Having a strong brand presents a clear picture of your business’ core values, personality, and what differentiates it from its competitors. Simply put, your brand identity clearly communicates why a customer would choose you over the competition.
Your brand identity includes your logo, font style, chosen colours, images, creatives, and general communication to your audience. However, small business owners continue to face the dilemma of exhausting a lot of resources to develop a brand identity and it doesn’t have to be so.
In this article, we highlight 7 tools small businesses can use to develop their brand identity without breaking the bank.
1) Getting a logo
Designing a logo is one of the key tasks every business must complete. A logo is a corporate image that characterizes your company and ultimately contributes to your brand identity.
- Tailor Brands Logo Maker
Using an AI-powered system to generate a suitable logo for your brand, Tailor Brands’ Logo Maker is the perfect tool for anyone who wants an auto-generated logo. The application asks for the name of your business and a description of what it does, as well as getting you to choose between an icon, text or initial-based logo, then it uses a ‘This or That’ AI tool to create a design style you’re after. With all that information in hand, it goes to work on creating a logo that you can then customise if you want; when you’re happy with it you can download a low-resolution for free, or pay for high-resolution files.
2) Picking a colour scheme
Colour is a foundational element of any business’ brand identity because it gives the first impression of your brand. In fact, according to some statistics compiled by colorcom.com, 84.7% of consumers say that “colour” is their primary reason for buying a specific product. This means that business owners must be intentional about the colours they choose to represent their brand. However, with infinite shades to choose from, it’s not always easy to be certain about your decisions.
- Color Supply
Color Supply is incredibly unique since it’s a multifaceted colour picker. You select one primary color in the color wheel and choose the style(complementary, triad, square, etc).
From there you can select different hues/mixes and see which colors fit best with your goals. But you don’t have to just guess since you can actually preview the colors in SVG icons that auto-update.
3) Choosing a font type
Just as the use of colour in branding, the choice of font is very important. Your font type sends an inconspicuous message to your audience. Your typographic palette helps to consolidate all business communications together, from the copy on your website, to your brochure and even promotional content. Using consistent font helps in maintaining brand awareness and consistency.
- Type connection
A self-proclaimed typographic dating game, Type connection is a website that helps you learn how to pair fonts.
You start the game by choosing the main font to match. Not only do you find suitable matches for each font you select, but the game is also informative.
As you play the game you learn more about typography and the details for finding the right font combinations.
4) Creating unique designs
Having an appealing creative makes people pause and pay attention to your message. That is why small business owners must ensure their creatives are not just visually appealing and enjoyable but is consistent and cohesive across board.
- Canva
Canva is a user-friendly design tool that makes it possible for businesses to create eye-catching creatives without graphic design experience.
This online design solution offers users a wide array of features, including drag-and-drop design creation, quality photographs, a template collection for each design type, illustrations, layouts, and fonts.
With this tool, you can create a myriad of things from social media images to email banners to brochures e.t.c which can then be printed, downloaded, or shared on social media.
5) Selecting images
It is important to consider the type of imagery you’ll use, as well as the visual treatments. Do you want to use real images for your brand, or you’ll prefer illustrated images?
- Free stock photos
Having to continuously have professional pictures taken or illustrations created can eat into the resources of your business. A smart alternative to that is to use free stock photos. Most of these photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication. This means you can copy, modify and distribute even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
Some of the popular sites where stock photos are available include Pexel, Unsplash, Pixabay, StockSnap.io, and Foodiesfeed
6) Building a website
What is a business without a website? The goal of a website is to represent a business, sell the business’ products, attract more visitors, generate more business leads, and build trust with customers. To do so, the business should have a consistent brand message in line with its mission and other brand identities.
- WordPress
You can set up a free WordPress site with its easy to use features, you can be on your way to designing your very own business website. With WordPress, you can create a business blog and start blogging right away, creating relevant, engaging content for your target audience which you can then share on your social media and other digital platforms.
7) Sending communication to customers
The worldwide adoption of email provides the perfect channel for businesses to improve their brand awareness.
Businesses can now curate the email address of their target audience and keep them informed about the latest happenings in the business.
- MailChimp Free
MailChimp offers an excellent way for businesses to build and manage a mailing list. Businesses can select from the collection of available templates or decide to build from scratch when designing emails for their audience. Once your Emails have been sent, you can make use of Mailchimp’s reporting dashboard to analyse the performance of the email.
Starting a small business is a lot of hard work and dedication. You’ll want to make sure your branding is consistent with your message and look across all platforms. Growth for your business won’t happen overnight. Hopefully, with the help of these tools, you’ll see positive results without breaking the b