational items may include a few personality adjectives that you can use to create your company name. You could also hang up your competitors’ color palettes, logos, and sales materials.
All of these items can give you ideas about what you can incorporate into your own visual brand.
2. Get Prepared
Now that you have your wall of inspiration in place, it’s time to come up with a simple color palette.
Ideally, your palette should include between one and three primary colors, as well as two to three secondary colors. And yes, white and black count as colors.
You’ll also need a logo. Be sure to choose a font for your logo text that is Web safe, as this will ensure that your font looks correct no matter where it is viewed.
3. Get Creative
Once you’ve settled on the right logo, font and color palette, you can start putting together your visual identity design.
Don’t worry — if you’re not exactly the creative type, a professional can help you to create a winning design.
Make sure that whether you use your logo online or on a promotional tote bag — with the help of tote bag printing from Printkick, for example — be consistent in the design elements you use, such as your color codes and font styles.
4. Time to Measure
Your logo is finally created, and you couldn’t be more excited. But the question you need to ask yourself is, will it actually work?
As a general rule of thumb, your logo should be just fine if it is flexible enough to work in various formats. For instance, it should work just as well in a rectangular header as it does in a square area on a social media profile.
In addition, your logo should be scalable, meaning that it will work in large areas, such as posters, as well as in smaller areas, such as business cards.
The logo should also be simple for the viewer to understand, and it should line up with your brand personality and story.
Most importantly, make sure that your logo is unique, not a copycat of what a competitor is already using in their marketing.
5. Gather Feedback
You feel good about your brand’s visual identity now, but now it’s time to see how people beyond your company’s walls feel about it, too.
Show your logo to other parties to see if they connect with it. If they do, and if they associate your colors, tagline, design, and symbol with your brand’s defined attributes, values and attitudes instantaneously, you’ve got a winner.
How We Can Help
In addition to highlighting how to develop a winning visual identity for your brand, we offer tips on search engine optimization and Web design.
Take a peek here to find out more about how the right marketing strategy can help you to beat out the competition in the years ahead.
