Branding is not just about making your marketing collateral look attractive and enticing. Branding is about how users feel about your company or product as a whole.Â
In essence, your company’s brand is the experience that your customers have when they use your company’s products AND services.
Therefore, it is important to ensure that the branding that you want to portray is consistent throughout all your company’s platforms and departments.
Here are the 5 ways your company can have a professional and consistent corporate brand throughout all your platforms.
1. Have a brand guide
If you want to have a consistent image throughout all your marketing collaterals, the way to get started is to have a brand guide. A brand guide is a guide that everyone will need to refer to and adhere with, whenever they create any collaterals for the company. This includes internal collaterals to send out to the employees (eg EDMs, landing pages, surveys etc) and external collaterals to be sent out to customers.
If you do not have the expertise or time to create a brand guide, Fiverr is the place to go to engage a freelancer to design a brand guide for you, at an affordable cost!
2. Have organized folder(s) for your branding collaterals
Instead of constantly sourcing new icons for the same old keywords or phrases (this was an issue in our company that we had to fix), consolidate all icons in the same folder that everyone can access. Having access to the same icons ensures that these same icons are used throughout ALL platforms, and also helps to reduce any wasted time AND money finding new icons for phrases that already have icons.
3. Have a standard signature template for everyone
Big brands and large organisations take measures to ensure that their branding is shown in ALL their communications. This means that their fonts, colours, image quality, type of images used, and even email signatures are on point and always adhere to their brand guides. When it comes to your emails, the good thing is that it is not difficult to achieve the same polished look for your email signature that the large organization and big brands are doing. Instead of allowing your employees to use pixellated images and setting their email signatures in all sorts of funky fonts and colours, a way to ensure that everyone’s signatures look polished is to use a standard signature template.
You can easily set a signature template in the email client (eg Gmail or Outlook) that you are using via their signature template guides.
4. Say goodbye to pixelation
Pixelated images just scream ‘unprofessional’. In our digital day and age, consumers are exposed to really great branding every day, through their mobile phones, their TV screens, their computer screens, etc. In the sea of beautiful, professional and sharp looking graphics, it is a huge eye sore to see an image that is even slightly pixelated. A sharp, crisp and professional looking image, be it a photo, logo, banner or any other graphic is now mandatory for your business.Â
The good thing is that it is not difficult to create sharp looking images. You can easily use platforms like Canva to create the image yourself, or engage a graphic designer on Freelance Platforms like Fiverr to create professional image graphics for you.
For the sharpest possible graphics, always keep a vector version (this is usually the original image in .ai, .svg, .eps format) of each of your graphics.
5. Have a consistent tone of voice
Branding is not just about visuals or imagery. A huge part of your company’s branding is also the tone of voice that you use. Do you want to sound serious and regal (an example of such a company is United Overseas Bank (UOB)), do you want to sound witty, yet sharp and fresh (an example will be Apple), or do you want to sound young and vibrant (an example will be Nike). Have a think about the tone of voice that you want your company to portray and always keep this in mind for all your company’s communications.
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