BRANDING
Branding refers to the culmination of all your identifiable elements working together in a cohesive marketing strategy that sets your identity apart from the competition. There are several critical factors that when combined establish an effective brand identity. When customers instantly know who you are from your logo or recall your name from a color scheme, trademark or slogan, you are branded.

LOGO
Whether you choose a graphic image or ‘word-mark’ the company logo is typically the first impression you make on potential customers so it’s important to create something that speaks to your core business. Any time you devote to developing a logo is time well spent that pays dividends when done correctly. This image should appear across all product/service lines to generate a sense of cohesive consistency towards branding your company.

COLOR SCHEME
Color is a subject often overlooked. Color impressions illicit an emotional response that can further attract new business. In choosing the right color scheme for your identity I will provide you with many examples as well as recommendations and what they mean in terms of emotional triggers and layman interpretations.

FONT
A common misstep in selecting the right font is deciding on something completely custom. This can present problems down the road when different workstations or devices try to open your documents and are missing an exotic font. While your actual logo can be a graphically unique image, as a rule one should try to stick with default/common fonts for all correspondence or body-copy to ensure universal cross-platform compatibility.

STYLE CONSISTENCY
Once your logo, color scheme and font(s) have been settled its critical to apply those choices across all your lines of business. Email campaigns, social media marketing, letterheads and web sites should all promote your company’s look & feel to the world, cementing your brand recognition going forward.

CONTENT LIBRARY
With all of your branding elements working in concert to project the image you want your focus must then shift to content. You may not think content is relevant to you or your business but it absolutely is. Content refers to textual verbiage such as product descriptions or manuals as well as photographs and videos of your services, facilities or products. This media content is necessary in the development of brochures, web sites, promotional videos, etc.