Building Brand Identity is even more challenging for a startup!

Why? 

Because they don’t have any or fewer achievements to showcase. They don’t have a lot of fancy awards to brag about and not even many certifications or entitlements.
Thus, it is very necessary for them to clearly differentiate themselves from the market to stand a chance among the market leaders.

Here is a step-by-step guide for start-ups to build a strong brand identity.
 

 1.    Establish Your Corporate Identity



How your customers would identify you in the heaps of information available online?

There should be a sign or a name that your customers, partners as well as your employees associate withyour brand. Here we are referring to your Brand Logo and Brand Name. You should have a name and a brand color that resonates with your products/services or your ideology. It is important to clearly define Brand Guidelines, that specify the exact color code of your logo, its exact size, and then you need to make sure that it is consistent on all the communication channels.

To get you started, here is what different colors mean from the branding perspective:

Blue:  Most used colors in the popular Brand Logo’s since it represents qualities like calm, trustworthy, reliable and a sense of security.

Red: Red is the most eye-catching color. It represents passion, strength and love. It is especially relevant for the brands dealing with food/fast-food.

Green: Associated with travel, agriculture and harmony, green signifies nature, adventure, outdoors, health, fertility, safety, and harmony.

Gold: Stands for prestige, power, wisdom and quality.

Purple: Brands use this color to represent sophistication. It combines the qualities of red and blue.

Yellow: Yellow is filled with joyous sunlight and inspires energy, enthusiasm, hope, cheer fulness etc.

Orange: Orange is used by brands to make an expensive item appear less costly. It majorly represents youth.

Brown: Brown represent dirt, earth and mountains that are reliable, solid and are connected to adventures. It is more preferred by men than women.

Black and White: In the world of brands, Black stands for elegance & being elite, while White represents pureness and perfection. 

If you are still not sure which color to opt for, it is better to follow what other successful brands are doing. Here are some stats that would help you.

Colors used by top 100 brands are as follows:

• Red – 29%, Blue – 33%, Yellow or Gold – 13%, Gray or Black – 28%
• Only 5% use more than two colors
• 59% use graphics with text
• 93% are designed to be identifiable even in small sizes
• 67% are horizontal

(Source: zuzaprint.com)

2.    Build Your Presence on Multiple Channels



Depending on the type of business you have, few social media platforms might be more relevant for you than others. For example, the startups targeting B2B customers can focus more on LinkedIn. While those with the B2C audience can target Facebook. Similarly, if you want to disseminate information, Quora is the best platform.

If your business is somehow related to the latest news and celebrities, Twitter can do wonders for you. Instagram and Pinterest are for the brands that want to showcase visually appealing images, like travel & hospitality and food & beverages.

No matter on which of these social media websites majority of your audience is present, your brand should have a presence on all the social media platforms. You can be more active on one than others, but having a company’s page / account on each of them is an absolute necessity.

If you don’t have the resources and time to post different content on different platforms, you can simply connect different social media accounts, so your post on Facebook gets automatically forwarded on Twitter / LinkedIn or other platforms as well.

3.    Establish Communication with Your Target Audience



You must have thought about your great startup idea and before planning to execute it, you must have thought about the people who would use your product / service. Even if you are not ready with your product, you must start communicating with your target audience.

You should care and post about the topics and subjects that might be relevant for your target audience on all social media platforms.

This would help you create a sense of reliability among the potential users of your product / service even before it is out in the market.

4.    Communicate Product / Service Benefits



Communicating product / service benefits is even more important for the start-ups because they often target niche market. They find solutions to the problems which people are used to face and have even stopped complaining about them.

You need to make them realize the problems they are facing and tell them exactly how your product is going to solve these problems. You can take out a series of posts, each of the post talking about a particular product benefit.

Conclusion:
Though this guide can give you a hint on how to build a strong Brand Identity for your brand, it doesn’t give a conclusive answer.  There is no one-size-fits-all solution for establishing a strong online presence. You might have to experiment a number of times before arriving at a suitable solution. What’s more, you might need to transform your Brand Identity in the future according to the changing taste and behavior of your target audience.