The leaves are rustling. Your every step is a crunch on the forest floor. The low hanging canopy of tree limbs blocks the sun. All is dark. Alas! We have made it to Branding Forest. Often, figuring out what a company’s brand should be is as daunting as making your way through a thick forest without a map. Just what makes up a brand? Your brand isn’t just your logo (although it’s certainly a big part of it). It’s who you are. It’s your first impression, your reputation, how you present yourself and the world perceives you. Your brand is a bunch of living organisms that intermingle with each other perfectly to form a full ecosystem. And if you’re lucky, maybe there’s a magical fairy or unicorn in there that helps set you apart. We’ll do our best to help keep you from getting lost in the woods, on the right path and away from the bears. Here are our 7 tips for making a strong brand:

1. Take a Brand Inventory
Take a full inventory of everything related to your brand. This should range from your company name and logo, all the way down to the copy on your website. It’s your overall look and feel, your tone, your mission, and how you communicate and express your ideas. If there’s anything representing you in the public eye, include it. Does it all align with one another? Does your brand’s name fit what you do and who you are? Are there inconsistencies or mismatches in your copy? Any missing pieces? If you’re not sure, you can use the next six points below as a checklist.

2. Establish a Purpose
Once you know where your brand stands, the first step is to dig deep and ask yourself, what is our purpose? What should our brand do? What’s the goal of our brand? What’s our mission statement? Who’s our target demo? What is it that we want to do, for real? You need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing so your brand can match that message. Without any of this info, you’re lost without your flashlight.

3. Brand Voice and Messaging
Now that you know your purpose and demo, it’s time to pick a tone of voice to match it. Establish if you want your brand to be adventurous, humorous, serious, enthusiastic, something completely different or a combination of a few different things. It’s typically best to pick no more than 3 and make sure they work together. For example, you wouldn’t want to have a sympathetic, kind, and arrogant brand. Instead, you may want a kind and cheerful, but sometimes humorous, brand. Now use your new tone of voice to develop some key messaging. This could include the highlights of what you stand for, your outward facing mission statement or “about us”, your tag line, and maybe even a “we never use” list of words. Don’t feel too overwhelmed by this. It’s best to start small and build as your brand continues to develop.

A perfect example of a strong brand voice is Dollar Shave Club. They honed in on their demo (young men), established their purpose (to take down the big names in men’s grooming) and developed a brand voice to specifically target their audience with a fun, humorous and sarcastic tone. They combine that tone with messaging that aggressively goes after their competitors in a funny way, while highlighting the benefits they provide. This is as close to perfect as you’re going to find, as it demonstrates how to directly speak to your target consumer base.

4. Your Logo
I’d like to start this by telling you a story. There was a very popular brand of collared shirts in the 80s called IZOD-Lacoste. When Izod and Lacoste split to form two separate companies, one got to keep the more recognizable name, and the other got to keep the logo. Lacoste is now a well-respected world-wide brand with over $3 Billion in annual revenue. Izod folded, sold, and now has $6.7 million in annual revenue. Guess who got to keep the logo?

Your logo is your brand’s identity. It’s the first thing that people see and what they identify with. This isn’t the time to be frugal! And it’s certainly not a candidate for a DIY project. A good logo takes a lot of thought, time and effort to get right. It needs to work in all formats, be easily scaled and identified at smaller sizes, and, most of all, be worthy of representing your brand.

Everything about it matters – from the colors, to the fonts, to the mark or lack thereof. Be sure that the finished product represents the purpose and tone you’ve already established and sets yourself apart.

5. Visual Branding
After you have your logo, you’ll want to build the visual brand around it. Develop your color palette, brand fonts, image style, and supporting visual elements. Everything you choose and create should support your overall mission, tone, and match your logo.

Pro tip: While you’ll want to use your logo’s colors as part of your brand’s color palette, we recommend against using your logo’s font in your brand. If your headlines are in the same font as the logo, your logo doesn’t seem as special and starts to blend into everything else.

6. Consistent Brand Experience
Once you have established the fundamentals of a strong brand, you need to make sure you’re using it consistently. You need to ensure that everyone who experiences your brand sees it in its best light. Put together a brand standard and live by it. Everything from internal communications to public facing materials should follow the same guidelines. It should all sound, look, and feel like your brand, and it should always align with your overall brand purpose. Consistency is crucial in developing a strong and lasting brand.

7. Digital Experience
The final aspect of your brand is its digital experience. Your website is your brand’s home base in the digital space. When people hear about your brand, they’ll more than likely go to your site. So, make sure it represents your brand accurately. A cheap or old website reflects poorly onto your brand and product. This is the place and time to show off who you are, convey confidence and quality and establish trust. Users are smart and they pick up on things quickly. You customers have high expectations, but they also have short attention spans. Be concise, be intentional, and speak to them as individuals. They don’t want to hear about you, they want to hear about how your brand or product can benefit them.

But it doesn’t stop there. Your website, Google listing, social media channels, apps and video should be treated no differently than the rest of your brand. Make sure they all work together, promote each other, keep the same tone and messaging, align visually, and work toward the same brand purpose. You may speak a little more formal on your site than you do on your brand’s Instagram, but both should still sound like they’re coming from the same person.