The word ‘branding’ can mean many things to different people. It is a key business asset which is commonly overlooked or misunderstood. Do you feel as though you showcase your business’s value with fantastic branding?

Building a clear, consistent brand identity establishes a visual bond with your business and the individuals connected to it. Branding is at the core of your performance and social media management – if you don’t have a strong brand identity, your marketing will inevitably fail. To coin a phrase which is often overused, ‘branding is more than just a logo’.

Creating your brand

Youbee Media as a marketing consultancy would recommend that you always define your branding before you begin advertising. You need to understand what people think and how they feel about your brand to pinpoint their emotions. Establishing a clear visual identity helps individuals identify your company through your branding. Visual Identity is a preview of your brand, highlighting your company values through visual elements. Some elements to consider when creating a visual identity include:

• Retain a consistent visual style through logos, images, and assets – sometimes simple is better.
• Choose up to 3 key fonts, which compliment your brand but remain current and professional. These should look good on emails, stationary and in print.
• Choose a small palette of complimentary colours which will help people identify your company easily. Changing the colours will have a large impact on the way your brand is perceived.
• Feature images are vital to tell your story, so avoid generic or stock images that fail to highlight your company’s personality or values.

Branding isn’t just visual

Although the visual aspect of your branding is extremely important to make your business easily identifiable, your brand voice is a key makeup of your entity. Your brand voice is the personality of your business, used throughout all your communications. Essentially this is your tone of voice, your written or verbal approach towards customers or situations. Is your brand positive and inspiring? Is it formal and functional? Is it conversational and warm?

What we communicate is broken down into 3 parts:

• The words you use (7%)
• Your tone of voice (38%)
• Your body language (55%)  

Retaining a consistent brand voice allows for a strong brand reputation, as those familiar with your company will immediately absorb your brand quickly and easily. Your brand voice should be conveyed both online and offline, so make sure that your employees keep it consistent when answering the phone or participating in networking events. A great way to distinguish your brand voice is to identify how you’d like to target your customers. However, it should be noted that a company’s brand voice differs from its brand tone, as like a person, your brand should have the ability to change its tone to be appropriate to the situation.

What benefits will a strong brand bring?

A brand’s reputation ultimately depends on the amount of trust that clients have in you. The more you trust a brand, the better your perception of it is. Branding allows individuals interested in your business to trust your brand as they value your personality and can deem you viable to work for or with. In order to gain and build that trust, your business needs to be authentic and consistent. You will need to ensure that you don’t create a brand based on what you think, but more on what you know.

Youbee branding

Let’s ask the question – What do you associate with Youbee Media? Are there any images or words that come to mine?

Do these ‘Buzz’ words hit the spot - Marketing, Bees, Positivity, Leeds, Solutions, Results, Friendly, Hive?

Youbee Media have retained a consistent brand identity throughout the two years operating as a marketing solutions agency. Our friendly, welcoming brand personality is what we believe makes us stand out from our competitors in the marketing industry. The colours purple and yellow are all over our social media content and you’ll find a consistent font and style. This approach helps to convey our personality through colours and making us easily recognisable to those acquainted with us.

Youbee Media offer services and marketing workshops to help you enrich your brand identity, such as brand identity generation, rebranding, web design, as well as digital or print graphic design solutions. We work with a number of professionals that can assist with brand discovery or photography. It may be that you want to refine your brand’s voice and approach as part of your strategy or understand you’re your business can grow – we can help. We would love to chat to you about your business’s goals, pain points and ambitions – so get in touch!