Your website is arguably your most important brand asset. Not only is it a wonderful sales tool but it’s also a great informational source to help educate your visitors not only on you and your business but the industry. Establishing yourself as an authority figure will give you credibility and make selling much easier. Given the importance of your website, it makes sense many entrepreneurs put a lot of focus on developing it. Stopping at your website is a mistake when it comes to branding, however. Your brand will be judged by all of your brand assets and not just your website. This post will explore how you can build brand assets that complement your website nicely.
Set the Right Branding Direction
Before you start thinking about social media accounts, business cards, brochures or any other promotional material let’s take a step back. Your entire creative direction and brand strategy should be based on your logo and your businesses’ core values. Creating your logo is the very first step and should be done even before putting a website in place.
If you don’t have a logo yet create a free design with Logo Creator. There are other great logo design resources available or you can hire a freelancer. With your logo in place, you can then take on your website. If you already have your website up and running you’ll need to make sure your website colors match the core color used in your logo. This will ensure your logo doesn’t look out of place on your website.
Create Cohesiveness Across All Your Brand Assets
The reason why your logo is so important is that it will be represented across all of your branding material, most notably your website. In addition to your logo brand color is what ties everything together. Your brand color is typically the most dominantly used color in your logo.
Many entrepreneurs make their color choice simply based on what they find looks nice. Of course, that will typically result in a visually pleasing logo but is it effective? Is it effective in the sense that it speaks to your target audience? Take a minute to find out what emotional responses different colors evoke and choose your color accordingly. As you build out your brand assets take a disciplined approach.
Whether you are designing your business cards, social media posts or banner ads implement the logo as the first step and then use the core color throughout your design to create visual cohesiveness across.
Adding Additional Visual Appeal and Brand Connection
In addition to your logo and core color, there are other ways to connect your branding material to your website. For example, the images used on your website are a great visual and communication tool. You can repeat those images across your other promotional items so your visitors will instantly connect them back to your website. In doesn’t stop at images but the same applies to illustrations, icons, and fonts. The trick to a professional and visually pleasing brand is consistency. Whether a potential lead lands on your website, social media account, or reads through a printed brochure they should have the same visual and emotional experience.
How to Create Matching Brand Assets on a Budget?
Most entrepreneurs when they are first starting out are operating on a small budget. Understandably many take shortcuts when it comes to graphic design. Poorly designed brand assets won’t be effective and hinder your sales efforts, however. Luckily there are a lot of free design resources available these days that you can leverage if you aren’t scared of the do-it-yourself approach.
Here are a few free design tools to get you started on your journey to create complementary brand assets to your website:
Canva:
Canva is a free design tool that lets you create anything graphic design related. The process is simple; choose a template, edit, and download. This is a great resource if you don’t have any design experience.
Pixabay:
One of your most powerful visual aids is images. Don’t settle for low-resolution photos; instead, use a free resource like Pixabay to find beautifully shot images. You are free to use them for your commercial projects.
Color Explorer:
To help make the right color choices and to find complementary accent colors for your brand assets try a free tool like Color Explorer.
Now that you are equipped with some best practices and free resources it’s time to take on your brand assets. Follow the tips here and you’ll end up with beautifully matching brand assets that support your website.
