What Is Branding

Branding is one of those buzzwords that few people genuinely understand despite being seen and heard all over the business blogosphere. This is especially true with small businesses and coaches trying to make their mark in the world. So what is branding?

Yes, your logo, website design, colors, fonts, and profile photos are essential to building an online presence.  But you brand is more than just a logo, website design, or color palette. 

Why Is Branding Important?

You brand lets people know what you do. But, more importantly, it lets the world know who you do it for. 

Your audience has to know, like and, trust you before they’re ready to pay you for your services. And your brand increases awareness of your services and products, making it easier to attract the right clients so you can do your best work. 

Brand Guide Basics To You Get Started

Choose Your Business Logo

A logo makes it easy for others to recognize your business. It can convey emotions, quality, and authority.

So choose your logo wisely. But don’t get hung up on this step. Something simple and clean works for most small businesses.

Use your logo consistently throughout your website, email marketing, advertising, and social media. The more people see it, the more memorable it becomes. 

Discover Your Brand’s Colors

Colors do more than make your website look pretty. They elicit emotional responses and build trust among your audience. 

When choosing a color scheme, think about the feeling, emotions, and personality, you want your brand to portray. You can google “color psychology” to learn about colors’ meaning.

Here are some resources you can use:

Canva

Canva is a graphic-design tool for non-designers that makes it easy to create beautiful and professional designs. 

Use their color palette generator by uploading a photo or find inspiration from these 100 brilliant color combinations they’ve put together.

ColorPick Eyedropper and Coolors

ColorPick Eyedropper, a Google Chrome extension, lets you identify color values used on other sites. 

You can take those color values and plug them into Coolors, an online color scheme generator, to find other complementary colors or even get inspired with their beautiful color schemes.

With the Coolors platform, you can export or share your palette, which provides the Hex# (web) RGB (screen) and CMYK (print) color codes.

You’ll need these color codes for your Canva designs and to give your web designer and developer or graphic designer.

Find the Right Typography and Fonts for Your Brand

Typography is the way you arrange type to make your message readable and appealing. You can use modern, traditional, playful, or sleek font styles to represent your brand. 

Focus on three fonts: A strong font for your titles, a clean font for headers, the body of your paragraphs and the text on your marketing materials and one with some personality to accent your brand, like a modern script.

Think about your clients and services. How would you describe them? Formal? Casual? Serious? Playful? 

Canva’s Ultimate Guide to Font Pairing can help you learn more about typography and be a valuable reference for your business. 

Find fonts using resources like Google Fonts, Creative Market, Adobe Type Kit, and MyFonts. There are plenty of others, but these are some go-to resources to make it easier for you to get started. 

If you want to stick with Google Fonts, check out TypeWolf’s blog post, A Curated Collection of the 40 Best Google Fonts.

These resources can help you start building your brand guide. But remember that your brand as a small business owner transcends design–it grows and evolves alongside your business.

As you work with more clients and deliver the highest level of service, your brand will secure a strong position in your current and future clients’ minds. You become the obvious choice when they need the solutions your services and products provide.

If this sounds like something you do not have a lot of time to spend on, take a look at my Mini Branding Package. It’s perfect for small business owners who just need the basics!