Branding is a vast business topic, with many different tools and strategies you can use to create a strong brand. With so many options, it can take time to figure out where to start.
Having the right branding plan for your business from day one will save you time, money, and headache in the long run.
In this article, we'll explore some of the best branding tools for small businesses, so you can start building a solid brand that will help you reach your business goals.
Let's get right into it.
What Are Branding Tools?
Knowing how to build a brand is one thing, but having the right tools to execute your plan is another.
Several branding tools are available to small businesses, each with its benefits and drawbacks. The best tool for your business will depend on your specific goals, budget, and needs.
From using tools that can help you with your branding strategy, to those that will help you create and manage your brand identity, I'll cover all the essentials in the next section.
Categories Of Branding Tools
There are four main categories of branding tools: identity, communications, experiences, and environments.
Knowing how each plays into your brand can help you choose the right mix of tools to reach your target audience.
Identity
Your brand identity is how your target audience perceives your business. It's what makes you unique and differentiates you from your competitors.
Creating a robust and consistent brand identity is essential to building a successful brand.
Communications
The key to earning money online revolves around how successfully your brand communicates with its target audience.
In this area, several branding tools can help you reach your target audience and communicate your message effectively.
Experiences
If you can get someone to experience specific emotions from interacting with your brand, you're more likely to build a successful long-term business.
For example, if your brand makes someone happy, they're more likely to associate that feeling with it and come back for more. Likewise, a brand that evokes feelings of trust is more likely to build a loyal customer base.
Environments
One can use many online platforms and community-based websites to build an online brand.
From community platforms to build an online brand to more generalist social media platforms, several branding tools are available to help you reach your target audience.Brand Identity Tools
The following are the essential brand identity tools that every small business should have in its toolkit.
1. A Fast-Loading Website With A Great User Experience
Your website is often the first touchpoint potential customers have with your brand. As such, ensuring that your site makes a good impression is essential.
You'll need to ensure that your site loads quickly and provides a great user experience. This means having well-designed pages that are easy to navigate and provide value to visitors.
Whether you're self-employed, learning how to make money without a job, or running a small business that employs various staff members, your website is a vital part of your brand identity.2. A Company Logo
Your logo is one of the essential elements of your brand identity. It will help people remember and recognize your business, so it's critical to get it right.
When designing a logo, consider how it will be used across different channels, such as your website, social media, business cards, and email signature. Make sure the design is versatile and can be used in various ways
3. A Tagline That Encapsulates Your Brand's Mission
Your tagline should be short, memorable, and reflective of your brand's mission. It should be something that people can easily remember and associate with your business.
4. A Consistent Color Scheme
You should choose your brand's color scheme to reflect your business's personality. The colors you use will be seen in your marketing materials, so it's essential to get them right.
When choosing a color scheme, consider what each color represents and how it could make people feel. You'll also want to ensure that your chosen colors work well together.
5. Fonts That Reflect Your Brand's Personality
Like your brand colors, the fonts you use on your website, social media, marketing materials, product packaging, etc., should be chosen to reflect the personality of your business. If you're unsure what kind of font will work best for your brand, consider using one of the tools below to help you choose from preset business-focused font combinations.
6. Imagery That Tells Your Brand's Story
The imagery you use on your website, social media, and other marketing materials should tell your brand's story. It should be cohesive and reflective of your business's values and mission.
If such imagery can tell the story of how your business got started and progressed along the way, it will only serve to build your brand further and make it more humanized and relatable.
7. Engaging Social Media Accounts
Your social media accounts are a vital part of your brand identity. They're often the first places potential customers will go to learn more about your business.
As such, it's essential to make sure that your accounts are engaging and provide value to followers. This means regularly posting interesting and relevant content and promptly responding to comments and messages.
8. A Brand Style Guide That Outlines All Of The Above
Once you've created all of the elements of your brand identity, it's essential to put them together in a brand style guide. This document should outline your logo, color scheme, fonts, and imagery.
A style guide will ensure that everyone involved in creating marketing materials for your business is on the same page. This will help create a consistent and cohesive branding strategy that reflects your business in the best light possible, no matter which channel it's being used.
Brand Marketing Strategies
With the brand identity tools in place, marketing is the next piece to focus on. Marketing will help get your brand in front of potential customers and create awareness. There are a variety of marketing channels that can be used to reach your target market.
1. A/B Testing
A company that understands branding will use A/B testing to see how potential customers react to different versions of their brand. This could start off as simple as changing the color or text of a button on their website or the copy in an email campaign. By understanding how people interact with your brand, you can make changes that will improve your conversion rate and bottom line.
2. Landing Pages
An effective way to reach your target market is through landing pages. A well-designed landing page can help increase conversion rates by providing a smooth user experience and clear call-to-actions. Additionally, using relevant keywords on your landing pages will help them rank higher in search engines, making them more visible to potential customers.
3. Heatmaps
Heatmaps are a valuable tool that can be used to understand how people interact with your website or app. They visually represent where people click, scroll, and hover on a page. You can use this information to make changes to the design and layout of your site to improve the user experience.
4. User Recordings
User recordings allow you to see how real people use your website or app. This differs from heatmaps because you can watch someone interact with your product. This can help identify people's pain points with your products and uncover areas for improvement.
5. User Flows
User flows show users' paths when using your website or app. This information can also help optimize the user experience and make it easier for people to find what they're looking for.
6. Session Replays
Session replays are like user recordings but capture the entire session instead of individual interactions. This can help see how people use your product over time and identify confusion areas.
7. Form Analytics
Consider a company that uses a form to ask for customer feedback. With form analytics, they could see how many people started the form, how many people completed it, and where people dropped off. This information could be used to make changes to the form to improve conversion rates.
8. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great way to reach potential customers and keep them updated on your latest products or services. By segmenting your list, you can send targeted emails that are more likely to be opened and clicked. Additionally, the right tool can help you automate your email marketing, so once you set up a campaign, it will run indefinitely.
9. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that involves partnering with authority figures in a niche that have a large social media following. This can be an effective way to reach new potential customers and promote your brand. However, partnering with relevant influencers to your target market is essential and aligns with your brand values.
For example, in the fitness industry, it would make sense to partner with an influencer passionate about health and wellness. However, if you are a luxury brand, partnering with an influencer known for their love of bargain hunting may not be the best fit.
Top Branding Software To Consider
When it comes to putting it all together, it's essential to use the right software that makes it easy to create a consistent brand and helps you keep track of all your assets in one place.
Here are some top branding software to consider.
1. Looka
Best For Building A Brand Kit
Looka's logo maker is easy to use and only takes a few minutes to create a custom logo that's perfect for your business. You don't need any design experience - enter your company name and choose from a library of icons and fonts. Once you've found a logo you like, you can download it in various file formats for print or digital use.
Once you have your logo finalized, Looka's Brand Kit uses your logo, colors, and fonts to instantly create hundreds of branded marketing materials - all in one spot.
Key Features
Pricing
Looka offers a few plans and packages:
Option 1: Get A Logo & Brand Kit (recommended)
Option 2: Get A Logo Only
2. ZeBrand
Best For Brand Management Services
ZeBrand offers design suggestions to create a distinct look for your brand. This means that even if you don't have an in-house designer, you can still have a professional and consistent look for all your branded materials.
Additionally, ZeBrand provides guidance and tools to get started on creating your brand identity. These can take your brand from concept to launch quickly and easily.
Finally, one of the best features of ZeBrand is its brand management services. Once you've created your brand identity, it's essential to maintain it. ZeBrand can help you do just that. From weekly check-ins to ensure your branding is on track, to monthly reports detailing your progress, ZeBrand will help keep your brand identity solid and consistent.
Key Features
Pricing
ZeBrand offers these pricing plans:
3. Tailor Brands
Best For Quickly Building A Branded Website
Tailor Brands provides all the tools you need to get your business up and running.
With their easy-to-use logo maker, you can create a unique and professional logo without design experience or spending hours wading through stock photos. Select the icons, colors, and fonts that best represent your brand, and our algorithm will do the rest.
Of course, a good logo isn't enough on its own—your customers also need somewhere to learn more about your product or service. That's where their website builder comes in. The platform makes it easy to create a beautiful website, even if you don't have any coding experience. Just choose one of the professionally designed templates, add your content, and voila!
Key Features
Try it for free before making a purchase.
4. Canva
Best For Creating Consistent Branding
Creating cohesive branding can be challenging if you're not a designer. That's where Canva's Brand Kit comes in. Brand Kit is a free tool that allows you to quickly build a brand from scratch or upload your existing brand assets to stay on-brand with every design.
If you're starting from scratch, Canva's Brand Kit makes it easy to create a cohesive brand identity. First, you'll need to choose a color scheme for your brand. Next, you'll upload your logo—or, if you don't have one yet, you can use Canva's logo maker to create one. Finally, you'll add your brand fonts. Again, if you don't have any fonts yet, you can choose from over 130 options in Canva's font library. Once you've finalized your branding elements, they'll be saved in the Brand Kit for future use.
If you already have existing branding assets, such as a logo and color scheme, adding them to Canva's Brand Kit is easy. Once your assets are uploaded, they'll be saved in the Brand Kit for future use. Every time you create a design in Canva, you can be sure it's on-brand.
Key Features
Pricing
Canva offers two various plans:
5. Brandmark
Best For Professional-Looking Business Branding Designs
With Brandmark, you can kickstart your brand with business card designs, social media graphics, app icons, letterheads, and more.
With a focus on professional-looking designs, Brandmark is perfect for businesses that want to create a solid visual identity.
For example, their letterhead templates not only represent your brand but also reflect your company's personality.
Their social profile icons are also perfect for building a solid visual identity across social media platforms, focusing on the areas that matter the most to your business.
Key Features
Pricing
Brandmark offers these plans:
These are all one-time payments.
6. Snappa
Best For Creating Professional Designs - Fast
Have you ever needed to create an online graphic for social media, a blog post, or an ad, but ended up wasting too much time or felt you needed to go to design school?
With Snappa, you can create stunning graphics in a snap - even if you're not a graphic designer.
What makes Snappa so great is its built-in templates for all of the most popular graphics sizes for social media, ads, blogs, and more. So whether you need a Facebook cover photo or an Instagram post, Snappa has you covered. And if you need something truly unique, you can start from scratch or even upload your images to work from.
Key Features
Pricing
Snappa offers these pricing plans:
7. Adobe Express
Best For Reusing Content On Various Platforms
Adobe Express offers users a variety of tools to help them create a strong brand identity for their business. With just a few taps in the app, users can resize content for social media sites or add Photoshop-quality effects. Users can also share logos, fonts, and brand elements with team members or print/share PDF documents through the app.
In addition, Adobe Express offers users thousands of templates, design assets, stock photos, and more to choose from for their projects. The app is available on the web and mobile devices, making it easy for users to get started with beautiful templates.
With Adobe Express, you have everything you need to create a professional, cohesive brand to help your business succeed.
Key Features
Pricing
Adobe Express has two pricing plans on offer:
8. SproutSocial
Best For Social Media Management
With Sprout Social's data-driven insights, you can understand your audience and uncover trends to inform brand and business strategy. Sprout excels in usability, customer support and satisfaction, ROI, and user adoption. In other words, it's the perfect solution for social media management that can transform every area of your organization.
One of the first things you'll notice about Sprout Social is how user-friendly it is. The platform is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, even for those who need to be tech-savvy. Additionally, Sprout's customer support team is top-notch. They're always available to answer questions about the platform or your account.
Another reason why Sprout Social is one of the best branding tools for your business is that it offers a great return on investment. With Sprout, you can easily track your success and see how your branding efforts are paying off.
Key Features
Pricing
SproutSocial offers these pricing plans:
9. CoSchedule
Best For Scheduling Posts On Various Channels
CoSchedule is a work management software specifically designed for marketers and can help you get more done in less time while ensuring that your business branding is on point.
One of the best things about CoSchedule is its calendar feature. This is extremely helpful if you want to create a branding strategy that covers multiple platforms and channels. The calendar feature allows you to easily schedule and share your marketing tasks with other team members. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and that no tasks fall through the cracks.
Another great thing about CoSchedule is that it has a family of agile marketing products. These products are designed to coordinate team projects and processes. They include tools for social media management, email marketing, content marketing, and more. This makes it easy to keep your branding efforts organized and streamlined.
Key Features
Pricing
CoSchedule offers three pricing plans:
Key Features Of Branding Tools
While the above tools can help with your business branding, you must consider a few key features when choosing the right tool.
Ease Of Use
Getting going with minimal fuss is essential for any business, but it's especially important when branding. After all, if you can't figure out how to use the tool, you won't be able to get the most out of it.
In this situation, ease of use means that the learning curve when using the tool should be as short as possible. The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) should be well-designed and easy to navigate.
Ease Of Use
Getting going with minimal fuss is essential for any business, but it's especially important when branding. After all, if you can't figure out how to use the tool, you won't be able to get the most out of it.
In this situation, ease of use means that the learning curve when using the tool should be as short as possible. The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) should be well-designed and easy to navigate.
Affordability
Tools that are too expensive can be a burden on businesses, especially small businesses or startups. On the other hand, tools that are too cheap may not have the features or functionality you need to create a strong brand.
Finding the right balance is key.
Functionality
The best branding tools will offer a wide range of features that can be customized to meet your specific needs. Look for tools that, at the very least, provide asset libraries, social media management, team collaboration features, and more.
Flexibility
Your branding needs will change over time, so choosing a flexible tool is essential to having it grow with you. Look for tools that offer a wide range of features and can be customized to meet your changing needs.
Scalability
As your business grows, so too will your branding needs. Make sure the tool you choose is scalable to grow with you.
Let's say that you have a small team and only need to use a few of the features offered by the tool. But as your team or company grows, you'll need to be able to add more users and access more features.
The best branding tools will offer different pricing plans that scale with your needs. This way, you only pay for what you need and can add more users or features as your business grows.
Support
When something goes wrong with your branding efforts, you'll want to be able to get help from the tool's support team. Make sure the team is responsive and helpful so that you can get back on track quickly.
Integrations
The best branding tools will integrate with your other software, such as your CRM or accounting software. This functionality allows for a seamless workflow and helps you avoid entering data in multiple places.
This will help you keep all of your branding efforts organized and streamlined.
Best Branding Tools - FAQ
Yes, there are many free branding tools available online. However, not all of them are created equal. To get the most out of your branding efforts, it's essential to choose a tool that fits your specific needs and goals.
Some standard features of branding tools include the ability to create logos, design websites and social media assets, and develop marketing materials. Other tools may offer more specialized features, such as developing brand guidelines or conducting market research.
Branding tools can vary in price, from free to several hundred dollars per month. The most expensive options usually offer the most comprehensive features, while free options may be more limited in scope.
If you want to use strong brand tools that focus on social media marketing, a custom tool would be a good choice.
For corporate branding tools, this might be a tool that allows you to create and manage a microsite or create and distribute e-mail newsletters.
A custom branding tool is one that's been designed specifically for your needs. It might be a more comprehensive tool that offers all the features you need or a specialized tool that focuses on one aspect of branding, such as social media marketing.
Just like having a personal branding tool that helps individuals, companies also need a branding toolkit. This would help businesses protect and grow their corporate reputation by managing how they are perceived in the market.
Choosing the right branding platform from the above is a great way to get started, but there are a few other key things that businesses should keep in mind when developing their branding strategy:
Conclusion
Choosing the right branding tools for your business can help you in the short and long run.
In the short run, the right tools can help you develop a professional and cohesive brand identity.
In the long run, they can save you time and money by streamlining your branding efforts across multiple channels.
When choosing branding tools, you must consider your budget, needs, and goals. With so many options available, there's sure to be a tool that's perfect for your business.
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