5 Things to Consider When Branding

Knowing your brand is half the battle, communicating it is the other half.

A brand is a promise to your customers, teams, organizations, leads, clients and so on. That’s why even the smaller organizations spend upwards of $2500 on logos alone. Knowing your brand and vision is huge, but means nothing if you’re not sticking to it everywhere you’re visible.

Today we’re sharing some tips on how to brand your content from creation to delivery:

1. Creating & Organizing Assets

Having easy-to-access assets such as logos, images and copy is the foundation for every step thereafter. In today’s multimedia landscape, it’s easy to get lost in all the formats and channels you’ll end up using. Because there are so many different outlets from computers, mobile devices, streaming and traditional media like hard copies, compatibility is key. One simple step is creating/storing all image assets as vectors, which are graphics meant to be scaled anywhere from a business card to a full-on billboard.

Make sure to keep track of all up-to-date assets by removing any old/used ones. For example, if your logo changes even one digit on the color-hex, get rid of the old iterations to avoid inconsistencies.

2. Committing to a Style Guide

Have you noticed the ever-present red on anything Coca-Cola related? You definitely recognize the Coca-Cola cursive font. Well, the beverage giant is a prime example of a brand style guide user. This is the collection of choices a brand uses when considering typography, color, lexicon, icons, and so on.

When considering things like font and color palettes, there’s no one-glove-fits-all approach. Instead, it’s important that you (and your team) understand your brand’s core mission and what emotional ties that brings. From there, make deliberate choices on what colors and icons evoke your brand, then build on that.

Some sage advice is to stick to simple imagery and more timeless styles. Don’t make the mistake of jumping on a current trend when making this long-term choice for branding. That’s an easy way to set your brand up to look dated within years or months.

Finally, things like speech can go a long way for the brand. Think about the Grateful Dead and its legion of fans, the Deadheads. As one of the more iconic fanbases in music history, Deadheads serve as an extension of the band itself in terms of branding. It’s an identity and experience that these fans represent and having a name ties it all together.

Employ the same mindset when considering the vocabulary you use to describe your product, experience, customers or even community. Shout out to the Squadzilla!

3. Consistency on Social Media

As we mentioned, there’s so many different channels, media and outlets that you’ll have to navigate; however, social media is one of the most important. For the sake of this post, we’re not specifying which social media, but instead giving broader advice across all channels.

The first step is simple: understand your brand's mission and messaging. Though this seems obvious, a lot of brands fail to jot down their vision and instead rely on an ethereal consciousness across conversations, emails, Slack chats and outdated notes to explain said vision. Next, use the same version of your logo and copy across all profiles.

As consistency is key, make sure you have a content calendar of some sort to schedule posts in advance. This ensures you have a roadmap, naturally increasing engagement with followers. When you map out content, make sure your brand is always present somehow. Avoid going overboard with ambush marketing, to a point where your brand is an afterthought.

4. Branding Your Delivery

You’ve done it. You got your brand style guide, your pithy copy and perhaps even a kitschy logo that will become synonymous with your market… but you’re tuckered out and cutting corners on delivering the content itself outside social media, marketing efforts and websites. Don’t do that.

A huge part of branding is the 1-on-1 experience itself. Consider all the different types of box subscriptions and how they’ve redesigned packaging over and over again. The actual experience of receiving that product is the most important facet of the brand. So when it comes to something less tangible like software or video delivery, you should be taking the same approach.

For example, MediaZilla enables its users to customize video projects and collections to fit their brand. The platform also provides a way to customize email invitations so that your kick-ass content feels like a red carpet event for only the exclusive; or for more corporate entities, it feels like an extension of your company instead of an outside service.

Above is an example of an established institution using MediaZilla to brand its video delivery process.

5. Taste Testing Your Brand

A common practice for communicating an idea is the elevator pitch. You know, the ol’ “can you get across your idea in the same duration of an elevator ride or a stop at a red light?” While an effective tool for journalists and cold-callers, we find that turning that dynamic around and putting the onus on the listener is a better fit for communicating brand.

Once you’ve taken some time to ideate your brand and create assets, get some outside opinions. You’ve been looking at the same content and branding for weeks, perhaps years, and so it’s easy to become tunnel-visioned at the sight of your brand. Grab a friend, family member or a stranger and let them interact with your branding either directly or indirectly, without any direction. Then pick their brain on what your brand means to them. What’s your promise? What are your team colors? What is your community referred to as? You get the gist.

And if the tools are at your disposal, poll your clients/teams. Ask them about what your brand is to them or how consistent they feel the brand is.