The stats about startups paint a bleak picture. According to industry data shared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics about the failure rate of startups, two out of 10 new businesses already fail within the first two years.
There’s a real risk that if you leave your branding for later that it will be too late. That’s why it’s better to work with a small business branding agency from the start. After all, you’ll need a cohesive identity to present to investors and introduce customers to your new product or service that’s set to disrupt. Combine an agency’s expertise with the following startup branding tips and you improve your chances of being in the one of the 10%. Not the 10% who fail, but one of the leaders in your industry.
Source: Exploding Topics
How Strong Branding Influence on Startup Success
Yes, startup branding helps to promote a startup. However, it can also be a vehicle that you can use to secure funding. It communicates to investors that you take yourself seriously and know in which direction you’re heading. It also makes it easier for them to visualize what they’ll be buying into.
Sure, product branding is crucial too. However, strong startup branding just makes it easier for your products to find favor among your target audience. In fact, it can even improve your product or service as it will be clear to consumers what else they’ll gain by supporting your business.
Branding also makes your startup look more credible and trustworthy. This is especially important for startups that don’t have a proven track record to support their innovative idea.
Not only does the right strategy allow you to make a credible name for yourself, but it can also help you to get ahead of your competitors. It essentially highlights how you’re different from similar startups, whether it’s in your core values, your actual offering, or both.
Key Elements of a Startup Branding Process
While marketing design plays a big role in branding for startups, it’s so much more than creating an attractive website or unique packaging. Startup branding is a classic example of where the product is more than the sum of its parts. For example, a logo isn’t just a picture that can be used in place of your brand name when you’re short of space. It gives your target audience an idea of the type of brand experience they can expect.
From more abstract concepts like your vision to tangible assets like the color scheme, there are various basic elements that a brand strategy for startups needs to cover. These include:
The mission, vision, and values: You need to have a goal that you want to achieve. Then, you need to know what will guide you and which direction you’ll take to get close to this vision. A startup like Airbnb serves as a great example of how to craft a powerful mission, vision, and core values.
Brand positioning: How do you want your target market and competitors to view your brand? Apple, one of the most valuable tech brands, shows that it’s good for an apple to fall far from the other trees. You need to zoom in on which traits and characteristics will make you unique.
Visual identity: Your visual identity includes elements like your business logo, color palette, and font selection. It will play a key role in brand recognition.
Brand voice and personality: Startups can have personalities too. Take Mailchimp as an example. Their personality and voice marked by offbeat, dry humour is captured in their logo, a winking chimpanzee affectionately dubbed Freddie. The fact that they try to take themselves less seriously is exactly what gets marketing professionals to take them seriously.
Business story: Every startup has a story to tell. It helps to stir feelings that you want to be associated with your brand and drive deeper, emotional connections. For example, Airbnb’s brand story of how the founders also turned to hosting to make ends meet helps property owners to buy into the idea of a sharing economy.
From logos to letterheads, our team of vetted designers will cover all the key elements. Our process is just as comprehensive as our services. We’ll study market trends, analyze competitors, and get to know your customers better. Then, we put as much effort into conceptualization and design before we’re ready to implement your branding across various brand touchpoints.Book a Call
Expert Tips for Effective Startup Branding
1. Clarify your mission, values, and unique selling propositions
Your brand identity should be built upon your mission, value, and unique selling propositions. It will help to ensure that the end result authentically communicates what your startup is about.
64% of consumers in their 20s and 30s feel that it should be easy to see a brand’s values.
To help you with this step and create a compelling brand foundation, answer the following questions:
- Why did I launch the startup?
- What are we trying to do differently?
- Which perception do we want to create among consumers?
- Which benefits can we offer that our competitors can’t match?
- Where do I see the business in five years?
- How will our product or service solve our target market’s pain points?
- Can our team buy into our mission and vision?
- Will these values resonate with our target audience?
As many of these questions also deal with your target audience, it’s key that you have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is. For branding to be effective, it needs to connect with customers on an emotional level.
You can use a mix of tools, like surveys and Google Analytics, and platforms, such as social media and online forums, to gain better insight into their expectations. What do they need? What are their pain points?
If you can create brand archetypes from the start that your ideal customers are looking for, it can do wonders for customer loyalty later. After all, you don’t want to create a startup brand that appeals to younger cash-strapped millennials when your product is actually geared towards older audiences with more means.
2. Pay attention to your tone of voice and customer experience
Whether it’s professional or playful, formal or funny, each brand needs to have a distinctive tone of voice. Your tone of voice will remain the same, but you can use personalization to adjust your messaging slightly to better appeal to that segment’s specific needs. This will help to improve your customer experience. To help with this step, you can use the customer data that you gathered to help you adjust your customer interactions.
As many as 79% of consumers say that they directly interact with brands in other ways like reading their content.
3. Tell stories about your brand’s origins, your team, or offering
Storytelling is one of the most powerful startup branding techniques as it creates an emotional connection. It will also help you keep your brand messaging honest.
Instead of simply listing the features of your product or service, you can shift the focus to how your product or service helps consumers. Think case studies and customer testimonial videos. This will also help you to avoid falling into the trap of making product claims that you can’t support which can hurt brand trust.
You can use this approach when you write about your startup and employees too. Instead of only sharing a bio of your employees on your website, tell a story about how they came to work for your startup.
Depending on your employees’ comfortability in front of the camera, you can, for example, create a behind-the-scenes video in which they give customers a glimpse into what startup life is like. It’s this type of real stories that customers value nowadays.
For your startup’s story, you can start before the official company launch. A good intro is to describe the moment or epiphany that inspired you to establish the company. What were the significant events that motivated you? This is your opportunity to let your passion for your industry shine.
In addition to your passion, you must also use brand storytelling to convey your commitment. Acknowledge challenges as it shows grit more than inadequacy. This level of honesty will also help to keep the narrative believable and humanize your brand.
4. Maintain a consistent brand image across different channels
Your visual identity is only as strong as it’s applied consistently. This becomes increasingly more difficult if you use various digital channels. To do this, you’ll also need to create a detailed style guide.
From your website design to social media to advertising campaigns, you’ll use this document to double-check that your brand image is easily recognizable. For example, if the color schemes of your email newsletter and advertising design are different, your customers will be puzzled.
They might even wonder if they’re dealing with the same startup. Not only do inconsistencies weaken brand recognition, but it’s also bad for brand trust. After all, the reason why you’re investing in branding is to create a cohesive identity for your startup.
Startups are allowed to be disruptive, but their branding shouldn’t be fragmented. As part of our branding for startups, we also include a style guide. Our design team will create a new style guide so that you can easily maintain your brand image consistently across your web, app and social media.
5. Embrace simple design
Whether it’s your logo, layout, or labels, keep your design style simple. Your startup’s personality and tone of voice might be bold or humorous, but your overall design should still be professional, which it will be if you favor simplicity over complex designs. Although simplicity is important, ensure your design and messaging remain distinctive and capture attention.
It will also help to improve the overall user experience (UX). It’s much easier to learn more about a new product if the website design is uncluttered and follows familiar design principles.
6. Use color psychology
The color palette that you choose should be connected to the emotions that you want to evoke in your target audience.
You’ll need to have a primary color which will be the main color that will be linked with your startup. For example, Mailchimp’s primary color is yellow, more specifically Cavendish Yellow (#FFE01B).
That said, your primary color doesn’t need to be limited to one of the three primary colors – red, blue, or yellow. For example, Airbnb went with a coral red with a vibrant pink shade.
Source: Mailchimp
Then, you’ll need a secondary color. You’re welcome to use a few, but try to limit it to three. Mailchimp chooses only to use one secondary color—black. That’s also an option.
To help you decide on the primary and secondary colors, it’s crucial that you take a few hours to read up on the psychology of color. Each color has unique connotations that can impact your customers’ attitude toward your brand and even their purchasing decisions.
For example, yellow is associated with happiness, warmth, and optimism. It ties in well with Mailchimp’s warm, conversational voice.
The association isn’t always positive. Just like yellow can conjure up feelings of warmth, it can also stir fear and anxiety in your customers.
That’s why Airbnb’s color choice is such a good example. Instead of using red which can also evoke feelings of aggression (the last emotion you want to stir among hosts or guests), they opted for red with a pink shade.
You can refer to the following table to shortlist the colors you want to use in your brand strategy development:
| COLOR | ASSOCIATION |
| Blue | Trust, loyalty, security |
| Red | Passion, power, excitement |
| Purple | Spirituality, wealth, wisdom |
| Green | Growth, nature, health |
| Pink | Passion, imaginative, caring |
| White | Purity, innocence, cleanliness |
| Black | Sophistication, security, power |
| Orange | Creativity, warmth, energy |
While color psychology should play a determining factor in the colors you choose for your startup branding, you should also check that your choices aren’t too closely linked to one of your competitors. That said, while you want a color scheme that stands out, the actual colors that you use should blend well together. Not only should the individual colors complement your values and traits, but it should also enhance each other.
7. Invest in original, authentic imagery
It can be tempting to cut costs and ask AI to generate a few images to support your content marketing. This approach, though, can damage your brand perception. Plus, it doesn’t support the effort that you’ve put in to create and narrate an authentic brand story.
While stock photos are “original”, they won’t be able to truly reflect your brand’s personality. They also typically look overpolished and won’t support a startup branding strategy like authentic brand storytelling.
Original, authentic images will also help you to capture your brand’s culture. It doubles up as a way to show how you actively incorporate your values into your business operations.
In any case, if you have a technical product, you’ll need content visualization like graphs, charts, and infographics to explain complex concepts. These will need to be original so you might as well use the same design team to create custom images.
That’s one of the reasons why branding packages are so attractive to entrepreneurs or an emerging company with a tighter budget. It typically covers all the key elements needed for your startup branding strategy like a logo, graphics, and marketing collateral.
In addition to custom graphics, you’ll also need photos of your team. Why use a stock photo of random men in suits strategizing when you can show the real faces behind your brand in your own boardroom?
There’s also the real risk that you end up using the same stock images as one of your competitors. This will greatly undermine your brand positioning and the work you’ve put in to highlight your unique selling proposition.
If cost is one of the concerns why you want to go the route of free stock photos, you can rather encourage customers to create user-generated content (UGC) for your brand. It can be especially useful for your social media branding efforts. Cost-savings aside, UGC can be an effective part of your startup branding strategy as it’s one more way to add authenticity.
To keep the UGC on-brand so that you can use it as part of your online design, you should share some guidelines with your customers. These guidelines don’t need to be as comprehensive as the style guide you use internally.
For example, Mailchimp chooses to share guidelines about the spelling of their name, logo, colors, and brand voice. Another benefit of taking this extra step is that it makes it easier for your customers to feature you in their content as they don’t have to start from scratch.
Source: Mailchimp
Analyzing the Success of Your Branding Campaign
Analyzing the success of your brand design is essential for understanding what’s resonating with your target audience and to identify room for improvement.
The first and most fundamental indicator of success is whether your branding campaign has increased awareness of your startup. In other words, are more people hearing about your business? To measure this, look at website traffic, social media engagement, and search volume.
Then, you also need to keep your pulse on brand sentiment. It’s of little use if you have great brand awareness, but few speak positively about you. You can use social listening tools to track and analyze brand mentions, if you prefer a more indirect approach. Alternatively, you can go straight to the source and send out surveys to your customers.
Lastly, there’s engagement. Effective branding for startups encourages interaction. Are followers, for example, sharing your images on social media? Even better yet, are they buying your product?
While purchases is an obvious metric, you need to look beyond just the average order value, customer acquisition costs, and revenue growth. Are you successfully managing to generate repeat purchases? If your branding is working, you should see a lower churn rate, indicating better customer retention.
How to Make Your Startup Unforgettable? Duck.Design Has the Answer!
As a top-rated startup branding company, Duck.Design knows what it takes to get a startup off the ground. That’s why we act as a one-stop agency for all your branding needs. Our brand identity services include visual identity, digital graphics, and other assets like business cards and a letterhead to attract investors. Then, we can also create a website or an app to help with your multi-channel branding strategy.
As these branding tips for startups have shown, your digital design is only as good as the research you’ve put in. That’s why our process kicks off with research and strategy.
One of the benefits of having a team of dedicated designers like we have is that we have the ability to grow with your needs. Your company might be in its early stages of growth, but combine our proprietary software with our network of experienced designers and we can keep pace with the rapid growth your new branding will fuel.
