Branding 101 for business owners

Once you make yourself a brand, you will make more money. Simple as that. Rest of this article will explain exactly why and how, and also telling you the steps to take.

Often, the core aim of business owners and internet marketers is to make money. All of them typically follow the same path. Getting the eyeballs by paying for ads, links, and more and then servicing their leads. Throughout this cycle, there’s one hidden gem that can amplify the effectiveness of all aspects: branding.

Branding works across media: advertising, website design, and even client communication. When you’re a brand, you make more money. It’s simple as that. As any business becomes more popular, it starts having an incoherent branding put together when the owner isn’t well-equipped with the right kind of resources. Here’s how: The businessowner gets a cheap logo done from Fiverr, gets some banners made from a guy they knew could do Photoshop, perhaps makes ads themselves and promotes those ads on social media and the Google network. Any documents required; they download it off the internet.

In all this, the business builds a highly chaotic and unorganized branding for itself which counteracts profits later. Make no mistake, you’ll still be building a branding, just a confusing, non-functional, and unprofitable one.

At a more later point, the business understands the importance of having a unique identity, a consistent design scheme (colors, fonts, icons) across social media platforms, an appealing and modern website, and so on.

What if you let branding step in on day 1 itself? It changes everything. Most importantly, it:

• Generates more money for you,
• Places you ahead of the garden-variety competition,
• Makes your products and services more believable and authoritative, and
• Gives you a direction to align your future expansion to.

What's included in branding?

Branding is not a list of items. It's everything taken together.

At this point, it’s important for you to understand that branding isn’t the combination of the logo, selected design scheme, logo usage guidelines, website, social media design strategy, and any other design work your business needs (from business cards and posters to animated ads and product catalog).

Branding is a mindset. In one sentence, here’s how to define branding:

What your consumers feel about your business or your products.

To build the perfect branding is a pointless task. The aim is to build the most unique branding. Sure, it has to look good and be functional. But making it unique is what makes it really work.

Think about it: your closest competitors and stalwarts in your industry use a specific strategy to pull customers and all of them use the same kind of colors and styles of logos. If you just try to copy them, what do you end up with? Another company in that niche.

It’s the final touch of uniqueness that makes your brand become recognizable. And it’s what the big companies do. Even among big, competing brands, you can find uniqueness. A brand chooses to specialize in high-end customers, for example. How does it make itself look luxury while separating itself from others? Branding. It changes its look and feel and positions itself differently.

When you make your branding unique, customers will retain what they learn about you, thus increasing your recall value. They will refer you when they remember you as something different, unique, and thoroughly devoted to what they are doing.

Is branding difficult?

You need to resemble something nobody else does. And it’s not that hard, frankly.

We’ve developed branding from scratch for companies that share the same niche and happen to have customers of the same psychographics and even spending power. Still, both companies had core differences in the design of its products and their presentation. This way, we’ve made them both the best in the industry, but they have their own laser-targeted mottos. They don’t share the same motto.

That’s what uniqueness does to your brand: separates you from even the closest competitor. And that’s very much important to retain consumers and make them refer you. This can be called carving a niche within a niche, if you may. Spamming consumers with newsletters is less effective than mass word-of-mouth that speaks about the quality of your offering, any day of the year, and you know you’d prefer it.

Doing effective branding boils down to having a USP and selling it in a particular fashion with a style, a personality. You’re still selling, just selling with a personality. Yes, if you copy a personality of another business then you’re not building branding. It will be punished in due time. But setting your own mood – colors, fonts, icons, style, design treatment, what elements to use, what elements to not use, how to display important things, how to present information, how to run the social media campaigns, what platforms to target, what style of ads to make, and on and on – is a fruitful way to do branding.

To repeat, it carves a niche for you within the industry. You’ll be remarked and shared. You will defeat your competitor. You will fulfil your goals.

Why do businesses often fail to make good branding?

There are two reasons for businesses failing to become recognized brands with their own mood and personality reflected through their face and communication:

#1: Not knowing or caring about branding

If one doesn’t know what branding is or care about doing it, there’s little point in believing they’ll get it done anyway. Branding costs good money and for good reason. If the boat can sail with separate assets designed with no common theme, like a logo, website, newsletter, business card, and an intermittent advertising plan with no social media strategy, then there’s no point in getting any branding or identity design work done.

Except if you don’t want to be on a boat, that is. To build a ship, one will need branding. It’s as sure as the sun rising in the east. Some understand it later while others are early adopters. If you’re late too, others will build their ships sooner. If you do it wrong, your ship will sink. Too many ifs. Good branding is extremely important, whether you let this article teach you that or whether you learn it yourself 6 months from now while running your business and doing marketing for it.

#2: Branding itself not being something everyone understands or knows of

Branding is not as popular as advertising, or buying backlinks for your website for example. It’s not as popular as having a social media. It’s not as important as having appealing and informative newsletters, SEO, or digital marketing.

But in reality, it’s a mix of it all and more – but not talked about.

That’s why I feel confident calling it the hidden gem. When every business learns about how branding can be so important, they’ll jump into the boat. Currently only those are jumping in that are already somewhere and it’s easier for them to become unique as they already know what their customers feel about them and what they want them to feel. They pretty much have a mood; they just need to translate it into something tangible and measurable – enter branding.

Tweaking their branding, even just a little, they arrive at the ideal image and perception that the business needs to propagate a particular vision. To build business the way they want it to be built. To steer their audience in a specific direction and nudge them gently towards performing the actions they want them to.

How does branding look like in real life situations?

Let me give you a little example. You’re driving through a highway. When you look at a road sign while driving for “stop”, it’s often red, bold, and uses an icon. Why?

• Red signifies danger.
• Bolding makes it prominent as it’s an important sign.
• Iconic representation of something transcends the language barriers and everyone can understand the stop sign.

On the same highway, you get road signs that tell you the distance (the longest one is perhaps the Provincetown, MA – 3205 miles!). It’s simple white text on green with the optional inclusion of the route number. Why?

• White on green is visible from a distance.
• The font used is highly kerned. That was some technical design lingo – kerning means the space between letters, so highly kerned means that the text has plenty of space between its letters. It makes it easy enough to read quickly and from a distance.
• The route number is just the highway blip with a number on it, which is a great example of compressing information. Instead of writing “Route 66, Illinois” all the designer has to do is put the number 66 on the highway blip/icon.

You see, branding is all around us. Government designers using highway branding makes sure when you end up in Oregon, you still know the number on blip on a green signboard means the route and the hand sign on red means stop. While driving, we don’t have a lot of time, and these signs convey the message very quickly, very effectively.

The government has no USP here. They’re not looking for perfect branding, even though public transportation departments across the developed world tend to hire talented designers to build impeccable, accessible, and straightforward communication design. Imagine what a business with a USP, a propaganda can do in its branding. The possibilities are very high.

Anyhow, the hidden USP in the highway example above is serving precise information and serving it up fast and possibly from a great distance. A bad designer will make highway signs that aren’t readable until you’re very close, or those that use a bright red tint on a flat, teal backdrop making it “glare” and irritate the passer-by. Bad design is worse than no design, but still, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine no highway branding.

Different US states will have their own decorative signboarding, and of course other countries too. So, when you finally decide to vacationing by the Niagara Falls, then you’ll find that the Ontario design team gives road information their own spin and makes waterfall-themed directions. You’ll end up at the base of the Falls – that’s what’s going to happen, put aside the confusion, referring to guides and maps, and information exchange that will no doubt be required.

Two things we learned:

1. Branding makes things more consistent, trustworthy, and less confusing. It gives you a direction. And every future work (like a new route, for example) will most likely require less time.
2. Slight changes like red vs. green make a huge impact. Color is indeed a very important part of branding.

To be honest, many other parts are also very important in branding, but the technicalities involved in describing exactly how choosing the right font, or even the right font weight, are simply overwhelming and nobody wants to hear that. A professional design team is like a magic wand, so to speak. They know the finer details, little nuances, and what makes a design work.

Bad design can lead to a dumpster fire in no time. Fixing a fire is always a gigantic task. Doing clean, modern, functional, good, and aesthetically pleasing branding since the beginning is a much simpler and interesting one.