If you develop a brand identity, this is a powerful part of your business planning for MLM. A strong brand identity not only sets you apart from your competitors, it also gains the trust of your clients and when done well it will help you hook new clients through your marketing channels.

How to Develop a Brand Identity 

A strong brand identity needs to communicate to your customers who you are and what you do. In addition to your MLM brand’s identity, you need to brand yourself along with your unique business. MLM Accountants recommend that you make a unique website for your MLM business. When you make a website for MLM you are giving yourself a platform to stand out and position yourself as an expert. When you make a website for MLM you have complete control of your site. When you develop a brand identity, you are taking control of your MLM business and this is something you can evolve if you ever switch MLM brands in the future, and still take your audience with you. Follow our step by step guide to develop a brand indemnity for your MLM business. 

What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is the visible elements of a brand, such as color, design, and logo, that identify and distinguish the brand in consumers’ minds. It combines many elements to create a style that matches and represents your business and your business activities. This can help you communicate your brand story. Design is a powerful tool that can transform how people interact with your brand in three important ways. 

Differentiation

How your brand stands out in a crowded marketplace. Whether you want your product to stand out on a pop-up stall, or you want your ads to stand out on social media, if you develop a brand identity that is consistent and cohesive representation of you and your business, this will put you in a really strong position and your clients will be attracted to interact with you and your products or services. 

Connection 

The more you can effectively communicate who you are with your brand identity, the easier it will be for people to engage with you and, ultimately, join your community of lifelong fans. We all feel more confident approaching brands that feel familiar to us, or really appeal to our own sense of style, so use this type of communication to attract your customers to engage. 

Experience

Everything you put out reflects your brand. Thus, if you want to create a consistent, cohesive brand experience, you need to present a consistent, cohesive identity. From your website, to your social media, to your business cards, you want to be memorable for all the right reasons and strong identity is the key to achieving an excellent brand experience. 

Your Toolbox to Develop a Brand Identity

You’re basically building a toolbox of visual elements to help you communicate your brand effectively. This can be very simple like choosing a regular colour scheme or more complex, like paying a designer to create a unique font for your brand, it all depends on your brand’s needs. At the beginning every brand needs a basic identity, which is made up of these core elements: 

1. Logo
2. Color palette
3. Typography

 

Businesses who want to create a wider variety of content (or plan to), you also design additional elements to express their brand across mediums, including:

• Photography
• Illustration
• Iconography
• Data visualization

 

Always start with the basic logo, color, and typography. You can develop and evolve your brand and your brand identity at any time. 

What Makes a Strong Brand Identity?

A strong brand identity is a detailed form of communication. So it needs to work for everyone, from your MLM business inside and out. Test your ideas with other people and get feedback.

These traits are What you are looking for:

• Distinctive
• Memorable
• Scalable – able to grow and evolve with the brand
• Flexible: 
• Cohesive – each element complements the rest 
• Easy to apply – intuitive and clear for designers to how to use it

 

How to Develop a Brand Identity

This is our step-by-step guide to help you develop a brand identity.

1. Build a Foundation

Just like a good solid house to last you through the years, your brand identity should be built on a solid foundation. Just like a house you can’t add the designer detail first, the visual impact needs to be the last part of how you develop a brand identity. You can’t design a visual identity that properly tells your brand story until you have fully developed the core elements of your brand that your visual identity will communicate. First, you need to know who you are. Much of this detail can be extrapolated from the process of writing a business plan. 

You need to answer:

• What’s your personality? 
• What do you care about? 
• What do you do? 
• How do you talk about what you do? 

Make sure you can identify these: 

Brand heart

An articulation of your brand’s core principals, specifically your purpose, vision, mission, and values, as per your business plan. 

Brand name

It’s possible you have something in mind, but even if this is the case, make sure you run it through a few test cases scenarios, compare and contrast against a shortlist of others and get feedback from a test audience and try to ask as diverse a group as you can. It’s amazing what people from different backgrounds will spot or understand differently about your brand name.

Brand essence

You need to settle on your voice, tone, and personality. Think of a few key phrases that you associate with your brand new try altering how you say them. The brand essence that you settle will need to be repeated when you are using social media for MLM.

Messaging

Get to know your tagline/s, unique selling proposition and messaging pillars thoroughly to ensure your visual identity communicates the right story. 

1. Assess Your Current Identity

If you are just starting out you have a clean slate, however if you are rebranding this could be a little harder. Get to grips with the challenges you’re facing with your current identity and what you’re hoping to achieve with a new one and take it from there. Good branding is really just excellent communication. For some this comes naturally. But even for those whom it does, it pays to run the tests to make sure your visual output aligns with your brand values, reflects your personality, and communicates your total brand story, you need to have an intimate understanding of your brand, which even if it very much about you, still stands separately from you and needs to have viability beyond just yourself. This will allow you to scale up and reach out to a much wider audience than your own associates. By taking a critical look at your brand, you can get the insights you need to build an identity that accurately communicates it. 

1. Analyse Your Competitors

It’s crucial to understand not just who your competition is but how your brand compares in terms of your differentiation and visibility. A simple SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) should reveal some useful insights. You will most likely have conducted an analysis such as this if you have written a Marketing Plan. Choose your top 5 competitors to compare and contrast. Notice how your competitors present themselves in terms of common visual elements, trends, industry-specific visual themes, brand personalities, etc.

1. Set a Visual Direction 

Set your visual direction before you start the design process. This is about specifying what you want to convey with your brand identity.

• What key traits do you want to express through your visual presentation?
• What type of visuals communicate these traits? 
• What do you want people to feel when they “see” your brand? 

 

Completely Develop Your Brand Identity

All of these elements should influence your logo, typography and colour palette. A strong logo captures the essence of your brand, helping you make your mark in the world. Think about how to differentiate yourself from your competitors and make sure you stand for, and stand out with your MLM brand. Once you have a solid logo that works in black and white, you can explore your color palette. Colour is a great tool to differentiate your brand from competitors. Think about what will compliment and enhance your MLM brand. Definitely make sure you don’t clash or drown out your MLM brand. You are branding yourself with this exercise, but ultimately you want to successfully sell the products or service you are promoting. An effective colour palette is clean and flexible, supplying designers enough choices to be creative but not enough to overwhelm. Once you have decided on these elements, you need to think about how you will represent your brand visually. This includes how you present your imagery, photography, info-graphics. Make sure to stay true to all the elements you have already developed and follow your own guidelines at all times to make sure you are using your brand identity effectively. Create clear, easy-to-follow guidelines for every part of the brand identity, including examples and use-cases for print, web, video, and interactive elements (if applicable). Also include practical detail, denoting as much information as needed to help your designers replicate the brand identity successfully. For more direction, plus great examples, follow our guide to create a brand style guide people will actually use. Once completed, make sure you run all of your campaigns through this checklist to make sure every communication is up to standard. As we know, consistency is key when it comes to building a strong brand. 

At MLM Accountants We Know How to Help You 

At MLM Accountants we can help you understand the best solutions for the success of your business. All you need to do is get in contact with us at MLM Accountants. Call us today 0203 237 2927 for help and guidance.