In part one, I discussed how your headshot and logo can create an effective first impression of your brand, and start to tune your clients onto your brand message, but first impressions are far from the whole picture. In this post I plan to discuss a few tools to help ensure your brand grows up big and strong.

Your brand message is who you are and what makes you unique; it’s your aspirations, virtues, history and value proposition. The tool you use to communicate this message is your branding, and is made up of everything people see, hear, and think about your brand. The latter is hard to control, as it takes time to build up an association between your brand identity and values, but exercising consistent control over the first two will help you get there. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if people recognise your values - they could even mistakenly associate them with a competitor - if they don’t recognise they’re talking to you immediately.

Whether visually or verbally, consistency is key to becoming recognisable. Identify elements of your branding, whether visual such as colours, typefaces, image treatments, or verbal, such as specific words you use or don’t use, your biography or tone of voice, and use them, and reuse them until your clients become accustomed to seeing them, and know who they represent.

For example, I could show you a specific shade of purple, a product name starting with “Mc,” or a horrendous advert featuring a talking animal, and you’ll probably identify them as Cadbury, McDonald’s and Optus, even without seeing the logo. Nike’s brand isn’t great because they have a great logo, it’s great because they’ve been hammering the same nail for so long everyone recognises their brand, and associates what they’re seeing with Nike’s values of being one's best and to “just do it.”

Visual Identity

The way to develop a consistent visual appearance is quite simple; write down rules. Develop a style guide, or brand bible, to outline all the rules of how you present your brand, and follow them to the letter, whenever possible. Make sure you have rules that cover things like:

• Size, placement, and requisite breathing room for your logo. If you have variants, such as horizontal/vertical, or compact versions, when should each be used? And as importantly, when shouldn’t they?

• Typography. Do not underestimate how much your typographic styles can add to your overall polished appearance, or how much personality can be expressed through them. Make sure you select typefaces that reflect your brand, and give yourself rules for headings, body copy, and pop-out or display text.

• If you also have text overlaying images, remember that consistent typography will help tie different image styles to your brand, and consistent image treatments will have the same effect on inconsistent typography. Give yourself examples of text+image treatments so you know your next image will still look like you, and to make sure you won’t have legibility issues if you move from a light to a dark graphic.

• Colour can be very emotive and add a lot of visual interest, but potentially create visual noise. You should carefully consider your brand's colour palette and any rules surrounding their use. Ensure you have both RGB or HSL and CMYK or Pantone values for all colours to make sure they always look the same. Your colours will never be recognisable if you don’t reproduce them accurately, and remember your CMYK and RGB colours may not look the same on your screen, as screen and print are inherently different.

• Embellishments. Having additional visual elements and treatments can give a lot of creative freedom. For example, a bookmark or card may not need your logo on both sides, but that doesn’t mean the reverse should go unbranded - having a reusable pattern, graphic library, or other such visual elements will help you fill these gaps, and save you from repeating the same logo again and again.

• Photographic and graphical style. Specifying a consistent mood and tonality will help you build up a strong image library, and ensure multiple images look good in combination, and continue to build your brand message. Set rules regarding use of stock photos, cliches, lighting and poses, and reuse your image treatments religiously. Whether your images come from a professional photographer, iStock, or your smartphone, running them through the same treatment will ensure they don’t look out-of-place.

• Web-specific elements. Whilst cataloguing your visual elements don’t neglect your web presence, such as call-to-action links, your information flow, or your 404 page. Although these may not appear in quite so many places as the above elements, they should still be recognisably you. Whilst Facebook, G+ and Twitter have different sizes for their cover images (which is itself an important part of their branding), make sure the images you use are identifiably and thematically similar, and use the same avatar across the board.

• Stationary, both print and digital. Your corporate letterhead probably won’t change much, but what does you email signature look like? Will you add some handlebars in Movember, or a santa hat in December? Do you have a custom Mailchimp template, or does your newsletter look like everyone else’s?

Whilst it may seem stringent, a good style guide is actually a licence for creativity - your designer won’t have to play it safe, as long as they’re on brief and don’t break the rules, as well as offering a toolset that can be used to tie things back to your brand. And for times you can’t engage a creative, like if you just really need to just pump out a quick image, newsletter, etc., a good style guide will let you simply colour within the lines. If you already know what your logo, type and images look like, how far wrong can you go?

Verbal Identity

Of course, not all of your communication is visual, sometimes you have to actually use words, so it’s important you continue to do so with a consistent tone and style. This can be especially true if you have multiple points of contact - as your clients should experience the same brand voice throughout their experience. Just like your visual identity, your verbal identity can be improved a lot by setting out some rules to follow.

• Write down a list of your brand's personality traits. You might say, for example, your brand is intelligent, approachable and sincere. Now whenever you write something, just ask yourself; “does this sound intelligent? Approachable? Sincere?”

• Create a list different attributes, such as volume, community, etc. and present different adjectives on a scale for each. Select one adjective on each row to reflect your brand, and this will define how you should, and shouldn’t sound. For example, do you talk with a whisper, your indoor voice, or by SHOUTING? Are you talking to one person, a table, or the room?

• Clarify words and adjectives. If you find you’re repeating the same words over and over, you’re probably on message, but you sometimes need to introduce some variety. Pick the adjectives you use in your brand messaging, then list some synonyms so you can avoid overuse. Likewise, you may have words you don’t want used, so outline acceptable alternatives!

• The first thing people are likely to read is your biography, so this could really be a make-or-break part of your verbal identity. Write out a really short, medium, and longform biography, so you can introduce yourself in a consistent manner.

• Scripts and templates. Sometimes you just say the same things over and over. Save yourself from writing the same generic emails and letters by saving templates. For phonecalls, use a consistent greeting, and check your voicemail message.

Just like the style guide, providing some documentation for your verbal identity will help any copywriters you engage to stay on-brand, and you should definitely consider engaging a good copywriter to help you develop your templates, catalogue, and biography.

Conclusion

We all judge books by their covers, and your branding is one of the reasons customers may give your book a second look. By giving yourself a polished and consistent look and feel, people are more likely to take notice of your brand, and by emphasising your brand values and communication, you'll be giving people a reason to choose you. In these two articles I hope I've helped give you some tools to identify how you can make your own brand stronger, and start really letting your users know get to know you.