How to create a killer brand (in 10 steps)

Whether your branding is good, mediocre or bad will have a significant impact on your business. Meaning that it’s worth spending a bit of time getting it right.

I know it’s tempting to get stuck into choosing colours and fonts right away, but in this post I want to show you why that’s not the right way to develop your brand and how to do it instead, to create something with serious impact.

If you approach branding from a pure design perspective, you’ll miss some of the most important elements. So, let’s look at a rounded approach to create a killer brand.

What is branding?

Branding is the process of giving a business, product or service its own identity. Creating a brand means defining every element of the brand that will come into contact with your customers: what they see, hear and feel when they are around your brand.

This includes the brand name, logo, tagline, colours used, language used and design style.

Well executed branding resonates with customers and creates both a positive perception and emotional connection.

Why is branding important?

Strong branding cultivates customer affinity, loyalty and trust. It makes it far easier for your customers to identify you in an ever growing sea of offers and allows you to charge a premium for your products.

Ultimately, branding is a critical tool in creating customer stickiness.

Once you’ve developed a solid brand identity, you can also share it with anyone representing the brand. Whether that’s your team members or agencies and consultants, it makes it easy for everyone to represent the brand in the correct way.

What happens with poor branding?

If your branding is poor it makes you easy to forget. If it’s inconsistent it makes you hard to get to know and therefore hard to trust.

Neither of these mindsets result in strong customer loyalty.

What are the key elements of building a brand?

Brand positioning

The development of any brand begins with a clear understanding of who the brand is targeted towards. Start with your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA) to really think about who this brand needs to be speaking to.

If you don’t have an ICA for your business yet, make sure you create one first. I have another post on this here, with a free template to use.

Brand essence

Once you’re clear on how your brand will be positioned and to whom, the next step should be to pinpoint one single word that describes the brand's essence.

To give you an idea of how important this is, I want you to think about a mega brand like Nike or Apple. These brands aren’t necessarily associated with any set colour schemes, etc but you do know what they stand for.

You know what’s at the core of the brand; what’s their essence.

That’s because everything that you see of the brand is developed from this heart. That’s what makes for an excellent brand.

The quickest way to do this is to brainstorm every word that comes to mind when you think about this brand. Make the list as long as you can. Use synonym lookup tools online to generate similar words as well.

Once you have your list of words, go through it and cross off any that don’t really grab you. Hold each one in your mind or say it out loud and see if it really connects with the brand you’re creating for your ideal audience.

Eventually you’ll get down to one word. This word should feel like it clicks when you say it. 

Everything you generate from here on out will flow from this brand essence.

Examples of words I’ve used before for brands I’ve developed are ‘inspire’ and ‘empower’. In both cases, they fit the brand perfectly and got me excited every time I thought about them.

Brand personality

It’s now time to give the brand more life, by characterising its personality. I would suggest picking around 6 words that describe the brand. 

Think about your ICA and your brand positioning. Think about how you want the brand to come across, the language it’ll use, the way it’ll deal with different situations.

What does this say about the brand? If it were a person, what would its personality be?

Examples of these words could be: playful, cheeky, elegant, sophisticated, bold, caring, inclusive, etc.

Brand language / tone of voice

Nailing down a brand’s tone of voice is something that often gets left out, but is one of the most key elements of developing a strong brand.

Here, you want to create a go-to document of words and phrases that your brand would and wouldn’t use. For example, if you’re describing being happy about something, would you say delighted or bloomin’ happy? Does your brand swear, or semi-swear, or never would?

You want enough examples to guide this, so that you or anyone else working on the brand can reference it when they aren’t 100% sure if the copy created is on track to maintain brand consistency.

Brand Name

You see how far down the list this one appears? It’s not until you know who you’re speaking to and the essence of the brand that you can create a name that truly fits.

Ideally your brand name should contain some hint of what you do and who you do it for. However, I would say not to over complicate your thinking here.

If you consistently get the other points right then your brand will be identifiable no matter what. You just have to look at some of the biggest brands in the world to see that.

When choosing a brand name, also check if you can get the social handles and domain for this name. It’ll make life a lot harder down the line if you can’t.

To do this, head to GoDaddy.com to check if the domain name is available and then also check the handles on the main social media platforms, by typing them into see if anyone has already taken them.

Brand logo

Designing a brand logo can be the step that sucks up the most time and energy. So, my advice on this step is to not overthink it and let it kill you!

Yes, a logo is important but it’s not as important as how you communicate your personality, values and content. All of this will be what sticks in people’s minds far more.

That being said, you do want to give it the best you have. I recommend using Canva to create your logo - it has templates you can use, which are great for both inspiration and creating your final design.

Here’s a few things to think about when creating your logo:

• It needs to be clear

• It needs to convey your brand personality

• How will it come across in the various places you’ll need to have it?

• How will it work against different backgrounds?

One thing I have learnt over the years is that simple is better. Keep it clean and to the point. And remember… you can always change it further down the line if you need to. Nothing is set in stone!

Brand tagline

Your brand tagline is a one-liner that communicates why you exist. And it brings in a little brand personality and uses brand language to convey this.

You could ask anyone whose tagline is ‘Just Do It’ and they could tell you. In 3 simple words, it tells you what the company stands for and does it with personality.

Same as you did for the essence, brainstorm ideas for taglines and use a thesaurus to generate ideas for you. Hell, use ChatGPT too. The more ideas you can generate, the easier you’ll find to nail down the line that works.

Brand colours

Only at this point should you be considering your initial core colour palette. It needs to reflect everything you’ve honed so far in this exercise: your brand’s essence, personality and how it communicates.

Is it bold or more gentle? Feminine, masculine or inbetween? Is it sunny or subdued? The colours you use should communicate just as strongly as your language does.

My favourite tool for designing colour palettes in Coolors. It’s a free palette generator that makes it super easy to put together slick, professional looking palettes. 

Once you’ve got your palette, you can just grab the hex codes and use them across all your branding. Just be sure to use them in a consistent way, i.e. pick one colour for buttons / calls to action, one for highlight sections or heading, etc.

This helps create that strong, consistent feel that you’re after.

Brand fonts

Having consistent fonts across everything you produce is incredibly important. We get a feel for a brand when we’re reading their font. Again this needs to reflect and communicate your brand’s essence and personality.

Does something more playful or formal suit your brand?

Bear in mind that the maximum number of fonts you want is 3:

1. Heading font

2. Body font

3. Script or highlight font (optional)

Your heading font should also be the font used in your logo and will come to be known as your ‘main’ font. By using this strong font across your logo and headings you’re consistently tying your brand elements together, giving that solid, secure feel to it.

Your body font should pair well with the main font and be extremely easy to read. You really don’t want something too fancy here because what’s most important is that your audience can read through all your materials with ease.

Pinterest is an excellent source of inspiration for font pairings. Personally, I would recommend buying premium fonts once you’ve found the ones you like. This enables you to use the same fonts across everything you do. Yes, it’s a cost but it’s not a huge one and it’s a one time cost too.

Brand design style

Last but not least (and very often missed altogether) is to decide on the design style for your brand. By this I mean setting some rules around design.

For example: 

• Will boxes have square or rounded edges?

• Do you use solid block colour or shapes?

• Are the shapes soft or hard?

• Do you use patterns or solid colour?

Visualise your brand and create a list of things you both do and do don’t when it comes to design style. In a similar way to the language exercise, this makes it extremely easy to keep everyone on point as the brand grows.

How much does it cost to start a brand?

It’s really up to you how much it costs to create your brand. These days there are so many free tools available online that you almost create it for free if you’re willing to do it yourself. Which you’re perfectly capable of by the way.

Here are the tools I use when creating or improving a brand:

• Coolors - colour palette generator (free)

• Canva - design (starts free)

• ChatGPT - helps to generate language and taglines (free)

• GoDaddy - domains (start from £0.99)

Of course, you can outsource this work if you prefer. If this is the route you want to take, my recommendation would be to try fiverr and review the past work of any candidates you like the look of before committing to work together.

You would still need to provide them with everything they’d need to know about the brand in order for them to do a good job, i.e. the brand positioning, essence, personality, etc.

Creating your brand guidelines

Once you’ve completed the above, it helps to create a one page document that captures it all. This will become your brand guidelines document.

You can use this to sense check over a piece of content you create and easily send it to anyone else who will work on the brand with you.

Evolving your brand over time.

It’s important to note that you don’t have to get this 100% from day one. Even getting it 80% of the way there will help you to stand out and start gaining loyal customers.

As your brand grows and strengthens you should regularly revisit this document and add to it / amend it as necessary. Maybe you’ve come across a new phase that’s important to your language or you feel like a different word describes your personality better.

Try not to make major overhauls unless it’s absolutely necessary, but do make tweaks to keep strengthening your brand as you go.

To recap

Here are the steps to creating a killer brand:

1. Identify your brand positioning

2. Define your brand essence

3. Round out your brand personality

4. Develop your brand tone of voice

5. Choose your brand name

6. Design your brand logo

7. Decide on a brand tagline

8. Select fonts and colours that reflect your brand

9. Set your brand design style guidelines

10. Capture it all in a ‘brand guidelines’ document and tweak it over time, as you get to know your brand better

If there’s any part of this process that you don’t understand or would like more detailed guidance on, drop me a note in the comments or email me.

The most important thing is to try and have fun with it. If you feel it becoming a chore, step away and reconnect with the heart of the brand and why you’re creating it.

You’ll create something far stronger if it comes from a place of joy and connection.

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As ever, if you want more hands-on support in launching and growing your business reach out to me about 1:1 coaching. There’s really nothing you can’t do with the right support.