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How to Build Your Brand — 2021 Guide

December 13, 2021
By James Gussie

“As the world becomes ever more saturated with brands, how can entrepreneurs find a way to stand out from the crowd?”
For those who want their brand to be as differentiated and memorable as possible, 2019 is going to be an exciting year. In this article I’m sharing some of my thoughts on what will become important for branding in 2021 — marketing tactics that are not only worth considering now but ones you should start implementing immediately.

A lot of people are creating their own product lines these days. It is a great way to build your brand and also create a source of income. Read more in detail here: how to create your own product line.

Building a genuine, consistent, and personality-driven brand sets you apart from the competition and helps your consumers to engage with you on a deeper level.

Creating a brand may be intimidating. Many small companies believe that it is something that only the “big boys” can afford. Branding, on the other hand, is something that any organization can accomplish provided they follow a few simple guidelines.

Table of Contents

What exactly is branding?

A brand is a whole ecosystem that governs how you interact with the outside world. In a word, your brand is a promise to your customers about how you will do business. Because the style, colors, and phrases you use should represent the feelings your consumers will experience when they use your product, this promise influences how you develop your website, produce your business card, and even respond to comments and remarks.

What is the best way to develop a brand?

Building a brand may be a straightforward process if the creative aspects are broken down into a few easy phases. Don’t worry if you find yourself going back over stages; it’s all part of the process of creating a brand identity. You can make a selection only to discover later that it clashes with other design aspects in your company.

Simply establish the foundation and come back to other aspects of your brand as needed. Let’s get this brand-building process started.

1. Research your target market and competition.

Any aspect of your business’s strategy should include some kind of market research, and branding is no exception. You must know the answers to queries such as, “Who is your target audience?” What makes your product or service superior to others? What are you capable of that no one else can?

Attempting to answer these questions will assist you in determining what will connect with your target clients as well as how other organizations in the market portray themselves. This might help you determine the direction of your branding initiatives right away. It will either assist in the elimination of possibilities that are already taken or do not resonate with clients. Alternatively, it will emphasize images, tone, content, and visuals that are most appealing to your target consumer. In any instance, it just helps you think more critically about your brand’s aesthetic and communication features.

2. Establish your brand

Your goods and services will not appeal to everyone. By being particular, your brand should reflect this. By having a distinct focus and a persona that your target market can relate to. When establishing your value proposition and mission statement, you’ve probably already gone through part of this. But, if you haven’t or need to hone in a little further, here are a few options.

Associating words

What would you use to describe your company? Is it friendly and approachable? What is the difference between educational and informative? Perhaps a touch naughty and mischievous?

In only 3-5 words, try to pin out your brand’s personality. This allows you to distill every aspect of your brand to its most basic form. Whether you’re not sure where to begin, consider defining your target audience first and seeing if those same terms match your brand’s image. Finally, this might aid in the definition of your voice and tone for both graphics and text.

What is your unique selling point?

If you haven’t previously, you should establish why your company is important. What sets it apart from the competition? For your consumers, what issue does it solve?

You must be aware of the advantages you give and how your products differ from those already available. You’ll have a hard time luring clients away from your competition if you don’t know or can’t describe it in a few phrases.

With a tweet, you can sell your brand.

Now it’s time to attempt to connect the remaining two parts. You know who you are as a businessperson and what value you bring to the table. Now attempt to condense all of those aspects into only 280 characters.

You’ll need to be able to accomplish this on a regular basis, but don’t be discouraged if you have trouble at first. It takes effort to fine-tune your messaging, but doing so from the beginning will make producing social and online content much simpler. It will also provide you with concise brand descriptions that you may build on in commercials, emails, long-form content, and so forth.

3. Decide on a name

Hopefully, your competition research and brand-defining tasks have already provided you with some choices for a name for your company. As previously said, branding is much more than just your name and logo, yet your name does carry some weight. It’s the word or phrase that ties all of your other brand pieces together in many ways, but it’s not what gives your brand personality.

Having said that, you should choose a name that is both distinctive and not presently in use. You want something simple to remember and wide enough to expand with your company. Now, coming up with a name might be tricky, so here are some suggestions.

Make a word out of two words.

Facebook, Snapchat, and Skillshare are just a few instances of combining descriptive terms. These brand names are memorable, assist in explaining the product (after you’ve grasped it), and are tough to imitate. To test whether the phrases you chose in your previous brand exercise work together, try utilizing a couple of them.

Make a claim to a well-known term.

Apple, Uber, Basecamp, and Slack are basic, everyday terms that have acquired a new meaning. Some trademarks, such as Basecamp, are more descriptive or symbolic than others. The rest have changed to reflect their product or service offers. Slack has even become a word that consumers use when referring to the transmission of an instant message.

To examine what could work here, go back to your first list of descriptions. You may also consider contemporary generic solutions that can be used as a modern company name.

Abbreviations or acronyms

You can’t seem to come up with a simple one-word company name? It may be time to come up with an acronym. CVS, AT&T, HBO, and other well-known companies don’t use their complete names, yet they’re all as recognizable. To get the similar effect, you may change words by eliminating vowels. Just a few examples spring to mind: Tumblr, Scribd, and Flickr.

Make certain your name isn’t already taken.

It’s critical that you double-check the availability of your name as you consider your possibilities. Finding the ideal company name only to discover it has already been trademarked may be a big bummer. For ideas and techniques to assist you check whether a name is taken or not, see this article on picking brand names.

4. Decide on your brand’s colors and font.

After you’ve decided on a name, you’ll need to visually establish your brand. For consumers, this is frequently the most emotive aspect, and it affects purchase psychology.

Color selection

Colors should evoke a sense in the viewer. While this is subjective in many respects, there are reasons why some sectors gravitate toward color combinations that are similar. Fast food, for example, will often use a yellow and red color scheme to evoke excitement, warmth, and play on your appetite.

Finding the proper shade of green, red, or the perfect blend of yellow and grey may do wonders for establishing an impenetrable position in your customer’s mind. It’s critical to create a brand color scheme that incorporates main driving colors as well as striking embellishments.

You’ll also have to think about the readability of white and black text against your color selections, as well as ADA compliance variances. To make this much simpler, strive to have many distinct colours in your palette that you can use in various branding settings.

Font selection

Typography is a subtle yet powerful approach to communicate your brand’s message. A contemporary sans-serif typeface communicates to the world that you’re creative and willing to solve problems in unexpected ways. A conventional serif typeface communicates to the world that you are reliable and trustworthy. You may even use a mix of serif and sans-serif font styles to create a completely distinct brand statement. Look at the typefaces used by firms with a similar brand to yours on their websites, print advertisements, and brochures.

Also bear in mind that you’ll probably want distinct font choices for headers and body content for online and advertising usage. This will allow the user to quickly distinguish the material without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of words.

5. Create a motto

Your value proposition is quite similar to your tagline or slogan. It’s a short, descriptive tagline that’ll often appear beside your logo, in advertising, in social profiles, and anywhere else it appears appropriate. A good slogan should be brief (no more than one phrase) and memorable. It should also include a modest call to action for your consumers, if possible.

Now, as your company expands, you may modify your tagline. You may discover that your value proposition evolves or changes, or that your initial interpretation no longer accurately reflects your brand. So don’t get too worked up over it, and continue to iterate and test slogan wording.

6. Gather photographs of the brand

Photography has the power to pique the interest—and wallets—of prospective clients. The impact of well-chosen images with a consistent theme on how your brand is regarded is significant. Consider Nike and how well their brand imagery communicates their brand message.

Start developing a library of photos that match your business by going to a couple photographic sources like Getty or iStock. See what comes up when you plug in the terms you identified in your word association exercise. This artwork may be used in advertising materials, on your website, and it should inspire you to create all of your branding materials.

Just make sure your picture use is consistent and fits your brand’s message. Additionally, hiring a photographer or taking images yourself to generate original imagery that is personal to your company may be a good idea at some point in the future.

7. Design your logo

Finally, we’re beginning to work on the logo. This is often the initial thought, although it should be addressed sometime in the middle of the design process. It’s all too simple to create a visually appealing image that has nothing to do with your brand’s fundamental message.

You now have font and color selections, as well as reference photos to aid you with your logo’s design. Before you begin creating it, think about where your logo will appear and how simple it will be to scale to various sizes. You may need to create several components or versions of your main logo to accommodate varied dimensions or usage scenarios. You’ll almost certainly wind up with a logo that includes your company name and an icon.

Look for methods to make things easier.

Starbucks, for example, has gradually reduced its logo to a single icon. On certain goods, they still maintain the original company name typeface and logo, but as their brand has grown, they’ve sought to remove the extra components.

Don’t be hesitant to evaluate and alter your logo over time, much like your slogan. Check out Canva’s logo builder if you’re looking for some ideas and a quick approach to design a logo.

8. Determine whatever branding assets you’ll need.

Hopefully, you’ve been thinking about this throughout the branding process, but now is the moment to figure out what brand assets you’ll need for your company. This goes beyond just establishing fundamental aspects and really assists you in creating a list of precise images to which your brand will need to respond. This contains items such as:

Webpages
Posts on social media
Advertisements on the internet
Assets in video
Business cards are used to promote a company.
Apparel
Advertisements in print
Headers in emails
Window clings

And they are only a few of the broad groups. You don’t need a comprehensive list to get started, and it could be more practical to divide them down into separate tasks that you can prioritize according to your company’s requirements. Most likely, you’ll want to start by adapting your branding to your website and then go on.

9. Create brand guidelines.

Making your branding official by developing brand rules is the last thing you’ll want to do. This will address the fundamentals of your brand as well as how it should be presented across various platforms. Most likely, you won’t have every scenario covered at first, but this will provide you with a source of truth to refer to when creating new pictures.

Working with a design business or hiring a designer to help lay your rules in stone may be the best option. However, if you want to make one yourself, you should look into the recommendations provided by other firms.

Go out there and make a name for yourself.

There you have it! The elements of a successful brand, such as your brand voice, images, colors, and type styles, are all wrapped up into a clever and completely engaging brand system.

Easy? No. Fun? Yes. Worthwhile? Absolutely. You’ll find a well-thought-out and strategic brand strategy in place at any of the world’s most successful organizations, such as Apple, Starbucks, and Nike. Simply remember these fundamental brand ideas, and you’ll have laid the groundwork for a company that will last the test of time.

*Editor’s note: This article was first published in 2013 and has now been revised for the year 2021.

Watch This Video-

In 2021, the world is going to be a very different place. The best way to build your brand in this new world is by creating a strong identity that resonates with people. Reference: how to create a brand identity.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you build a brand in 2021?

A: Its not easy to build a brand. You need an outstanding product, you need good advertising and marketing campaigns, you have to be creative with your social media efforts, and it doesnt hurt if you have angel investors that are willing to put their money on the line for what they believe in.

How do you develop a unique brand identity in 2021?

A:
To develop a unique brand identity in 2021, you would want to be focused on what your customer wants. You need to determine how customers will perceive the company and create an image that is not only attractive but also relevant for the target audience.

What is the best way to build your brand?

A: In order to build a brand, you need to make it known that they exist and what they do. You can also use marketing strategies such as advertising campaigns or PR firms in order to market your companys prowess.