Branding if done correctly can be an extremely powerful part of your business. Think about big brands like Apple, who make every experience with them feel luxurious, sleek and sophisticated or Coca Cola, whose iconic red is not only instantly recognisable, but you can even taste the product when you think about it.
Branding is more than just your logo and colours, if done correctly and built up over time you can create something that’s instantly recognisable for people and something people view as tangible.
So how do you start building your own brand?
The Basics
First impressions really do matter when it comes to ecommerce businesses. You won’t get a second chance to make a good impression with a customer so investing in your branding from the beginning is very important.
The basics of branding include what you might expect, a logo, a glyph, a set of brand colours, a brand font and set guidelines for how this should be used. However, when developing your branding, either with a designer or by yourself, you’ll need to remember to keep your target customer in mind.
If your branding is off from what your preferred demographic would be more attracted to, then you’ll simply miss the mark and your intended audience won’t be open to interacting with your brand.
For example, if you’re designing a ladies wear brand for women over the age of 50, the branding choices you make such as softer colours and a simpler font will help to make your branding attractive to that audience. If you were to make your branding very bold, loud colours this may put off your target market, so it’s best to get the branding right for your audience.
Once you know who your audience is and what they’re interests are, you can then start developing ideas on what colours, fonts etc to use in your branding.
More than just a logo
Developing a brand is about more than just your logo design. Great branding can be the way a person feels when interacting with your brand, it’s a mix of customer perceptions, engagement and expectations.
Branding done right, is when you see something either an ad or a social media post and without knowing who is was done by, i.e. having a logo or slogan on it, you’d just know who it was.
It’s also about telling your story. Stories should be the most compelling part of your brand. They drive emotion and allow your audience to connect with you better. As an example, EKM’s story is all about our CEO and Founder, Antony.
“Back in early 2000 our founder Antony Chesworth was working in a local hospital as a porter and from spending time with people at their end of their lives he kept hearing the same thing… “make sure you spend life doing something you love”.
So, in 2002 at the age of 22 from his student bedroom he started building an ecommerce platform that would let anyone create a successful online shop, even his computer illiterate mum, and enable them to spend life doing something they love.
After 4 very tough years starting the business and struggling on his own, the company started to take off and over 17 years grew into a team of 80 world class ecommerce experts working from our office in Preston, Lancashire and tens of thousands of customers all doing something they love.
With multi-millions of pounds per day going through the platform it quickly became the UK’s most popular ecommerce solution and powers 1 out of every 5 online shops in the UK.
EKM online shops are unique because they are always evolving and getting better to ensure you sell more. Our two decades of experience and team of 80 ecommerce experts are always making improvements to both the platform and your shop ensuring tomorrow is always better than yesterday.
You are never on your own with EKM, our team are there to help you and your very own account manager will work with you, coach you and even manage the shop for you leaving you to process orders and spend more time doing something you love”.
Your story will help your audience connect with your brand and help to build an emotional connection which can help encourage loyalty down the line.
Remember when it comes to creating your brand, you’re not trying to please everyone. Tailor your messaging and marketing to your ideal customer and understand who they are.
Consistency is key
Once you’ve decided on your brand colours, font, guidelines and terminology you now need to ensure that all of this is used correctly across every single thing that represents your brand. Everything you create should be instantly recognisable as your brand which means consistency is highly important. The exact same colours should be used across your site, social media and any other branding you might do. A quick tip is to make sure you’ve taken note of the hex code (a code that is unique to each and every colour and looks like this – #026ac2) for each colour to ensure this consistency.
Terminology is also an important aspect of your brand. Here at EKM we have set rules for the wording we use when communicating with our customers. We use ‘ecommerce’ not ‘e-commerce’ or ‘eCommerce’ and we always refer to an online shop as an ‘EKM online shop’, we say ‘team’ instead of ‘staff’ or ‘employees’. It’s these language choices that help influence your company culture and perception to others.
Ultimately, branding is about what people think after seeing or interacting with your brand and you’ll want that to be positive, so make sure every interaction with your branding is a positive one.
Reflect and refine
Lastly, you’ll want to take the branding you’ve created and speak to others and ask them what they think and feel. Take on their advice, they may see something you don’t. If you already have a customer base, why not ask them what they think. Find out what they like about it and what they don’t, this is a quick way to see if any part of your branding simply doesn’t resonate with your audience.
Once you’ve collected some feedback you can then reflect on it and implement any changes necessary for your online shop’s branding. Going forward, you’ll need to ensure consistency across all of your business assets from the way your online shop looks and feels to the branded business card you have made and any social media marketing or advertising.
The post How to create a brand identity for your online shop appeared first on Ecommerce Blog.
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