I think it’s a well understood fact that starting your own business and building your brand is a challenging experience. I also think it’s well understood that starting your own business is an incredibly rewarding experience.
You get to enjoy the challenge of creating a product or service that people actually want, while also building the business behind that idea or passion.
It’s the process of bringing your ideas to life that most entrepreneurs thrive on.
However, once you get over the romanticized aspects of starting a business and building your brand, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. Not only do you have to create and develop an awesome product or service, you have to effectively market that product or service to your target market.
It’s starting to get tricky now, you’re needing things that you don’t necessarily have the skills to do yourself.
It’s time for some real content. How about a logo? Do you have a Brand Guide?
Up to this point, you may have been able to do everything yourself, but once you start designing things, you’re getting into areas that are better left to the experts.
As a business owner, the hardest part will be consistently finding talented people who understand your niche industry and can build everything at an affordable rate.
It takes time, effort, and energy. Xotic Labs is here to help.
I’m here to walk you through some of the essential aspects of building your brand from scratch to launch your company and how Xotic Labs can help you do it.
When you have solutions that were built for you as a business owner with these challenges in mind, it’s really nice when it just works.
One of the biggest considerations every business owner faces is cost. What is it going to cost me to get this done?
To create all of the essential assets for an effective brand, you’ll probably find yourself having to find different designers with different skill sets that are all going to charge all different rates for the various projects you’re requiring.
This strategy of piecemealing all of your projects together can work, but it’s oftentimes going to lead to very inflated costs and sometimes inconsistent results if you don’t manage it effectively.
The value of Xotic Labs is a team of dedicated cannabis focused designers at a consistent monthly flat rate.
I’ll share how in one month, Xotic Labs can help you create your brand from the ground up with all of the essentials.
Name
It’s pretty basic to understand the essentials of building a brand and what’s needed.
First things first, you need a name.
Have you thought of one yet? Maybe you already have it or even just have some ideas.
Naming your business can be a fun process, this decision is the first step in building your brand.
The name is something you’re going to have to come up with and on your own. Avoid a decision by committee. Brainstorm ideas and get other people’s opinions, but ultimately it’s going to be up to you.
At the end of the day, your business name isn’t going to be the reason your business succeeds or fails, but it can certainly play a big role in both!
Here are 7 few quick considerations when picking a name:
Is it short and memorable?
Is the website domain available?
Check social media availability.
Be careful with geographic names.
Avoid obscure words.
Avoid names that are too narrow. (‘Bob’s best apples’, now Bob can only sell Apples)
Can you live with it?
Logo
Now that you have a name, your idea is starting to become reality.
It’s time to create an eye catching logo that’s going to sit alongside the top brands in the industry one day.
Logos can evolve over time, but it’s still important to get it right the first time and have something that stands the test of time and grows with your business.
Your logo is going to serve as the foundation of your brand, it will be the most recognized part of your brand and business. You want this logo to represent you well and serve purpose over many applications.
A good logo should:
Be eye catching
Work well large or small
Represent and encompass your brand
Be memorable
Be timeless
When submitting a request for a new logo, here are a few tips to make the process easier for you and your designer.
Use Google to find inspiration on logotypes you like that can be used to share with your designer.
Provide detailed commentary in the project description of how you envision your logo. If you don’t have any idea, that’s ok, do your best to describe elements that you like in a logo or elements that you’d like to see in yours.
Since you don’t yet have a brand guide established, you and your designer have the opportunity to be creative with a wide range of styles.
You can spend weeks in the process of refining your logo. With everything else you need to do as a business owner, it’s best to spend time providing clear instructions up front so your designer knows what you’re looking for and you don’t have to waste time going back and forth making small adjustments here and there.
If you received a few different styles because you weren’t quite sure on what you were looking for, that’s great!
Now choose one, pick a direction, and provide clear instructions and feedback. It’s really that easy.
Don’t get caught up on the small details, move on, you’ve got a brand guide to make next!
Brand Guide
The term brand refers to a business and marketing concept that helps people identify a particular company, product, or individual.
A brand is a collection of uniquely identifying aspects of a business.
A logo is not a brand, it is a part of a brand.
In order to create an effective brand, you need a consistent image and identity across all of your business content.
The font standards you use on your website should be the same font standards you use in your catalogs.
The color pallet your business uses when creating assets should be established and defined.
These are only a few of the many components that make up a brand. All of which are outlined and defined in a Brand Guide.
An effective brand guide will be a tool your business can use to build consistent assets using any number of designers. It’s literally a guide the designers will be able to use to understand the standards your brand uses.
This brand guide, which includes all variations of your logo, will be the cornerstone of how your marketing collateral and creative assets of your business are created.
Once the brand guide has been completed, you’re ready to start building the rest of your brand assets.
Marketing Assets
Now that you have your brand guide, there are a few basic essentials that you can knock off your list and have as a resource.
These are all items that your designer can build for you just based on the brand guidelines that have already been established.
Your job as the business owner is to just call out specifically what you want and provide feedback when they send back options. You may not need branded envelopes for your business, but your employees may need security badges to get into the building.
Create a list of quick essential items your business can use now that you have an established brand guide. The key part here is ‘quick’, we don’t want to focus on anything that takes up too much time in this first month.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Business cards
Letterhead
Employee ID cards
Envelopes
Quick informational brochures
Email Signature
Social Media Graphics
Now we’re going to start getting into some of the real true value of a service like Xotic Labs, the content generation.
In this case, we’re just getting started with launching your brand. After setting up your social media accounts like instagram, it’s time to start filling them with content. When getting a new account started, I often like to make at least 3-6 postings in quick succession to get some content on the account.
When you request imagery for instagram, it’s usually important to have a consistent image type. It might not look the best to post memes sometimes, and real life photographs other times.
Establish the look and feel you’re going for and provide your designer with the copy they should include, and the type of imagery you’re looking for.
Once you have a few images produced, you can get them posted and establish your initial presence on the platform while you move onto other activities.
Content to build next
We have the absolute basics taken care of, but we still have tons of additional content that is required to really enhance our brand and appearance.
Once you have the essential items crossed off the list, you can begin to build out more time intensive resources that will only add value to your brand and company as a whole.
Sales product catalogs or brochures
Email templates
Social media content
Blog posting imagery
T-shirts and company swag
Product imagery
Website Imagery
This is where you’re really going to start to see the power of what Xotic Labs can produce for your business, the list of content you’ll find that need to be made for your business will seemingly never end.
So now what?
Now it’s time to use Xotic Labs as an extension of your business and turn your vision into reality. For the creative support you need in getting your business off the ground, Xotic Labs is the resource that works for you.