Branding is more than just a specific set of graphics on a computer screen.
Branding your business can aid you in standing out from your competitors while adding value to your product and engaging with your customers.
With this branding checklist for online businesses, we will provide you with all the actions needed to ensure that you create a modern, cohesive and responsive brand.
Branding Checklist for Online Businesses
1. Determine the Level of Branding Required
Before you start the process of branding from scratch, it is worthwhile to investigate whether it will be needed. Maybe the modernization of an existing brand would be better.
Your branding must be reviewed from time to time, whether you are a small online business or a corporate giant. Sometimes a small update to the new era can drastically change the perception of your target audience.
2. Create a Customer Persona for Your Target Audience
Before you can do anything about your brand, you will need to have a persona, the ideal customer, representing the audience you want to communicate with your brand. That will help to form the base of everything else you do moving forward from this point.
Points to consider must include the following:
- Age and gender of consumers
- Lifestyle and hobbies of consumers.
- Why do they need your product, their pains, and challenges?
- Occupations and business background.
- Where can they be found online, their social media channels, and social media platforms?
If you already have a website with organic traffic or social media presence, you can find a wealth of information using analytics software.
If you want to start a new brand, you will have to use these questions to visualize your target demographic in conjunction with your product.
This step will help a lot to position your brand among competitor's brands and may create new ideas regarding targeting, your logo, and other facets of your branding adventure
3. Determine How You Will Utilize Branding
Now that you know your target audience, you need to determine the most practical and worthwhile idea to carry out your brand to them.
Branding is more than just your logo. But logos and branded assets are common to advertise your brand. Keep this in mind for scaling and mediums in the future.
In our digital age, logos need to be responsive. Vector-based graphic images are indispensable when it comes to designing logos, emblems, and images.
Vector-based images can adapt to your screen's resolution and be visualized on any social platform by any device, from a computer to a smartphone.
Branding should be used on all communication networks like social media channels, email marketing, and email newsletters.
4. Research Brands Within Your Industry or Niche and Get Inspiration
The goal here is not to copy your competitors but to see the industry norm to strive towards a better branding and marketing strategy than what they have. During this phase, you will have to implement what appeals to you and your target audience and what to avoid.
5. Choose A Domain Name
Choose a domain name at the same time when you are setting up your branding to ensure that your domain name has options available.
It is essential to develop a catchy and unique name that will appeal to your target audience. Your name must be able to translate and take effect across all platforms.
Take these points into consideration when creating a name that will create a buzz and interest.
How will the name display? On the web, for a social media user as well as a search engine. It is advised to have names as short as possible, seeing that search engines limit the length in SERPs.
What emotion does the name evoke? As an online business, you will carry out a corporate company profile or a family business. Does it coincide with your ideal customer persona, and does it reflect the mission and values of your business?
The name and URL need to be unique. Make sure that the name or URL/domain is not being used already by someone else. BrandBucket can help you to ensure that the name is available on all channels.
6. Design Your Logo and Color Scheme
After all, the research has been done, and you know everything to put your logo together so that you can have a brand that your ideal customers will love. It will be your company's identity and be a visual trigger for your target audience to consume.
Create a brand style guide to follow in your online business to ensure that the brand stays unique. You can include things like this:
- Color size and placement
- Color palette
- Typography and fonts
- Iconography
- Photography styles
- Web elements
If you're looking for a good tool for color palettes, Coolors.com is worth checking out.
7. Create a Great and Loved Slogan
Creating a unique slogan that is unique and reflects your product will give you an advantage over competitors.
8. Get Social
Social media marketing is exceptionally popular as a marketing strategy, and you will have to exploit it to its utmost. Sign your online business up with all social media platforms to introduce every social media user to your brand and products on the web.
Remember to make all efforts on the web responsive. That will ensure that all social media users with any device can see your logo, brand, and products the way it is.
Use social media marketing to get every visitor into your sales funnel to maximize conversion and broaden the expanse of your brand.
FAQs
What are the Critical Elements Of Branding?
The branding process is completed only after you have defined and considered these five key elements: promise, position, personality traits, story, and associations.
What is a Social Media Marketing Plan?
Creating your social media marketing plan shouldn't be painful. A social media marketing plan is everything you plan to execute and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you are succeeding or failing. The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will be.
What Should Branding Include?
A logo, packaging, typography, and personality include brand, customer service, price, product quality, and corporate liability, but the brand is a bit more intangible. It's emotional, visual, and human.
Recommendations
Looka can generate beautiful and unique logos by making use of sophisticated artificial intelligence. The software gives you complete freedom to design a logo by providing you with all the tools. You don't need experience seeing that Looka will seamlessly bring together all the elements you need for a perfect logo design experience.
Looka is an advanced logo design software package with awesome premium fonts, icons, and graphics that will ensure your logo is an authentic representation of the brand.
Their online software helps to make designing a logo easy, pleasurable, and fast.
No templates are available. Each and every logo is unique, thanks to the artificial intelligence that brings together different aspects that satisfy your needs.
Logo Garden is a small business that offers two options when wanting to create a logo. They provide a do-it-yourself process to design a professional-looking logo and business cards. They also customize logos where they take the custom information and create a logo and business cards for you.
99Designs is based on design contests. Your design is entered into a contest where designers will compete for the best design. The more you pay, the more designers will compete, and you can choose the best one.
Fiverr is an agency where freelancers from all over the work can participate in getting jobs from customers.
You can select the best freelancer based on the gig everyone has on their portfolio
Conclusion
Using a branding checklist is vital for any online business. Branding is such a broad and complex process, and it is easy to let something slip by. Using these checks enables you to pay attention to all the points you need to address with your branding effort.
You can download our Branding Checklist for Online Businesses, for free, here and use this to work through the process.
Dig deep into the branding adventure. The deeper you enter into it, the better results you can expect from branding. It is not a one-time action but must be done using social media regularly and includes interaction with existing clients to attract potential clients.
