The biggest trends in branding for 2023

Branding trends provide a window into how we react to the present. People are pleading with brands for authenticity, transparency, and honesty after a few turbulent years and growing dissatisfaction with the actions and inactions of brands. While there are numerous factors that could affect branding trends, one is that in the future, it will be important to demonstrate how your brand upholds its core principles.

Making a brand that transports consumers to a different era of history is the goal of Embracing an Era. It might be as current as the 2000s or as distant as the glitzy 1920s. Making a vision of a different period might be a way for people to escape from the chaotic and stressful present.

Visual imagination and eye-catching colour were used in overstimulated branding to grab attention and attract the senses. This style frequently makes use of vibrant colours, strong, distorted fonts, and overt iconography.

Design Tips for Small Businesses

Design is more crucial than ever in our age of images and visual platforms, especially for small firms striving to compete with household names. The advice in this article will be useful if you are unable to afford a professional designer.

Be aware of your design goal. a method for organising your project and determining its success. Are you trying to build brand awareness or improve sales?

Use your brand’s colours in your design if you have them. Finding colours that correspond to or convey your brand message is important if you don’t already have brand colours.

Fonts are as vital to design as colours are. Be consistent in the fonts you use. Make sure the fonts are readable and convey the essence of your brand.

Draw ideas from thriving businesses. Consider some of the well-known brands; they enjoy success for a reason. Examine their logos, designs, colours, and fonts. Everything communicates the history, values, and products of the company.

 

What is Digital Design?

Digital design is a general term that is more relevant now than ever before. Any design that appears in a digital format rather than print is considered digital design. This includes websites, logos and print documents.

The best way to make sure your brand is consistent is to create a style guide. A style guide is a detailed outline of how your brand’s visual elements should look. It includes everything from fonts to colours.

The digital design process has become more streamlined over the years, with technology making it easier to create works in a shorter period. Designers have more tools than ever before, which means that they have more freedom to express themselves. The growing community of designers on the Internet has also made it easier for designers to share information and learn from one another.

What is a logo?

Businesses owners are always asking, “Do I need a logo for my business?” Business owners often wonder if they have to invest in a logo or not.

What Is A Logo?
A logo is a visual representation of your business and is a powerful marketing tool. A logo can be a graphic mark, stylised name, an image or anything that your imagination decides as long as it represents your company.

What Do I Need A Logo For?
A logo makes a great first impression to a potential new customer, and it is a representation of your product or service.  It also helps returning customers find you and distinguishes you from your competitors.

How Long Will My Logo Last?
Your logo lasts for however long your company continues to provide the original product or service.  If your business evolves or changes its product/service base, then you would update your logo to fit that brand.

How to Create Your Brand Voice

Before you start creating content for your brand, one important thing to consider is your brand’s ‘voice’. You need to consider how you will say things so that they are consistent with your brand and entice your audience to engage.

Tips to Creating Your Brand Voice

1. Take the time to construct and document the tone you wish your audience to perceive. Do you want to come off as comical, professional, knowledgeable etc?

2. Put words to the tone and get opinions from other on how those words and tones are perceived, to see if it matches what you are trying to achieve.

3. Ensure that you remain consistent with all of your content to build trust.

4. Be sure your chosen brand voice is transparent, genuine and honest to your brand.

5. Be sure your voice is being used on platforms that suit your brand.

6. Do not be afraid to adjust your brand voice overtime, as necessary.

Using these tips to create a brand voice will ensure you create content that is reliable, consistent and trustworthy to your users.

How to Choose the Colours for Your Brand

Choosing the colours that will help represent your brand, business and products can be a very tricky thing and is more important than you may realise. Studies have shown that an incredible 84.7 percent of people buy a product based primarily off of colour. A judgement on whether or not to use a product or business based on colours can even happen subconsciously. Here are a few tips to help you in your choice.

• Choose colours through the perspective of your customer and how that colour reflects the tone you wish to portray.

• Use good colour combinations to enhance their impact.

• Be aware of how those colours may be interpreted in different cultures.

• You should not choose colours based on your own preferences. Your favourite colour may not set the appropriate tone.

• To ensure you stand out, try to avoid colours that are similar to your competitors.

To aid your decision, one additional thing to look into is colour psychology.

How Important is Consistency?

Consumers are progressively becoming more concerned in creating a trusting relationship with the brands they support. The biggest way to generate that much-needed trust is consistency. Consistency in all of the marketing content that you produce will help to establish that link between you and your customer. Four ways in which you can be consistent are…

1. Having a consistent ‘voice’. The way in which your content and responses to users are written should always be in the same tone. You need to decide what that tone is and keep it unchanging.

2. Any visual content you produce needs to be branded with your logo. You want people to easily identify that this content belongs to your brand.

3. Keep your visuals, colours and fonts consistent. Choose what type of visuals you wish to represent your brand and do not mix. Use colours that are associated with your brand and logo.

4. If you are sharing content created by others, ensure that it is relevant to your brand, service or products. If people are looking at your content, they do not want to be seeing things that are completely off-topic from what you represent.

Just remember consistency builds trust, trust is what keeps customers coming back.

How often should you be posting to your Instagram grid?

Instagram is a great social media platform for most businesses and is a platform you absolutely should be investing time into growing. Successfully cracking Instagram will allow you to make sales, gain new followers, and increase engagement.

There really is no right or wrong answer to how often should you be posting on Instagram to fully utilise the platform. If you scour the internet you will find several different answers but this will be entirely dependant on your business.

At the bare minimum, you should aim to post to your grid daily but you must remember that what your posting is more important than how often, if you regularly post the same posts using the same hashtags Instagram could shadowban you as it could flag as spam. We think you should invest time into good quality engaging content as this is likely to benefit you more than just posting for the sake of it.

Renaming your business

Your businesses name is the most identifiable front of your business therefore it is very important that you have a strong and memorable name. Although most business names are adaptable if your business has changed or expanded you may wish to change the business name completely but what does this involve?

Firstly, you must choose your new business name, this is not always an easy task with so many businesses out there you want to use something brand new, memorable and a name that is adaptable so you won’t need to change it again. We always advise that you do a trade mark search before changing your name.

You will also have to inform all of the appropriate organisations such as HMRC Revenue and customs. You will also need to update all of your suppliers and customers. Lastly you will need to re-brand – chances are all of your website, logos and flyers will need to be re-branded.

Is there still a place for flyers?

For decades flyers have been a popular choice of marketing for many businesses but with social media growing rapidly year by year and online marketing becoming the most popular way to advertise your business is there still a place for flyer marketing?

Studies show that although in a modern world everything is online that there is still a place for flyers, statistics state that almost 50% read addressed mail. Figures also suggest that addressed mail flyers are more effective than door dropped flyers.

Many businesses still user flyers to advertise and there are several reasons for this. Now more than ever they are cost-effective and you can be very creative with design to ensure your flyer catches the receiver’s attention.

A well-designed catchy leaflet is an invaluable tool in promoting your business. So, you must make sure your flyer is vibrant and eye-catching. And make sure you shop around for the best deal as many companies offer very competitive prices and offers.