If you’re in the early stages of starting your small business, you might be in the process of thinking about factors such as branding and logo design. Branding is the imagery and text you will use to make your business identifiable and keeping it consistent across the board is really important. But why is brand consistency so important and what can we do to keep our branding in line?
A Consistent Brand Identifies Your Business
As we said above, brand consistency makes your business identifiable as one cohesive entity, and this image is what carries your brand. When designing your website, you’ll need a logo and this logo is what you should be using across branded products, your email footer, business cards, social media accounts and anything else you want people to know is you. Ensuring that both your messaging and visual branding is clearly and consistently applied across all communication channels makes sense, as strong consistent branding reinforces your identity.
A Consistent Brand Sets a Tone
Branding is important in helping people to recognise the mission of your business. If you’re a serious professional, you’ll want your branding to be professional, whereas if you’re a childrens entertainer, super-sleek business cards might make you look a bit dull! Think of how you want to be seen by customers and try to get that into your branding.
A Consistent Brand Makes You Look More Professional
We’ve said it before, but there’s little that’s more confusing than going onto a social media page for a business and finding a load of personal pictures and a complete lack of branding. It gives the impression that you aren’t really serious about your business (with a few exceptions, such as doula services which are intrinsically very personal) and makes it look more like a hobby. Investing in professional services to design your logo and create your branding also sends a message to your customers that you’re a serious person who is willing to invest in their business.
A Consistent Brand Simply Looks Nicer
When setting out your branding, something you also need to think about is fonts and letter sizing. It’s all well and good having set colours, but lettering is also an easy identifier, and using the same fonts and set sizes for different documents and images will give you a level of brand consistency that looks tidy and highly professional. You can’t please everybody all of the time, but you can guarantee that you’ll find far more people who are put-off by your branding if there’s a lack of consistency!
A Consistent Brand Makes Life Easier
From a purely administrative point of view, having set guidelines for your brand really does make your life easier. Working to very strict parameters of fonts, sizing, colours and logos means that you don’t have to make design decisions every time you create an email template, Instagram image or Facebook advert. Knowing exactly what you’re doing reduces the time you’ll spend on these tasks, all while doing the important job of maintaining your branding.
