Understanding Branding | Coordinate your Brand with your Marketing Efforts

What is Branding?

Branding is where a business or organization creates a visual representation of themselves, including logo design, brand colors, font, social media creatives, website development, business cards and more . This can be done to form a unique picture in the minds of the customers. Branding focuses on establishing a distinguished presence in the market to retain clients’ loyalty. There are some brands that are instantly recognizable, for example the golden arches of McDonalds or the apple of well, Apple.

A brand can be a mixture of images, names, icons, symbols, colors and fonts. The combination of these create an overall image that is used to represent the business or organization.

More about Marketing

You need to understand that branding and content complement each other in marketing. Marketing is all about building a process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers. With its focus on the customer, marketing is one of the most important components of all the business activities. It is the chance to show the world who you are as a business. Although your marketing activities may change, your brand shouldn’t change if you make it right!

Whether you’re focusing on digital or traditional marketing, your branding should always be the center of your marketing strategy. Whether that’s sticking to a particular font and writing style for your content or using a color scheme on your website!

With a successful combined brand and marketing effort you should be able to effectively communicate with your audience with quality and transparency. Marketing can target different people with your products and services. With potentially many groups, a strong brand will make you recognizable across different groups.

Your brand is also the best way to differentiate yourself from your competitors. None wants to be caught in a crowded marketing with nothing to make them stand out. So how do you start with creating a unique brand. At Growth Hackers, we’ve helped dozens of businesses align branding with marketing to create campaigns that resonate, build trust, and stand out in crowded markets.

Best Color Combinations that You Can Use for your Business

Choosing the right brand colors is like composing a symphony and at Growth Hackers, we know how to make every hue harmonize to captivate your audience. Coming up with the excellent color combinations will help you skyrocket your business. By knowing which colors work together and what they can mean, you can choose an aesthetically pleasing combination which reflects your business ideology. If you want to attract a lot of people to your business, color can be one way to catch their eye.

One color is not ideal for a brand you should always have one main color with one or two supporting colors. The best situation is knowing which 2 or 3 colors work together when combined. These colors are really important, as we become more visually inclined, they will be the main identifiers along with your logo.

Your marketing strategy as well as your brand identity include a number of different aspects: social media, website, emails, content and product. Each of these elements should include some part of the color combination you have chosen. It could be as simple as a border on a picture or your logo at the bottom of the email.

Websites are the home for your business and your brand. It should reflect your style both in layout and color. Using a block layout creates an easy to read website. It also allows for images and colors to be used. Keeping the CTA’s clear yet colorful and enticing is really important.

Let’s talk about Logos

In the grand scheme of branding, logos are some of the most crucial elements. Too basic and it’ll fade into the crowded market, too fussy and people won’t want to look at it. It can be hard to pick a logo that reflects your brand without being a direct copy of something you sell. For example, Mercedes Benz have a silver wheel with three spokes for their logo, this makes sense because it looks like a wheel of a car, yet it is discreet enough that it doesn’t scream car company.

If you find the right balance your logo can be recognizable but also a promoter of your company. As was mentioned earlier, logos and branding should be used throughout your marketing efforts. If you make your business logo design both distinct and popular you can get people to want to share it. That could be as simple as wearing a specific clothing brand with a strong logo or sharing a post on social media.

Changing logos to show support for a charity or political movement has been used by some of the biggest companies. Take Lacoste, who have added endangered animals and used them for special edition logos to raise awareness for the environment. Or Apple who took their apple and made is a rainbow during Pride celebrations. This type of marketing is great for showing that your business cares about society.

We once guided a new fashion brand to redesign their logo, and within months, it became a symbol their customers proudly shared… another Growth Hackers win.

Fonts and Name go hand in hand

Long gone are the days of size 12, times new roman text. Today businesses use their own font both in their name and their marketing effort. These fonts need to reflect the nature of the business and be clear enough to read. Nothing is worse than barely being able to read what is written. So, make sure when you’re picking a font that you can read it both on desktop and mobile, most content is consumed on a phone now so be aware of marketing trends!

To pick a font for your brand name and logo you need to consider what type of company you are. If you’re a luxury, high quality, premium business you want a font to match that. It should be elegant and probably a bit on the smaller side. Or if you want to market to kids it should be big bubble writing. You know your business best so making the right decision should be easy.

Content Marketing is a must for business. Blogs, videos and images are great for communicating to your audience. Blogs should be written with your chosen text, as should any in video text you use. Images should come with a caption that also reflects the style of your business. Essentially though every piece of content, people should be able to recognize that it is a match.

Wouldn’t it be strange is a luxury brand made a video about how cheap you can buy their products second hand? Keep your brand at the forefront of your mind when undertaking content and you won’t go wrong!

Some branding examples for you