A quick, DIY, beginner’s guide to brand creation in 7 steps

Professional brand creation is complicated and can take weeks, months or even years. We’ve put together this handy guide so you can create your own solid branding quickly and easily.

No matter what you are, a musician, a podcaster, an online shop; you’ll have a brand whether you know it or not. Everything you create, post and share only adds to your brand, and it’s important you have a solid grasp on exactly what your brand is and how you want to be seen by the outside world.

Brand
A person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.

The Dictionary of Brand, Marty Neumeier

First things first

Fundamentally, you’re going to need to define your brand. Answer questions such as:

• What are my brand’s values/beliefs?
• How do you want your audience to view your brand?
• What words/emotions do you want associated with your brand?
• What sets your brand apart from other similar brands?
• What personality do you want your brand to embody?

All of the answers to these questions will help you establish a clear sense of exactly what your brand embodies.

Research

Next, you can start researching what your competitors are doing and how they present themselves as brands. Note down the feelings, themes, visuals and voice that your competitors are using and any you want to take any inspiration from. Also consider making a mood board of the visual themes and imagery you want to embody in your own brand; Pinterest is a great tool for this.

Research is a key step as it helps you visualise where your brand fits in the sea of competitors, and exactly what can help it stand out and be a cut above the rest.

Name

Your first big commitment is choosing a brand name. Hopefully your brainstorming and research will help with this. There’s no fool proof way of finding a solid brand name; it takes time, creativity and perseverance.

We’ve collated our 5 favourite ways of creating brand names, each of which is easy and will help you come up with suggestions you wouldn’t have previously thought of.

Brand story

Does your brand have a story that you want to tell to your audience? Brand stories are great at informing people where the brand was born from and what values it holds dear. It also gives people an insight into your brands personality and can help form lasting relationships with your fans if your story resonsates with them.

Brand stories aren’t essential though, and if you don’t have one or don’t want to tell people about the birth of your brand, then you don’t have to.

Visuals

Now for visuals! Visuals are super important as they’ll be the first thing your audience see on your socials, pages, products and posts. Visuals encompass loads of things, such as:

When it comes to building your first brand, the most important visuals you should have ready to go are a main image which you can use for your socials and/or sites, a colour palette or ongoing theme and a logo.

There are a multitude of free image editing and designing tools online, such as Canva, Unfold and Pixlr. These kinds of tools will help you create a cohesive visual toolkit ready to go when you need them.

Tone of voice

How does your brand sound and how do you want it to interact with your audience and fans? Is your brand’s voice…:

This tone of voice should be in line with the answers you gave when brainstorming; this only helps glue your brand together and makes it more cohesive.

Cohesive

Cohesion means your brand will be easily recognised across different platforms and sites; this looks clean and professional to your audience too.

By using the same colour palette, image themes and tone of voice across all of your platforms, cohesion is easily acheived.

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And there you go, you now have a basic brand that you can go out and start building socials, sites and content for. If you’re wanting some free digital marketing tools to start promoting it with, check out PUSH.fm and the tools we offer.