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Tag: brand

May 12, 2022

4 Reasons Why Brand Awareness Is Critical For Your Marketing

Brand awareness is critical to your overall marketing strategy, but it can be difficult to build! Marketing takes time and that’s something small businesses don’t have. Many business owners focus their marketing efforts on creating sales to drive revenue and grow their business. That strategy makes sense from a business perspective.

If you’re a small business, you want to know if your marketing dollars are having an impact. There is nothing wrong with quantifying the results of your marketing.

The problem arises when business owners neglect ANY advertising or marketing that doesn’t create an IMMEDIATE sale. It might sound smart to only focus on revenue-generating marketing tactics, but this strategy has consequences. Marketers call tactics that seek only to make the potential customer aware of the business, not drive an immediate sale, “brand awareness plays.”

Business owners often are skeptical about this approach. Why spend money on advertising or marketing if it won’t generate an immediate sale?

The answer is pretty simple: your customer’s awareness of your brand is the cornerstone of your entire business. Without widespread brand awareness, you just can’t hit your revenue goals. To help further your marketing knowledge, our team put together our thoughts on why brand awareness is such a crucial part of your marketing!

Read On To Learn More About Brand Awareness!

 

Brand Awareness Is The First Step To Making A Sale

Brand awareness is the first step of the marketing funnel, regardless of your industry or business model. All customers go through the following mental journey before they purchase, whether they’re looking for a project management software for an engineering firm or a new wine for date night.

  • Brand Awareness: Your customer learns about your business. This knowledge might be extremely high-level, but they understand you offer a product or service that might solve a problem of theirs.
  • Consideration: The customer is contemplating purchasing your product or service. This process could be as simple as reading a wine blog review of your new pinot noir or as complex as watching several webinars on the best project management software. Regardless of what the process looks like, the customer is actively considering buying.
  • Intent: The potential customer is displaying intent to purchase, but they have not YET become a won customer. (Think of searching for your new pinot noir via a search engine.)
  • Purchase: The sale is complete! The customer has purchased from you.
  • Delight: The past customer is so satisfied with their purchase that they become a repeat customer.  They may even recommend others to you through word of mouth or become a spokesperson in your marketing materials!

 

Brand awareness is literally the first step of this process. A lot of business owners want to see their dollars spent lower in the marketing funnel, driving purchases and winning repeat business. To use our wine example, showing a Google Ad to the searcher for your online store would be the “intent” stage of the funnel. Your hypothetical vineyard could use email to send out a discount code to the purchaser in the “delight” stage to win continued wine purchases.

It’s easy to see the dollars won in the intent, purchase, and delight stages. After all, at these stages, purchasing is more likely, so it makes sense to put money here if you would like to see an immediate return on investment.

However, there’s one problem with this approach. Without general brand awareness of the product in question, your newfound wine enthusiast or project management customer would never have purchased. There needs to be some general understanding of what products and services you offer and without brand awareness, your potential customers can never consider purchasing from you.

Brand Awareness Is Subtle

If your business depends on quick decision purchases, you need brand recognition. The reason why is pretty simple. There aren’t many opportunities to market to existing customers or reach those researching your brand.

Take soap for instance. While it is theoretically possible to research a new soap, most of us probably pick up soap when out at the nearest drugstore. If you’re a soap brand, you don’t have many opportunities to make a case for your brand as your potential customer considers purchasing. They’re likely already in the soap aisle when they’re skimming the different brands.

That’s why general advertising is so important. Your potential customer is likely making a snap-second decision in the aisle and without general advertising to raise awareness of your brand, you’re likely not getting the sale.

However, general advertising is also useful for longer decision-making cycles. Take car manufacturers. It can take ten years or more to buy a luxury car. While “intent” and “purchase” stage marketing is critical for these long sale cycles, general branding is still important to stay top of mind. While prospects research and contemplate buying a complex product like a car or project management system, they can become disinterested and stop considering your product. After all, this decision-making process is longer, so there’s more time to forget about the product in question. That’s why general advertising is so critical to keep the potential customer aware of your brand.

It also takes time for advertising to make an impact. To go back to the wine example, maybe your potential customer saw an ad for your wine on YouTube and then promptly forgot about the product. (Remember, the average American sees over 2,000 ads in a day and it can be easy for a single ad to be drowned out in that chatter.)

You may need three or four impressions to really make an impact on your wine enthusiast before they even read a review of that pinot noir. If you keep all of your marketing dollars in Pay-Per-Click advertising, you may see that customers purchase after clicking your Google Ad and think that Google Ads is your most important marketing channel. However, that view ignores the fact that your user saw your advertising well before they ever considered searching for your wine.

In all of these examples, the customer likely isn’t aware of the impact that advertising has had on them. The customer likely would have not consciously remembered a “top-of-the-funnel” advertisement, whether they’re making a snap-second decision on soap, a long-term decision on a luxury vehicle, or trying a new wine.

However, regardless of if they remembered your initial ad, they likely wouldn’t have purchased without first coming into contact with your brand’s messaging! Focusing on the final purchase while neglecting the rest of the awareness, consideration, and research that led to that purchase is a limited view of your marketing.

Brand Awareness & Messaging Align

One of the best ways to differentiate your brand from the competition is to have a well-defined brand message that is about more than products and business propositions. Consumers are consistently demanding more socially-conscious messaging and/or human value propositions from their favorite brands.

Another problem with focusing purely on purchases is that it’s hard to make a human-centered brand message on a digital store checkout page or via a 90-character Google Ad. These mediums are great for finalizing sales, but they’re not a great place to speak to the values of your business.

To pique the interest of prospective clients while simultaneously trumpeting your brand values, you’ll need some sort of brand awareness advertising. Many businesses use high-level brand awareness tactics like video or social advertising to tell potential customers about their values and mission. You need to get your potential customer’s attention, and speaking to your brand values is a great way to do so.

Here are a few quick tips for speaking to your brand values in an advertisement!

  • Keep It Brief. You’ll only have 30 seconds at most and possibly only a second on social media. Find a pithy way to make an impact.
  • Don’t Sermonize. This isn’t the place to lay out your five-point plan to change the world. Top-level and feel-good statements work for your values.
  • Be Authentic. Whatever your brand values are, be truthful. Your advertising needs to come across as real, so be sure that your ad doesn’t feel fake or forced. Generally, having consistent brand values across all advertising is a good rule of thumb for determining if you’re being authentic.

 

Technology Improvements Have Reduced Marketing Costs

Small business owners are often skeptical about brand awareness marketing due to its cost-prohibitive nature. We understand why.

Before the internet, broadcast television, billboard, and newspapers were the main mediums for advertisers to reach the general market. These mediums often cost premium dollars, were hard to measure, and couldn’t be targeted to individual users based on set characteristics. This meant that most businesses needed a large budget to actually use brand awareness marketing to their advantage.

Thankfully, the marketing landscape has changed considerably since the 80s. New mediums have entered the picture and have reduced the barrier to entry to the advantage of small businesses. For instance, minimums for social media advertising can be as low as a few hundred dollars and can also be targeted to unique characteristics, making it a great option for small businesses to reach new customers.

Real-time bidding advertising has also made it easy to use digital audio and Youtube as brand awareness channels to increase awareness among potential customers. The point is that small business owners don’t need to put down the money for a primetime broadcast spot or a centrally-located billboard to increase brand awareness. New tactics mean that business owners can only spend what they’re comfortable with while also better targeting and measuring impact. That’s a great development in the marketing space and it’s one to take advantage of!

Increase Your Brand Awareness With JSL Marketing & Web Design

Are you interested in growing your brand awareness? Our marketing experts are standing by to discuss any of the following.

  • Social Ads
  • Video Production
  • Direct Mailers
  • & More!

 

If you think that your customers understand what your business does, but need to see more direct and actionable marketing progress, we can also meet with you to help design an impactful and powerful marketing funnel! Depending on your unique needs and overall business strategy, we may recommend ….

  • Automated Email Campaigns
  • Pay-Per-Click Advertising
  • Content Marketing
  • Reputation Marketing
  • Web Design & Web Development
  • & More!

 

Reaching the right audience is important, but it’s only the first step. Use your marketing mediums to guide your potential customers through awareness and consideration to intent and purchase. Once you have won a customer, don’t forget to keep remarketing to them!

If you need the expertise and attention of a full-service marketing agency, reach out to JSL Marketing & Web Design through our contact form!

August 26, 2021

What Makes A Great Logo? 4 Tips For Amazing Branding!

“What makes a great logo?” It’s an important question! 

You know you need an amazing logo to compete in the marketing world in 2021. Your customers and potential customers expect you to have a logo. If they are researching your brand and don’t see a well-made, professional logo, their trust in your reputation will take a hit and they’re likely not to invest their time or money in your brand.

And just having any old logo isn’t enough in and of itself. If you have a logo (but it looks like a kindergartener designed it) your users are likely to leave unimpressed. Your logo doesn’t need to be a historic work of art, but it does need to be clean, professional, memorable, and enticing to your customers and potential customers.

So how do you design a great logo? What makes a great small business logo? Our graphic design and branding experts at JSL Marketing & Web Design are here to run you through how you should think through your logo and branding design needs!

Read on to learn more! 

Ready to Talk Logo Design? Fill Out The Contact Form!

Great Logo & Branding Design Tips

1. A Great Logo Is Simple. 

Think through the iconic logos of the last thirty years. Many of them are very well-designed but are not necessarily complicated or intricate. The Nike Swoosh is one of the paragons of this practice, but there are plenty of other minimalist logos. Coca-Cola, Target, Airbnb, NBC, and Shell are all great examples.

A good logo needs to be versatile, so less design “noise” is often better. Like with Target or Shell, a simple logo is recognizable from a highway in a split second, in a way that a complicated logo would not be.

Remember, the average American sees well over a thousand ads a day, so it’s easy for your great and ground-breaking logo to go forgotten. Make it easy to remember by making your logo and trade dress simple. These logos are easier to digest and thus easier to associate with your brand. 

2. A Great Logo Is Impactful.

The McDonald’s arches are not necessarily the most awe-inspiring logo in the world. However, this simple design is extremely memorable to users, whether they’re online, watching TV, or on an interstate. While the Golden Arches may not be the Mona Lisa, they’re very recognizable, which is one of the highest praises you can give a logo!

3. A Great Logo Is Strategic.

There’s no one right way to design a logo. Does a logo need to be associated with your industry?

Lufthansa, a German airline, shows a crane taking off in the same position as an airplane leaving a runway. This logo immediately associates the brand with travel in the mind of the user, but this isn’t necessarily a requirement. What’s important is that each brand made conscious decisions that aligned with their business goals.

For instance, an international flight across the Atlantic, the bread and butter of Lufthansa, is not a quick snap-second decision, so potential customers are likely to be researching flights when they come across the Lufthansa logo. Therefore, tying that logo to the feeling of travel and flight is a great decision!

That’s not true of a brand like Target or Shell, where quick brand recall helps drive revenue. (I.e “I need gas” or “We’re out of milk.”) There’s no right way to design a logo, but it is important to think through your brand’s needs and design a logo that supports those needs.

4. A Great Logo Uses Psychology.

A lot of marketing is subconscious. You can carefully plan an advertising spot, thoroughly research your target audience, and craft a beautiful value proposition, but at the end of the day, a lot of the factors that compel people to purchase are emotional, not logical.

Marketing isn’t just giving your audience information; it’s compelling them to feel a certain feeling about your brand. A great logo ties into these feelings. Think about McDonald’s red or yellow. While it’s a sharp color scheme, the McDonald’s colors also stimulate hunger. Did you know that red can be a stimulant?

Likewise, think of how many financial institutions use blue in their logos. Why is that? Well, it’s because blue is often a “soothing” color, a shade that conveys trust, calmness, and stability, all qualities you’d love to see in your insurance, investment firm, or bank. 

Common Logo Mistakes

Overthinking It

Again, remember that the best logos in the world are sleek, clean, and memorable. They are not overly complicated and hypercomplex pieces. If your logo looks “messy” then your users are likely to not remember it. 

Going With Trends

Great logos are timeless. They transcend the decades and don’t need to play off of a fleeting design fad. This doesn’t mean that logos might not need slight facelifts over the years. However, it does mean that designing a logo in line with a new design fad is probably a short-sighted approach. Design fads come and go in a matter of months. You’re designing a logo to last for years! Stick with more timeless and “safe” design elements. The classics are classic for a reason!

Using Generic Imagery

There’s a fine line between sleek and timeless and simple, boring imagery. That’s unfortunately a very subjective line. It can be a tricky balancing act to find the right recognizable imagery without overly complicating the design, while still keeping your users engaged. Some brands play it too safe and use overly simplistic design, motifs that are quickly forgotten. Symbolism is great, but if your logo looks like ClipArt, you’re not going to stay top of mind for your customers.  This is also a great reason why you should avoid online logo generators, logo templates, and free logo makers. Talk to our team if you have any questions on finding the line between doing too much and doing too little. That’s especially important because being too boring could inadvertently become…

Logo Plagiarism

Ripping off another brand entirely is difficult to do unintentionally. However, the more generic your logo is, the less unique it becomes and the greater the odds that your logo is too much like other brands. You don’t want to be accused of plagiarism, or worse, have your customers conflate your brand with a completely unrelated industry.

Do your homework upfront to ensure that you’re creating a unique logo. 

Our Graphic Design Process

Finding that winning mix and designing a memorable, simplistic, unique, impressive, and uncomplicated logo is often easier said than done. That’s where the logo designers of JSL Marketing & Web Design enter the picture! Whether you need a completely new logo, a facelift, or custom social media graphics, we’re here for your custom logo and graphic design needs!

To begin, we want to ask some questions about your brand.

  • Do you have a logo? 
  • Is there a brand style guide we should refer to?
  • What do you want your customers to think of when they think of your brand?
  • Who are your competitors? What do their brands look like?
  • Are there any industry-specific logo design trends we need to be aware of? 

From there, we can offer you several brand development services to help you with where you are in the logo design process! 

  • Concept Development!
  • Brand Development
  • Value Proposition & Messaging Research Logo Design 
  • And More! 

Know when you trust JSL Marketing & Web Design that you’re trusting the best. \We’re a digital marketing industry tycoon with years of experience working with real estate, healthcare, and tech clients and we have the recognition and laurels to prove it!

We’re in it to win it and are ready to help you build a long-lasting online brand for the years to come. Build your brand to last with JSL Marketing & Web Design by filling out the contact form. We look forward to discussing your marketing needs with you!

May 20, 2021

3 Dos & Don’ts For Branded Merchandise

In 2021, small businesses are going above and beyond to get their name out there! The average American sees over 2,000 ads in a day, after all, so anything business owners can do to increase their brand recognition is helpful! One of the best ways of doing this at scale is to invest in branded merchandise. A Google or YouTube ad might only be in front of your audience for a few seconds. A T-shirt or notepad bearing your logo and brand name could be seen every day!

However, there are some rules of the road to be aware of when designing brand collateral. It’s not as simple as merely creating branded products. How are you going to distribute this merchandise? Do you have a logo to put on this collateral? What audience is this collateral made for? These are all questions you should answer BEFORE you start designing any product or article of clothing!

Thankfully, our team here at JSL Marketing & Web Design has the answers!

 Read on to learn about our Dos and Don’ts of Branded company merchandise!

Branded Merchandise Dos

  • Do Incorporate Your Logo: You’d be surprised by how much brand collateral doesn’t include a logo. Displaying your brand name and contact info is still relevant, but it’s disconnected information and is thus less valuable to your business aims. A lot of human recall is prompted by colors and design more than text, which is why logos are so powerful. If you don’t include a logo alongside your brand name, you’re decreasing the likelihood that the user will recall your brand name if they see it in other advertising. This only reduces the probability that they ever turn into a sale for your brand. Trust us, include a logo to help your users recognize your brand in the future.
  • Do Highlight Other Marketing Efforts: This can be easier said than done. You only have so much space when you put your brand on an object or article of clothing, and it can be cluttered to try to put your website URL or Facebook handle on a coffee mug or pen. However, we highly encourage you to include another marketing medium on the collateral if possible. It’s a great way to promote other aspects of marketing and educate your audience about what else your brand is doing! It’s even better if you can promote your website on an object that is relevant to your industry and audience! A company URL on a branded mousepad, for instance, might be an excellent play for a company that specializes in software. 
  • Do Include A Bit About Your Brand: Again, this will depend on the circumstances of the collateral. Are you passing out branded coffee mugs at a convention? Are these items that customers can order from your site? Depending on the circumstances of how your users are getting their collateral, consider including a little printout slip with each item. This little pamphlet can quickly summarize your brand’s history, make a value proposition to your lead, and include relevant contact information. Let’s take the case of a local candy shop that passes out branded old-fashioned soda bottles during the local street fair. If this shop puts a printout within each bottle detailing the shop’s history and values, they’ve contextualized the collateral. Now, the bottles aren’t just bottles. They’re a quick summary of your brand and a reminder of that shop’s value propositions for your users!

Branded Merchandise Don’ts

  • Don’t Neglect The Strategic Purpose Of the Collateral: Companies often jump straight to the design stage without thinking about WHY they’re interested in branded merchandise. The purpose behind your merchandise doesn’t need to be to drive sales! Creating collateral for customers to buy or T-shirts for your staff as an appreciation gift are perfectly valid reasons to invest in merchandise! Just be sure to have the conversation upfront and know what YOUR why is before you design any collateral. 
  • Don’t Design Without Research: Often, business owners default to what they think their customers or leads will want without conducting any research to back up their assumptions. If you’re adding your collateral to an eCommerce store for purchase, you need to know what your customers actually want to purchase! Again, this will depend on your brand’s goal for your collateral. If you’re passing out free collateral at a sales show or local event, researching customer desires isn’t as imperative. However, you should still find some way of gauging interest among your audience, whether that’s your staff, your customers, or your industry before you order 1,000 tote bags.
  • Don’t Brand Everything: Sometimes, companies get bitten by the design bug and get excited about all the creative things they can create. While there’s nothing wrong with being excited, this enthusiasm often has unintended consequences. The point of putting your brand on collateral isn’t just to do so; it’s to put your name out there and increase brand recognition amongst your target audience. Ideally, you’re creating branded collateral that is somewhat related to your industry. A coffee company creating branded mugs or a doctor’s office passing out branded calendars with their contact information are great examples of this. These objects display a logo relevant to the audience and thus increase the odds that the viewers remember the brand in question. It’s tempting to immediately think of pens or coasters and imagine what your logo would look like, but we encourage you to think of more suitable options for your industry. 
  • Don’t Cut Corners On Cost: We understand entirely being cost-effective, and there are plenty of fantastic brand collateral options that are reasonably priced. Don’t think you need to spend an arm and a leg for unique brand merchandise. However, you do need to provide a positive user experience to the customer or lead receiving the collateral. That could be dependent on the price. Remember, the point isn’t to put your brand on everything. It’s to create branded merchandise that’s relevant to your brand. If you’re a vineyard passing out branded corkscrews at a convention, choosing a subpar producer is a risk. You don’t want those corkscrews breaking and your brand name being the only thing the user remembers about the experience. The point isn’t just to put your name out there; it’s to put your name out there and get some good brand recognition. Don’t cut corners. Trust us; it’s worth taking the time and resources to make the right brand collateral for your customers. 

Call JSL Marketing & Web Design for unique brand merchandise! We’re an award-winning, Dallas-based digital marketing, branding, and design agency! Our talented artists and brand ambassadors are waiting to discuss your next branding project and any of the following!


Concept Development

Logo Design

Brand Collateral

Print Marketing

Messaging Consultation

Branded Video Development


Call us today at 855.458.2873 to begin your next branding project!

April 08, 2021

How To Create a Stellar Brand Style Guide

If you’re a small business owner, creating and maintaining a logo can be difficult. There’s just so much to do and it’s easy for branding to fall by the wayside. However, proper branding is an integral part of any marketing strategy and an aspect you should invest in. A great way to begin strengthening your brand is to develop a comprehensive brand style guide. Read on to learn JSL Marketing & Web Design’s tips for developing an amazing brand style guide!

What Is a Brand Style Guide?

A brand style guide is kind of like the “playbook” of your business’s branding. It’s a shared reference material that lists out the different plays and executions of what your brand should look like. Much like a college football team’s playbook keeps every member of the team aligned, your brand style guide ensures that every branding effort your business undertakes goes swimmingly! In this guide, your business will list out what fonts, graphics, colors, and presentations are acceptable for your brand! It’s a comprehensive reference material for whoever may need to work on your logo or branding at any point!

Why You Need a Brand Style Guide

If you’re a small business, you probably haven’t given that much consideration to a brand style guide before. You might not even have a logo, let alone a brand style guide that details every aspect of your brand. However, just because you haven’t considered a brand style guide before, doesn’t mean that there aren’t real benefits to creating one!

A Good Brand Style Makes It Easy For Customers To Recognize Your Brand

  • This is one of the most obvious reasons to develop a brand style guide. Carefully choosing the logo, color shades, font, and other inventive details and standardizing them across your marketing efforts makes it easy for your customers to recognize your brand immediately. The sooner they do so, the sooner they can make decisions, like the decision to purchase from your brand. A streamlined and recognizable logo and trade dress, courtesy of your brand style guide, makes that process easy for your customers!

A Good Brand Style Guide Helps Everyone Get On the Same Page

  • Even small businesses can have complicated marketing plans. It’s not unheard of for a small business to use a logo designed by a freelancer, use a web design agency for web development and SEO, and a social media contractor for social media management. A brand style guide helps standardize the output and efforts of these disparate teams. 

A Good Brand Style Guide Elicits Strong Feeling From Your Audience

  • Think of the way you feel seeing the logo or slogan of one of the world’s biggest and most recognizable brands. You might feel pumped up seeing the Nike logo, inventive after seeing an Apple commercial, or even a little bit hungry after seeing a Golden Arches from the highway. That’s the beauty of an impactful brand style guide! If the logo and slogan of your business are designed properly, your audience shouldn’t just see a logo or color scheme; they should experience a strong feeling or memory of your brand! That’s a valuable reaction, as most purchasing decisions are more emotional than logical! If your brand style guide can drive emotional responses from your audience, then you’re that much closer to driving sales!

How To Create a Brand Style Guide

Begin with the core values of your business

  • What defines your brand? What do you want people to remember about your business? What does your business value? Once you have this finalized, you can move onto the graphic elements. 

Finalize the visual elements

  • This can include, but is not limited to…
    • Font
    • Colors
    • Hierarchy 
    • Formats
    • Logo

Develop a checklist

  • Depending on the size of the business, it’s not realistic for the owner to approve every branding exercise. However, you can include a checklist of common issues for your freelancer or agency prior. This lets your creative developer have a guide to work off of without making you review every aspect of their work prior!

Our Branding Services

Common Brand Style Guide Mistakes

You’ve decided to put your brand style guide together. That’s great! However, you’re not out of the woods yet! Make sure you don’t fall into these common brand style mistakes!

Failing to define your strategy first

  • It can be tempting to define your brand font, colors, and formatting without thinking through your brand’s overarching strategy. However, this is one of the most common brand style guide mistakes we see. Make sure that you have a developed strategy in place before you develop the brand guide. There’s no point in creating a brand style guide if you don’t have the strategy in place prior!

Failing to connect your logo to your marketing efforts

  • Imagine a brand style guide that lists out all of the different aspects and examples for a business. However, there’s one crucial mistake. It doesn’t address what the business’s logo should look like on your website! Make sure that you’ve thought through all possible places your logo could be displayed and then develop the specifics to display that logo!

Choosing a logo solely on price

  • There’s no reason that an affordable logo can’t be the right pick for your brand! We’ve seen plenty of cost-effective logos over the years and some of them have been phenomenal! However, too many businesses fall into the trap of thinking of their logo as just another line item that will cost them, rather than an investment. The result is that they submit a few basic logo designs to freelancers over Fiverr, then pick the cheapest design concept from the freelancers and call that their logo. We encourage you to consider several criteria beyond just the price point when finalizing a logo. You don’t need to pick the most expensive and intricate option, but you should walk away from the logo development process with a logo you can be excited about, regardless of price. 

“We have had an awesome experience with JSL Marketing & Web Design. They have completely revamped our website and it looks wonderful! They are very knowledgeable and creative! Will definitely be calling them again”- Jordan S.”

Contact JSL Marketing for Your Next Branding Project

If you’re interested in putting together a great brand style guide, consider JSL Marketing & Web Design! Our team has years of experience in award-winning design projects and would like to bring that expertise to your next project! Don’t just take our word for it, however. Take the word of our clients!

Call us at 855.944.1201 to begin your next project!

June 28, 2019

7 Tips to Improve Your Branding (That You Can Start Today)

Branding can sound scary, especially to those who don’t fully understand what all goes into it. But improving your branding can be as simple as making sure everything is consistent, all the way up to making sure your voice, colors, logo, and look all tell the story of your business.

JSL Marketing & Web Design loves finding the unique ‘why’ of our clients, which is why we love branding so much! It is one of the ways you can show the world who you are, what you do, and (most importantly) why.

Need a shortened version of the above? Here’s a simple definition of ‘branding’ by Entrepreneur.com and Google’s dropdown feature snippet.

definition of branding screenshot

Now, let’s find out how we can improve your branding with just a few steps – steps you can even start today!

1. Your Logos

First, you need to decide on a logo design, one you absolutely love and will never part from (at least, until you rebrand/redesign your style). After you’ve designed and fully committed – you need to stick to it.

Now, this isn’t to say you cannot have a couple of slight variations (inverted colors, emblem or abbreviation vs full name) but it does mean you can’t have a different logo in every location on every page and on every platform. This will confuse customers at best and make you seem unpolished or unprofessional at worst. Branding is all about building trust, and trust comes from consistency.

Remember ‘close enough’ is only for horseshoes and hand grenades.

Check out our logo variations below for a visual example of what we mean:

JSL Marketing Brand Standards

JSL Marketing Round Logo 2

JSL Marketing New Logo

New JSL Marketing Logo

2. Your Colors

Of course, you probably noticed that all of the JSL Marketing & Web Design logos are in a similar color scheme – that is completely intentional. Because if you suddenly saw our logo in red, it would seem wrong, off, and other.

That is all because of our branding.

We consistently use the same colors, the same fonts, and the same logos to build trust, feelings of dependability, and a professional image.

Now just because you mainly see our green, blue, and white doesn’t mean you have to choose 3 colors and exclusively stick to those, instead, consider having one or two primary colors, a couple secondary ones, and even a couple tertiary ones to use for pops of color or CTAs (calls to action).

See our full color-scheme below:

JSL Marketing Color Scheme

3. Your Voice

Voice is incredibly important in building your brand online, because one of the main communication forms online is through writing. This means you need a strong angle or a strong ‘style’ of how you write in order to portray your voice through your words, through the screen.

Take the ‘voice’ of three huge digital marketing and SEO teachers of our time – Backlinko, Neil Patel, and Search Engine Journal.

Each is personal to varying degrees, each is educational, and each talk about similar subjects, but there are hard and fast differences between their voices, or, the style in which they speak.

This is important to remember when you are researching your ideal client or customer. Think of how they want to be spoken to, and then make sure your voice matches that demographics needs and wants.

4. Your Look

We’ve talked about the importance of web design before, but it must be mentioned within the realm of branding as well – make your site look nice and function well.

Because no matter your consistency, color scheme or voice – if your site is a flop, then your business will be a flop.

Most online users judge your company from your website, so make sure you aren’t losing their business from an aesthetic standpoint before you ever get the chance to win it.

5. Your Content Plan

Your visibility is important, and one of the best ways to ‘get out there’ is with a content plan. This can include updates to your website’s copy, blogs, email marketing, eBooks, white pages, fact sheets, infographics, and more.

But what’s most important to remember is that content is king and putting out quality content will show you as a thought leader, and a brand that gives value through its content and knowledge.

An innovative brand that writes worth-while content? That will certainty breed some serious trust in your customer base.

6. Your Social Media

This is actually a subsection of content marketing, but it deserves its own spot due to its importance. Make sure your social media’s branding is just as polished as your website’s and make sure you are consistent in voice, logo, colors, style, and even posting schedule.

Social media is a great way to get your brand out there and increase your brand awareness. If you are a new company, then consider starting off with some paid ads to get in front of your customer base. This can be especially great if you are just starting an SEO strategy and need leads fast, since SEO can take more time to see results than PPC ads.

7. And (Of Course) SEO

We’ve been dancing around it for the last few tips, so surely you knew we’d end up here. But it is true – branding needs SEO to truly thrive.

From content marketing to web design that converts, to social media posts and blogs that are targeted and optimized, you need SEO if you’re online.

If branding interests you (or content marketing, web design, or simply SEO in general) then contact JSL Marketing & Web Design today!

We have created in-depth brand books for clients, logo designs, website, and social media plans that perfectly mesh with their desired tone, voice, and company culture.

Give us a try and see what we can do for your company and brand!