7 ways to clean up your brand essentials this spring

Written By Elyse Ball

It’s starting to feel a lot like spring. The weather is a balmy 65 degrees, tiny plants are shooting up from the ground, and there’s only a 50% chance it will be snowing again by the weekend. Since spring is associated so closely with cleaning, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to clean up one of the most essential parts of any business: branding. 

We know consistency is key when it comes to branding, so take a few minutes to clarify the brand choices you’ve made and reflect on whether anything needs updating. If you haven’t done so already, you might want to organize all the key choices you’ve made about your brand in a short “style guide,” using UARF’s Style Guide template. Click here to download the guide!
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Brand personality – Before you tackle the nitty gritty details, like deciding whether to change the fonts on your website or the colors in your logo, take a step back to think about how people perceive your brand and how you want your brand to be perceived. Are you professional or friendly, fun or serious, accessible or upscale? What would your customers say if you asked them? Spending a little time thinking about your brand personality will help you make decisions about style and formatting that reinforce what your customers love about your company.  

Visual elements – Make sure your branding consistently uses 1-2 fonts and 2-3 colors for everything from your website to bulk emails to customer invoices. In our culture, fonts and colors are associated with personality traits that convey things like trustworthiness, boldness, and modernity. Don’t confuse customers by using 10 different fonts – it makes you look unprofessional.  Be sure your font and color scheme match how customers perceive your business. Learn more about font psychology, color psychology and picking colors that work well together in branding.

Logo – Early-stage startup companies might not think they need a logo. That can be true up to a point, but don’t put it off too long. Logos are crucial to grabbing customer and investor attention, differentiating from competitors and reinforcing the other elements of your branding. Even a temporary logo that your business can use in its early years can create a professional and memorable impression. Platforms like Hatchwise, Fiverr and Upwork allow you to access design talent.

​Document templates – Use your newly refreshed visual elements and logo to create templates for the documents you create most frequently, which could include Word or PowerPoint templates for pitches and proposals to customers or Excel templates for quotes and invoices. Keep these consistent with your chosen fonts and color schemes, and make sure they have a header or footer that includes your logo and contact info.

Descriptive language – Do you find yourself saying the same things over and over about your product or service? That’s a good thing! It means that you have consistent messaging that reinforces your business’s key value proposition for customers. Don’t stop there. Document these key phrases, so you can share them with less seasoned team members. Bonus points if you create Gmail templates or Outlook templates that allow you to auto-populate your most frequent email responses for quick and consistent replies.

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​Social media – Lock down your social media handle on platforms you think you might want to use in the future. While reserving a web domain name typically costs $10 to $12 per year, you can generally reserve social media accounts for free. Namecheckr.com allows you to check a whole bunch of social media platforms at once, so you can make sure you have a consistent handle across all of them.

​Your online presence – You are your own brand ambassador, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re also the face of your company. If you want people to take your brand seriously, the first step is to get them to take you seriously. Update the bio on your company website to ensure its accuracy, and make sure your LinkedIn profile is linked to your company and actually explains what you do there. If you want some professional help putting your best foot forward, check out UARF’s free LinkedIn profile review giveaway.