Your brand identity is what sets your brand apart from others and builds a strong customer base. Find out how to make yours!
A brand identity can include everything from your business’ tone of voice, the colors and illustrations that appear on your website, the font in your letters and invoices, the way you interact with customers, to your slogan and values.
Let’s take a closer look at these, and how to make sure you build a strong brand identity for your business.
What makes up a brand identity?
You can divide brand identity elements into three categories: the visual elements, the verbal elements, and the experienced elements.
Experienced elements
A good brand identity should begin with company values. Company values are a set of keywords that shapes how your organization operates, makes decisions and interacts with customers.
Examples of company values for a small local company could be motivated, friendly, and service-minded while a national upscale brand could go for sophisticated, traditional, and knowledgeable.
These are just examples, you’ll have to figure out exactly how you want your brand to appear to customers.
Your visual identity
Your logo is one of the most visible parts of your brand identity. Your logo can appear on your website, in your emails, your letterheads, your social media accounts, as well as your contracts and invoices.
If you don’t have a logo yet, you can actually create one quickly in Word, Figma, or Photoshop. See how to create a logo.
Fonts and colors are certainly secondary visual identity markers, but they’re still important. It’s a hard sell to establish a sophisticated brand if you use comic sans as your font, for example, or to show that you care about the details if you use a standard font like Times New Roman.
Your verbal identity
While you don’t need to have a slogan, it can help make your brand more memorable. Some highly successful slogans are Nike’s Just Do It or McDonald’s I’m Lovin’ It.
The verbal identity also includes the words you use, for example, if you’re selling to industry experts you’ll have to use the words and phrases they use to convey your expertise. On the other hand, if you’re selling to the everyman, clear language can work way better.
You should have a document that outlines your voice and tone: Are you formal, informal? Funny or serious? Subtle or loud? The voice and tone document can also outline how you deal with active versus passive voice, abbreviations, how you write numbers and dates, whether you use emojis and so on.
Why is brand identity important?
Brand identity matters. Here are just some of the perks of having a solid brand identity:
- You’re more likely to be remembered by existing customers, which is great for retention and repeat purchases
- You build strong customer loyalty, which is a great asset if there’s a market downturn
- Customers might feel more comfortable recommending you to others
- You’re more likely to be top-of-mind when new customers need your product or services
- You might be able to charge more for your products. This is called value-based pricing and is covered in our ultimate guide to pricing strategies
- You can attract clients that align strongly with your brand identity, for example price-conscious customers, eco-friendly customers, or other niche customer segments
How to make your own brand identity
Here’s what we recommend you set up:
- Values that define how your brand operates
- A style guide, which outlines how you write, for example how you handle abbreviations, currencies and so on. Tone and voice should be part of the style guide. See for example Mailchimp’s voice and tone
- A logo—here’s how to make one
Start by working out your values: It should be something you feel very strongly about and that sets you apart from your competition.
You should use this as an opportunity to position yourself in the market. In order to do that, you have to have a clear idea of how you want to be perceived.
If your competition is exclusive and expensive, maybe you want to go for a more down-to-earth brand that can appeal to a larger audience? On the other hand, maybe you think your competition is too basic, and you want to position yourself as the smarter, more sophisticated solution?
The values inform how you sell and market to customers, how you provide support, and how you onboard them.
Your values can be used to work out a style guide, a customer service routine, as well as business documents, email templates, and whatever else you need.
Common brand identity mistakes
There are some things you should keep in mind when deciding on your brand identity.
Make sure to deliver on what you promise. Don’t market yourself as having the best customer service, if you’re not going to be able to live up to the high bar you’re setting. Don’t promise 5-day delivery if you, literally, can’t deliver on it.
If you have staff, make sure they know the brand as well as you do. It’s a great idea to include them in the branding process, such as having a workshop to come up with the right values, a feedback meeting so they can voice their opinions, an employee survey or similar.
Make sure the brand identity is celebrated internally, and make sure it shines through in all your customer interactions too.
