Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Many entrepreneurs, especially ones who operate solely online put all of their branding efforts into their website and then fall short when it comes to supporting brand assets. Your brand will be judged by all of its brand material or assets and not just your website. For some, the reason is resource constraints.
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During the startup phase and even once you are up and running marketing and design budgets are often small or none existent. This isn’t an excuse to publish or print branding material that doesn’t compliment your website as there are free do-it-yourself design tools available. Let’s look at some helpful tips on how you can support your website with matching brand material.
Your Branding Starts With Your Logo And Not Your Website
If you are reading this article you most likely already have a logo and website. The right way to go about your branding is to create your logo first, informing all of your creative decisions. The style and color choices you make for your logo set the tone for all of your other brand assets like your website.
Hopefully, you chose those carefully before you designed your website. If you didn’t that’s ok, we can reverse-engineer the process. Take a look at your website and pay attention to how your logo blends in.
Does the look and feel match both of them? If not you can either adjust the main colors used across your website to include your logo’s core color or the other way around. In most cases, it’s easier to adjust your website colors since your logo is probably used across other branding material already.
How Consistent Is Your Website?
Since we are already reviewing your website let’s dive a bit deeper before shifting our focus to other brand assets like social media, business cards, posters, etc. Whether your website was custom-built or you chose a template it must be consistent.
For starters make sure your abstract or text logo appears in the top left corner on every single page of your website.
Don’t forget those orphaned pages that don’t get much traffic or attention. In addition, repeat your logo’s main color across all of your pages in some form. This will not only tie your logo together with that particular page but give your website a cohesive look.
Build Out Matching Brand Assets
With your logo and website in place, it’s time to build out branding assets that complement each other and support your website. It’s best to take a disciplined and deliberate approach as you build out marketing channels like your business’ social media accounts, banner ads, email newsletters, business cards, and more.
Each brand asset should include your logo in a high-resolution format and in the right dimensions. Nothing screams amateur brand like a blurry or skewed logo. With your logo in place make use of your core branding colors. Not only will this give your brand cohesiveness but add a nice visual touch. With the main color in place, you can then implement secondary colors that complement your brand in subtle ways like hover states, illustrations, icons, etc.
Brand recognition is about repetition. When your potential leads and customers have the same visual experience whether they visit your blog, read your brochure, or walk into your brick-and-mortar store they will start to view you as a professional and memorable brand.
There are other ways to enforce brand recognition besides logo and color. Leverage visual aids like images, icons, and fonts to build even more cohesiveness. Of course, these are great tools to elevate the quality of your graphic design. When it comes to incorporating these types of visual enhancements the trick is to find one particular set for each and use those exclusively across all of your designs. This will ensure you don’t mix and match different styles.
Take Advantage Of Free Resources
Designing an entire branding set requires time and resources. Luckily there are some wonderful free design resources that can help you build a professional and consistent brand for your web business without breaking the bank. You can’t become a branding designer overnight but if you utilize the right tools and stick to the tips here you can create a beautiful brand without much design experience. Here are a few design resources to get you started:
- Pablo: Your social media accounts are probably your second most important branding and promotional tool after your website. Pablo lets you create professional social media post designs for free.
- Business Cards: Just because you operate mostly online doesn’t mean you should neglect offline promotions. Try a free design tool to create matching business cards.
- Stock Snap: Images are a powerful visual tool. Use a free resource like Stock Snap to find professionally shot images for your brand assets.
