Why do you need to stop now to think about your brand identity?
Working with SEO and eCommerce the most common error I saw was brands who don’t know who they are. Many companies pay for courses on SEO and spend great sums of money on internet Ads without doing the basics first, and defining a brand identity.
Why do I need a brand Identity?
Empathy. That’s the key word. Clients buy products because they empathise with your company, in a sense that they feel that you understand their needs, be it the need to be feed by a restaurant or the need to transportation by a car manufacturer, clients need a figure to trust in order to make a purchase. And yes, this applies to your company, no matter how small or specialized you’re.
How does a brand Identity get clients to empathize with me?
Simple, when you stick to your brand identity, be it on the visual language of your ads, the tone of the conversation you have with customers or the political positioning of your brand (yes, your company has a political stand, even if it doesn’t look like so) you create a persona that you client can build a trusted relationship with. But don’t take my word for it, take the word of Neil Patel or Jaime Troiano.
What can you do in 15 minutes to over hall your brand?
1. Create a colour pallet.
If you don’t have a colour pallet but have a logo what I want you to do is to go to coolors.co. Once you’re on the website you can click on the camera Icon, drag and drop your logo and the website is going to automatically make a colour pallet for you based on your logo.
From now on all your visual communication stays within those 5 colours. For example, here’s mine, everything on this website is made using these shades, even the blacks and whites.
2. Choose a font (or a set of them)
You can find a selection of high-quality, royalty free fonts here (click me). These fonts are provided by google. Pick 2 or 3 and stick to them. This website has 3, one for titles, one for text and one for the changing title card on the homepage. Stick to the fonts you picked.
3. Create a persona
You`re going to need a piece of paper for this. Your persona is the ideal of your client, but not in an abstract sense. We’re are not talking about your target audience here; we are creating a real person. Give him a name, an age, a job, how does he look like? What car does he drive? Is he married? Have kids? What are his hobbies? Does he have any disabilities? What are his political affiliations? What is he wearing? Write down were he lives, what he eats, when he sleeps and where he goes on vacation, your objective is to make a tight, coherent, identity. If you’d like I would suggest going as far as drawing him, or using a stock image to represent him. Now he’s the head of marketing, everything you post, print, record or say regarding your brand goes trough him. Does he like the new add? Why? What could you change to make that add appeal more to him? Will he see the add on his day to day life? Is it on a place he is going to pay attention to?
Conclusion
Surubrand (the lack of a solid visual identity) and the lack of a persona are the two most basic and easily solvable problems with brand identity and online marketing, they don’t require page rewrites like SEO or investments like targeted ads, if you’re not doing these things, the time to change is now.
28/08/2020