We are bombarded with visual information on a daily basis with everyone, everything and every app vying for our attention.
It's no wonder we feel overwhelmed and have a love/hate relationship with social media.
Understanding how to get your message across will help you attract the right-fit clients to your business, get more people signing up to work with you and ultimately help you earn more money with a lot less effort.
When your ideal client stumbles across one of your posts on social media, or you get a word-of-mouth referral and people click on your website to check you out, what do they think? What do you want them to think? How do you want them to feel about your brand?
Your message
When you're communicating a very clear message about what you do and who its for, you make your ideal client feel like they are in the right place. They feel connected to you and like you really understand them.
As humans we're wired to connect with others and we connect best with those who share similar values and beliefs as us.
How do you want your ideal client to feel about you and your brand? What impression are you giving off?
Branding is all about shaping how your ideal client feels about you. It's about the emotional response people have towards you & your brand
Your brand personality
Think of your brand as a person with real personality traits. What three adjectives would you use to describe your brand?
Loyal, Fun, friendly, funny, adventurous, trustworthy, cool, vibrant, timeless, traditional, vintage, creative, spiritual, eco-conscious, care-free, youthful, rough, outdoorsy, accomplished, sophisticated and so on.
For example, mine are:
Trustworthy
Relatable
Friendly
Go ahead and write them down.
Pick your main colour
As we know, branding is all about how you make your ideal client feel. Refer to your ideal client avatar from my previous blog post, and keep them front of mind as you go through these next steps.
Colours are subjective. For example in the West red is seen as a powerful and sometimes aggressive colour, whereas in China it symbolises joy and luck. So it's obviously important to know who you're speaking to.
Western colour psychology shows us how the different colours can evoke various emotions.
Have a look at these well-known companies, the colours they have chosen for their logos and what sort of feeling these colours give off.
Now go ahead and pick ONE COLOUR that's going to give off the right message about you and your business:
Once you have that one colour, you can look at colour palettes and pick one that you really like with your main branding colour included.
Typically a colour palette would have 5-6 colours. You can do some colour palette research on Pinterest (for example search for "colour palette green")
Here are some other resources:
Really beautiful colour palettes that you can search for by colour
This is a free tool and easy to use. You can upload a photo and colour pick from it to get the exact colour codes. You can also use it to generate colour palettes for you
This is a bit more advanced, where you can find colours using the colour wheel. For example, if you put your main colour code in, you can see what the complimentary colour is to your main colour by checking which colour sits on the exact opposite side of the colour wheel. Sometimes this works well to use the opposite colour of your primary colour as your accent colour - so for call-to-action buttons so they really stand out on your website but don't clash with the colour palette
Loads of colour palettes of all sorts here!
Choosing the right FONTS for your brand
So we know that colours evoke emotions, but did you know that fonts also have characteristics that can give off an impression?
Some fonts look fancy, some look friendly, some look techy, some look personal...
Sans Serif fonts are clean, stylish, elegant, orderly, fine, chic warm and modern
Script fonts come across as elegant, classic, feminine, contemporary, playful and personal
Serif fonts evoke feelings of safety, reliability, tradition, authority, and honesty
What impression do you want to give off?
I recommend picking 2 fonts - one for your logo and headings, and another for your website's body copy (smaller text).
Primary font
Your primary font is your main brand font and can be used for your logo, headings and social posts. When used in conjunction with your specific brand colours, people will recognise it’s you without even seeing your logo.
Secondary font:
Choose a secondary font that looks good as body copy. You need to be able to read it easily if it's in paragraph format. Fancy, curly fonts don't work well, nor do handwritten style fonts because they're not as easy to read.
Call to action font:
If you really want to have a third font, you can use it for your Call To Action buttons. I don't recommend having more that 2-3 fonts because it can start to look messy.
Font pairings:
Do a bit of Pinterest research for inspiration, but make sure the fonts you choose are free and available for use (or you can purchase them). With Wix you can upload a font and use it in the design, or you can use what they already have installed (plenty to choose from)
Resources:
Do some research on Pinterest. Here's a link to my Pinterest board that can help you with font pairing. You can also have a look for free fonts on the websites listed below, just remember to check their licenses and make sure you're allowed to use them.
Your logo
Your logo is a single representation of your entire brand.
If your logo is standing alone without any other content around it, will people be able to tell what it is that you do?
If not, I recommend adding a tagline.
The colours in your logo need to be the exact same colours as you've chosen in your colour palette, so make sure the colour codes match.
Also make sure you're using your branding fonts (and that you're allowed to use those fonts or have purchased the license if they aren't free fonts).
Make sure your logo is easy to see and read when it's small, and have a simplified version of it that you can use as a favicon on your website and as a social media stamp.
And last but not least, you need to be consistent. Make sure every bit of content you create on your website and even with design platforms like Canva, you are using your exact brand fonts and colours. Consistency is key to creating a strong brand.
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