Top Tips for Building Your Brand

Building your brand can be a daunting task. Your name, logo and positioning will (ideally) become inextricable from your service, this can be a thing of great beauty as a well-known brand can sell itself.

We’ve put together some insider tips for building your brand as a freelancer or sole trader.

Why branding?

A well-known brand stands out from the crowd; it gets people talking and even attracts fans, saving the time and effort of manually drumming up business. Think of the well-known brands: Virgin for instance. The colour red springs to mind as does Richard Branson’s face – but also the sense of fun and have-a-go attitude of its entrepreneur leader. What about Cadburys? With its unctuous font mimicking a swirl of milk against a rich purple background, synonymous with quality British chocolate (before the Kraft takeover of course from which the brand hasn’t quite recovered).

How to start

The easiest way to approach personal branding is to create it from your own qualities and unique traits – or at least the ones you want to emphasise and want others to think about you. It is advisable to be genuine as the constant, repetitive branding is easier to sustain if it comes from the heart – and helps you to stay unique. No one else is you after all.

Positioning

Your brand positioning – namely the service you provide and the content you create – is important. If you continue to provide fun, fresh web designs, your positioning will begin to reflect this. But be consistent: if you deliver well-worn, humourless web design your positioning will skew.

USP

A unique selling point (USP) should be part of your brand package. The USP is the answer to the ‘why you?’ question a client will ask. This could be anything from having the uncanny ability to deliver a website within 24 hours or providing genuine one-to-one customer-focussed services. Whichever you choose, it should be consistent. If you fail to deliver within 24 hours or get your client’s name wrong it will start to damage your image.

Naming

The name itself will become synonymous with your service, but it’s a complicated process and opinions differ on the best approach: do you spell it out e.g. ‘WebsiteWonders’ or do you start with a blank slate to create your own image? And how do you avoid duplication with another brand?

You could enlist the help of experts who will circumvent trademark laws and advise on good names but it can cost thousands. However, you can create a name without the cost. Take Virgin again, the name was allegedly created by a colleague of Branson’s, when they were brainstorming business ideas. She suggested Virgin – as they were all new to business – like “virgins”.

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