Things You May Not Think About That Should Be "On Brand"

These days it’s growing increasingly important to ensure that you have a clear definition of your brand before even considering marketing your business. From the colors you utilize to the tone of voice you take in your content, everything must be unified and be “on brand”.

Take a moment to read through a few key things that can make all the difference in having a unified brand for your business.

Your Website

This first one may be an obvious one to many, but it’s your website. It is surprising to find that something that seems so obviously important to building and identifying your brand is often overlooked by many businesses. We often find that many companies are so eager to launch and get started that they simply throw together a website via WordPress template, promising that they’ll go back and redo it once they’re up and running, but more times than not that time never comes. More pressing things come up, money needs to be spent elsewhere, and before you know it your website is ten years old and the design reflects it too.

With potential customers often making their first impression of your business through your website, it is so essential to have a site that reflects your company accurately. You don’t want customers coming to your outdated website thinking that you obviously are too.

When it comes to crafting a website, make sure you have a logo you’re truly happy with. Pick 2-4 colors you think fit your brand well and that you’re going to be happy seeing on everything from your homepage to coffee mugs. Once you’re there, hire a designer! There are even some great websites out there where designers can compete for a minimal amount of money by crafting custom designs built around your business, making the process so much easier for those of us who aren’t gifted in website design.

Ultimately, your website is a direct reflection of your business, so make it a good one and make it right the first time around if you can.

Your Social Media Feed

The thing that takes over the majority of our free-time every single day, social media. For a business, social media can be highly profitable in raising brand awareness and garnering new interest in your business/products. Therefore, it’s important that when someone clicks over to your Instagram feed, that you’re accurately represented. When I go to a businesses profile I want to be able to know exactly what they are selling or providing almost instantaneously and be able to, with a few scrolls maybe, gather whether or not it’s something I’m interested in.

Many companies may spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in order to have a perfectly curated feed and this may work out very well for them, but it is definitely not necessary in order to have success on social media. By following a few key tips, I believe that Instagram and Facebook can be a success for the majority of businesses. Firstly, stay true to your brand. Don’t be posting photos of your cute lunch when you run a software company. No one who follows you likely cares. Secondly, don’t over post and don’t under post either. If you’re able to, posting once a day is amazing, or even twice, but not if it isn’t quality content. Posting 3-5 times a week is still really great for keeping up the consistency and retaining interest.

Your Email Newsletter

Email newsletters may not be necessary or even make sense for all businesses, but to many they are a key aspect in retaining and growing repeat customers. They’re also something that is easily overlooking when it comes to brand consistency. Being that a lot of businesses rely on the simplicity of a platform like MailChimp to craft their email newsletters, they often simply select a template, add a few photos in and voila, hit send. It is important though to keep a consistent brand message within the emails themselves. This means making sure your colors are prominently feature in different ways (i.e. clickable buttons, line breaks, etc.), having your logo present, even matching the design of the footer and menu to the design of your websites footer and menu. These things can make a big difference in how customers view your brand.

Your Email Signature

This last one is pretty small (both literally and conceptually). With people potentially being in contact with multiple people at your company, having a consistent email signature that everyone uses is a really great way to enforce your brand. Step it up by integrating your brands main color into the signature, a small logo, and even clickable social media icons. This can sound overwhelming but you can actually google something like ‘custom email signatures’ and simply plug in all of this info and receive a stylish new email signature in no time at all.