What Is Brand Identity? (And How to Build One That Lasts)

We spend our whole lives surrounded by brands. In fact, when you really think about, it you probably have loyalty to different brands in every aspect of your life from the coffee you like to buy, the clothes you wear and the car you drive. Whether we spend much time thinking about it or not, we are all really influenced by brand identity. So, what is brand identity? Brand identity is made up of all the things your consumers see of your brand, so the visual elements like your logo, imagery, website design, colour, and fonts.

Why spend time building brand identity?

The aim of any brand identity is really to make your brand recognisable instantly. Why does that matter? Well really, the more memorable your brand is the more people will think of your service or good as the first choice whenever the need arises. To be a true category king, your brand needs to be known by the majority of your audience. More than that, it needs to have gained the trust and respect of them. To do that, you will need a polished and professional brand identity.

How can I build brand identity?

Building brand identity starts small. Choose the colours, fonts, imagery styles and other visual elements like your overall UI design as early on in your brand journey as possible. Of course, as times change you may find that you want to evolve your brand and bring it into line with more modern trends or styles, but the basis identify marks of your brand shouldn't change. Instead, those basic blocks might alter slightly but a lot of the identifying aspects like the brand colours and font style would stay the them.

Setting Brand Guidelines

Once you have decided on the basic blocks of your brand, you should create a set of brand guidelines. The brand guidelines are essentially a rulebook for every other person that works on anything to do with the brand identity, outlining important details like the hex codes of the exact brand colours and the right fonts to use in different areas of a design. Having those helps to ensure everyone is on the same page and your visual elements remain consistent, which contributes to a stronger brand identity.

Increase Content Production

Those foundations are a great starting point to begin with content production. Ramp up content production to help your brand be seen by as many people as possible. When every piece of content sticks to the same visual elements, it won't be long before your audience start to recognise your brand just on those visuals alone. It's a great idea to make your content stand out by keeping it as unique as possible, and by making sure that you're producing content in a variety of different formats so your audience have access to your brand wherever they are.For example, here's some content formats to try out:

• Infographics
• Flyers
• Posters
• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• Podcasts
• Video
• Carousel Posts
• Blogs

Keeping your content format mixed is a good way to ensure that your audience is more engaged, since they can interact in a way that suits them.

Why do you need professional graphic design?

In today's busy marketing landscape, it's important to note that the quality of the design throughout all of your brand assets is really important. There's a whole lot of content to look at online, so making yours stand out with professional graphics that relate well to the subject being talked about is not just important, it's actually really necessary to get better results. If you need help with graphic design, have a read of how Design Cloud graphic design subscription plans are helping teams across the UK now.

Distribute, then redistribute the content!

Once you've spent time creating content that's worth stopping to look at, remember that it can be used again and again. To do that, you simply need to distribute the content! There are a lot of ways to reuse the content you've already spent time planning, writing and designing. For example, blog post content can be adapted to create an infographic and a carousel post which can then be posted on social media platforms or used to gain backlinks across other websites.Redistributing content is a great way to make the most of the content you have, and to build brand identity as it drives up brand awareness.