Stand out from your competition and make many more sales!
Don’t be one of the businesses that lose the attention and trust of their leads and prospects. Be different – master your visual identity sooner rather than later for a strong impact from day one.
Getting started in business can be tough, especially if you haven’t got the marketing resources that some of your competitors might have. There are so many different things you need to do to get your venture off the ground, and deciding how best to manage your time can be difficult. One often overlooked part of your business is creating and defining your company’s visual identity.
Initially, it might seem like a good idea to go into ‘opening’ phase without paying too much attention to the visual aspects of your business, relying on pre-organized formats and themes and saving logo development for a later date. At some point though, the importance of branding for your company, no matter how small or large it is, will become clear.
I’m going to take you through seven of the most important reasons why your company needs its own visual identity:
1. To increase your credibility
To be truly successful, you have to be able to convince your audience that you’re not only the real deal, but you have something different to offer them. You know from your own experience that businesses automatically appear more credible and consistent when they stand out. With the average consumer seeing 2,000 advertisements per day, you need to stand above the noise. The way to do this and grab attention is with a strong visual identity.
2. Make your business memorable
In general, most people are “visual learners”: they learn and remember things better when they see something than when they just read it or hear it. This is one of the reasons why we often remember faces but forget names. Giving your company a visual image gives it the full package. You’ll have a voice, you’ll have content, and then you’ll have your face, but it’s all about building up credibility by working with a memorable image that gets your attention immediately.
3. Distinguish your business as both better and different than the competition
Creating an identity gives you an approach that few really have. If you create the right image, this distinguishes your business as both different and better than the rest, and the effect on your business can be massive. It makes it more likely for people to talk about your business, which will in turn send referrals your way and hence more new opportunities. For example, you need to develop a logo and image that helps define you so when people pick up your brochure or land on your website, it’s the first thing they see, and it gives them an instant idea of what you’re about.
4. Important even for new businesses
Don’t think that just because you are a new, growing business that your visual identity isn’t important. You can offset what you currently lack in reputation by establishing an identity that shows your professionalism and gives your customers something to identify with over the long term.
5. Develops a rapport with high/low culture
Giving yourself a name works on two distinct levels – up close in your local neighbourhood for your printed merchandise, and even on a more national, “web-based” level. The interaction between various levels of information allows you to expand who you are easily and more effectively than before. Simply because you can harness the importance of establishing a realistic approach between the two subjective cultural divides.
6. Increase trust to increase sales
To build a continually growing customer base, you have to work on your professional image to make customers see you as a well-defined company to do their business with on a regular basis. The more professional you look, the more your clients and members will trust you. When it comes to online marketing, attention and trust are key, and these values are crucial offline too.
7. Design is king
Napoleon Hill said that every problem contains within it the seed of equal or greater opportunity. It is our job to seek out these opportunities. My final attempt to show you the importance of visual identity is this problem. Right now, you might not be able to capture the attention of your leads and prospects, but this actually presents you with a great opportunity to come up with something fresh and unique. The look of all of your promotional materials, be it your leaflets or your company website, is undoubtedly crucial to convincing your potential customers that you’re the real deal, but if the design and visual identity is off, the user is likely to take their interest, and their business, elsewhere.