Brand-Building for Design Startups

When it comes to establishing a creative enterprise, it’s important to outline the priorities you need to handle. This is especially true if it’s the first time you’re attempting to launch a business in this industry.

But before you get to the nitty-gritty of accepting projects, you need to let people know you exist. It’s pretty basic stuff, but building your brand from the outset can make or break your creative momentum.

No matter how good a design professional you are, you still need a system for getting interested clients to choose your services.

The best time to start is when you’re in the process of creating an identity for your business.

Survey your current market

Hardly any entrepreneur can create a successful business plan without a clear understanding of what the current market looks like.

Being able to analyze market situations is an integral skill for getting the information you need to craft your branding strategy.

So, take a look at how your closest competitors engage their audiences. Using effective competitor analysis, you can easily determine what it is your brand needs to secure a larger share of the market.

For this, it’s important that you know who you are up against. Basically, you can compete against other design startups that are targeting your preferred market. You wouldn’t want to waste precious time, so focus on the information you need that will form the foundation of all your business activities.

Then again, competitor analysis doesn’t take place in a single all-nighter. It will take days or even weeks to gather and analyze the data you need to make the right decisions for your brand. But the good thing is that you can gain valuable insights if you are able to research your competitors extensively.

That said, you should be able to answer the following questions as you look closer at what other businesses are doing.

• What services do they offer? Do they provide full-service digital marketing or do they focus exclusively on one channel? Often, you need to know what the other side is selling to see if you can sell something superior.
• How do they engage their audience? The key to successful branding is in the way you communicate the value of your services to the people who need them. Figuring out how your competitors connect with their customers helps you refine your brand-building strategy.
• What materials do they produce to engage with their audience? Content is king and you need a great deal of it in order to promote and highlight the value of your services. Your competitors might be using a diverse range of marketing collateral like email newsletters, shareable infographics, timely blogs, and videos. Looking at the content they publish should help you build a highly effective brand-building campaign.

This is all basic information you can easily acquire through their social media pages, websites, and other channels where you can (legally) conduct in-depth competitor research.

But your competitors are only a part of the larger market you are in. There are other factors that should influence how you construct a successful brand-building strategy for your design agency.

Take the time to understand the preferences that prevail in the current market for design services. Market research involves getting information about your target audience and seeing if your brand is able to address specific needs.

This is a process that typically happens across four key steps:

 

• Knowing your ideal buyers. You need to come up with an ideal buyer persona. Segmenting your market based on their preferences can help you create content that resonates with them on a personal level.

 

• Conducting extensive market research. Know what your ideal buyers want to hear from you so you can create better value propositions that will encourage them to make a purchase.
• Practicing social listening. Be informed of the trends that people are talking about. For this, you may need to track keywords, search terms, and hashtags that people often use. From an SEO standpoint, these should give you viable ideas for engaging content.
• Engaging with customers directly. With content that encourages your audience to engage you more closely, you are able to obtain opinions that people usually keep to themselves until they are in the right avenue. These opinions are crucial for building a brand that takes audience expectations seriously.

 

 

 

Of course, to do all of this analysis, you will need the right tools for gathering crucial data related to the success of your brand-building efforts. Platforms like Google Analytics are useful for determining the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Building your brand involves getting people to consume as much information about your business as possible.

With Google Analytics, you can identify content that is able to generate a lot of interest, achieve higher conversion rates, and optimize customer experiences for better brand retention.

You are going to work on a lot of numbers when you are at this phase, but this is where you lay down the foundation for building a strong brand identity.

After you are done with all this research, you may now proceed to perhaps the more exciting (yet, equally perplexing) part of building your design startup’s identity.

Give your brand kit some time

When it comes to design services, clients want people who actually know their craft. This is reflected in the way a design studio promotes itself through effective storytelling. That said, like market research, your brand kit isn’t something you’re going to finish overnight. Think of it as a bridge that you have to build in order for your audience to get across.

A successful brand identity is defined by three core elements.

• Start by creating a logo your audience can readily connect with. Design an image that captures the essence of your brand, along with the type of imagery that best suits it. It is as simple as it sounds, but you will still need to sift through multiple logo mockups before choosing the perfect logo for your brand. The trick here is to convert the brand name into a relevant icon or illustration.
• Pick colors that resonate well with the personality of your brand. The color scheme says a lot about your business, perhaps more than any other piece of content you publish. It’s important that you choose shades and hues that capture the very essence of your brand. A good tip is to identify colors that coincide with your brand’s identity and its advocacy. Apple, for instance, is iconic for emphasizing simplicity. Using minimalist colors like chrome and white, the company wants us to focus more on what its products can do than on what it looks like. With the right color scheme, your design startup can also deliver the message it wants to convey.
• Typography is both an art and science — and it’s definitely not as simple as picking a WordArt design like what people used to do way back when! You are not just picking fonts, you are picking an essential part of your brand’s identity. You will need to spend an ample amount of time picking the right pairs, but the most crucial principle here is to pick typefaces that relate to your overall brand personality. To be safe, you may pair a serif type (fonts that have lines at the end of each stroke) with a sans-serif type (fonts that do not have such lines). This should create a perfect balance that not only makes every piece of content you publish inviting, but also expresses the underlying look you want for your brand.

With these elements already in place, you now have a basic brand kit to work with. All you need now is to add templates for promotional content that will support your brand.

For this, come up with an arsenal of templates for ebooks, newsletters, blogs, infographics, and social media posts. These should help maintain consistency as you promote your brand across multiple channels.

Encourage engagement

You can’t force your audience to engage with your design business directly. Engagement, after all, is a process that comes naturally — that is, if you do a good job behind the scenes. Thus, to improve brand awareness, you need to find ways to engage your target audience.

One research study found that small business marketers spent nine hours each month engaging with online reviews. There are others that focus on the number of Instagram shares and likes their marketing content is able to generate.

Whichever the case, building a solid design business requires a great deal of action coming from your audience.

Brand-building is all about engagement, so you will need to work hard in order to get people to notice what it is you are offering.

It all starts with creating quality content. In today’s business landscape, it’s impossible to generate interest in your design startup and encourage potential clients to hire you without providing valuable information.

But content creation is not about keeping your market informed. It has more to do with providing information that’s valuable and could impact decisions. Indeed, content is powerful because it lets you build credibility and gives your audience a reason to engage with you and see what else you have in store for them.

Creating quality content is complex and you must observe the following principles:

1. Diversify content. Don’t stick to a single type of content for promoting brand awareness. As a design startup, you can also manage an informational blog or create videos that are related to your services and to the industry you are in.
2. Know what makes great content. And, without a doubt, great content is both engaging and entertaining.
3. Keep tabs on the latest trends while you stay unique. Again, social listening is crucial for creating content that’s fresh and easily searchable. So, if you really want your brand to stand out in a highly saturated market, you will have to pierce through the noise by creating relevant and authentic content.
4. Make changes when necessary. Brand-building is an ongoing process where you can stumble upon opportunities for reshaping your business’s identity. For this, you will need to monitor how your brand performs after it has been launched. Use analytics to identify what it is you need to retain or drop from your brand. This will make sure your brand strategy is fully optimized.
5. Utilize SEO fully. You know your brand is getting all the attention it deserves when it ranks high on the search engine results pages (SERPs). When creating content for your website, it matters a lot if you are able to optimize your content through link-building and using well-crafted meta-descriptions and high-value keywords. These will improve organic traffic, make your content highly searchable, and engage people who are actively looking for the services you are promoting.

Effective content creation is important to make your brand strategy work, so be sure to create a digital marketing campaign that gets people’s attention, stimulates their emotions, and rouses their desire to take action.

And when it comes to action, you will need to give your audience a much-needed “push”. People are bound to know more about your brand if you are able to invite them, so it’s important to add a Call-to-Action or CTA at the end of every piece of content you create.

A carefully placed CTA can encourage people to visit your website, download an ebook, follow you on Instagram, or watch an introductory video about your design startup.

You can also use CTAs to initiate conversations on social media.

For instance, if you share a curated blog post about image manipulation software, you can have your audience talk about their favorite platforms in the comment section.

Parting Thoughts

The market for design services is growing. And that’s because businesses have already discovered the value of creativity in their operations. As a budding design professional with tons of talent, it’s important that you reach out to your audience by building a brand they will never say “no” to.

It takes time, but the benefits it gives are too hard to ignore.

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