5 Quick and Easy Tips for a Professional Brand Identity

With so little time, and so many tasks to juggle, your brand identity might be towards the bottom of your list of worries. Luckily, we have 5 quick and easy tips for developing a professional brand identity that won’t keep you up at night!

How important is brand identity?

Your brand identity is a crucial element in raising recognition, and ultimately building loyalty from your customers. A great way to ensure your brand identity is professional is by creating brand guidelines.

Brand guidelines are a set of rules that explain and showcase exactly how your brand works – and your business can really benefit from them.

Here are 5 quick and easy tips for developing a professional brand identity through your brand guidelines:

1.Explain who you are

Make sure to include your brand’s history, personality and core values throughout your brand identity. Whether it be your staff or external suppliers, it’s important for them to understand what makes your business tick. Explain what your business is passionate about, how you conduct your business and what makes you unique.

2. Decide how you speak

Tone of voice is a trait that your business should always keep consistent. It ensures that as a brand you are unified and speak as one voice, and it will help the world to recognise you.

For example, Innocent Smoothies is a brand popular for their tongue-in-cheek and playful tone of voice. Innocent’s original way of speaking lets customers know whom the message is coming from without relying on their visuals.

Within the tone of voice section of your brand guidelines, discuss what personality you’d like to express. As a corporate B2B brand you may want to keep things professional, straightforward and detailed, whereas a cosmetics B2C brand would want to use an exciting, personable tone.

 3. Decide how you don’t speak

It’s equally important that understands exactly what not to say when adopting the voice of your brand. A new staff member might think it’s harmless to post a risqué joke on social media, but if it’s not in line with anything that’s been posted before, there’ll be a whole bunch of contacts who’ve read a post that sounds nothing like what they’re used to – and it’ll probably confuse them.

 4. Discuss your logo

As one of the most powerful tools in your brand armoury, just like your tone of voice, your logo must adhere to its own set of rules. You need to be sure of when and how your logo should be used. Is there a minimum and maximum size? Is there a specific set of colours that you would not wish any designer to stray from? Should it never be placed on top of particular imagery, or never warped or edited? Specify how your logo should be used in different settings to prevent brand confusion. Statistics also shows that it takes consumers 10 seconds to form a first impression of a brand’s logo, but 5 to 7 impressions for consumers to recognise the logo.

5. The little things count

Colour palette is important; font is important; consistency is important. Using a limited choice of specifically chosen colours will help inspire further recognition from the people that you reach. The same goes for font – everything that you create needs to be recognised as coming from your brand. That way, when consumers come across your brand, whether in a magazine, in-store, or online, your branding will be instantly recognisable. This helps to create a memorable impression and customers are likely to return again and again.  

Brand guidelines are a highly effective way of showing your staff, your suppliers and your customers exactly what your brand identity is. You need to speak as one voice, be visually consistent, and be aligned with what remains at the heart of your business if you want your brand to appear as professional as possible.

For more branding tips and tricks, why not call our creative team on 01462 262020 for a no obligation chat, or email us at hello@focus7int.com