When you own a business you constantly are improving your strategy, right? Well your brand online and on social media needs the same attention. Whether you’re doing a full company rebrand, testing out a new color scheme, or social media #hashtag, you want to often review your company’s online image. Here are a few key branding areas you should focus on and revisit as your company grows:

Color Schemes

Pick 2-4 colors that you want to display on your website, marketing materials, and filter through to your social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Besides the normal black, white, or gray that you may use for fonts or a background color, these theme colors will instantly bring cohesiveness to your brand. You may use this color scheme for headers, sections separators, icons, or link colors on your website to tie in every page. Of course more colors will make its way through your branding, as they should, but once you have your color scheme you’ll also have ease during your designing stage. Pro tip for everyone designing anything at all- learn your color codes or download an app or widget right to your computer! It is a life safer.

Fonts

My biggest pet peeve is a document, especially a contract that has a mish-mosh of fonts all over the place. This screams unprofessional to me, mainly because it looks as if the company didn’t take any time to review their material. The same consideration should be taken into account with your online and social media presence; cohesiveness. Definitely don’t stick to one font, but have a handful that you like. Your titles or headers may be one larger and bolder font, while your text blocks or paragraphs another. Maybe the theme on your Instagram has pictures with text (see ours) that you keep consistent based on the material you’re sharing. The best thing to do for design inspo is check out other businesses and once you gather some ideas, test them out to see what works for your brand.

Logo and Icon

One of the most recognizable things about your business is your logo. It’s on your cards, website, marketing materials, social media platforms, and maybe even in your email signature. Make sure to have a logo and if needed (usually needed), design an icon of that logo for other platforms. Our logo says “Energetek”, while our icon say “etek”. And don’t forget to add your Favicon to your website!

Social Media

I have to say that Instagram is my favorite social media platform to brand off of. With the versatility in how you can share things about your company (picture/video posts, story, highlights) you have the option to get pretty creative. But, do not forget about the other key platforms where you can share your company: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. Now for full transparency Energetek decided not to use Facebook, but that’s just us and totally based on our client audience. When it comes to social media, you have to think about the audience. Are you using it to gain clients or followers? Whichever your reason, because either or both answers is correct, think about what and how you want to portray your message. For my company, we wanted to use Twitter and Instgram to brand us, the owners. We knew that the percentage of client gains may be small, also taking into consideration our in-person sales strategy, so we use social media for gaining followers. How are you using it? Are your accounts informational but also aesthetically pleasing?

Website

Oh the time I’ve spent on building and updating the website… thankfully I love doing it. Every company needs a website, even if you don’t think you do, just create a one-pager, because everyone these days googles your business to check if it’s real. By incorporating your color scheme and fonts, your site is off to a great start. If you are able to take great, high-quality photos, then add those into your website as headers or sliders. If you are looking for free but perfect quality photos that you can pull online, check out Unsplash. On our website, we have a mix of photos we’ve taken and many photos from Unsplash, especially on this blog. Another tip for an aswesome website without having to fully code or even half code your site, try the Avada Theme. It’s pre-coded, extremely customizable, and easy to build. Of course if it is your first or even second go, you will need to dedicate time to configuring your design, but all great looking work takes time.

Written by Eva Gerrits