What is brand marketing

Branding is an essential part of marketing. Without branding, your customers will not know have anything to remember and identify your product by. The exact definition of branding can be debated endlessly. Still, generally, it's considered a combination of brand assets — like logo, colors, typography — the actual product and how people perceive the combination of those.

Branding enables repeat business and word-of-mouth

Branding is critical when looking to attract repeat customers. Your brand doesn't even have to be very polished; it just has to be memorable and represent your business. Something that your customers will remember you by and be able to recall when the time comes.

Word-of-mouth would not be possible without a brand, especially in this day when it's hard to get a good domain name. For word-of-mouth to work properly, you need to be able to describe the brand.

In most cases, it starts with a name and then a logo

Without a logo, it's hard to identify a brand. You would have to rely on other things like:

• Product quality, is it made from that high-quality material only that brand is known for using?
• Colors, what does the Ferrari red look like?
• Shape, again, how does a Ferrari F40 look like? Would you recognize it without the logo? If you're a car fan, then the answer is probably yes. If you're not a car fan, then possibly not. That's why a logo is key to reinforcing it.

Brand assets help make the brand whole

The name and the logo are the foundation of doing brand marketing. However, there are several other assets that help bring the brand together.

Colors

Colors are an excellent supporting brand asset. We mentioned the Ferrari red earlier, which is such a famous color that you can say it to almost anyone, and they will know exactly what color you are talking about.

Typography

Typography can be either be a massive part of a brand or a small one. Some brands have very memorable typography, so much so that you recognize the brand when you see the font. Some brands have gone as far as to create unique fonts for their brand.

The product

The product is a crucial part of your branding. Without your product, which can also be a service, you don't have anything to tie your branding to and essentially renders your brand meaningless.

Trust and quality

A quality brand that people trust can be a vital factor in a brand that enables word-of-mouth and brand loyalty. An example sector that this often is very effective in is tools. A high-quality tool can create a kind of a cult following where laborers like mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, and so on won't even be seen without their name-brand tool. Milwaukee, Makita, Knipex, and other brands have done a great job building trust in their product due to their quality. If you visit the tools subreddit on Reddit. You will see countless posts of alt: people simply sharing pictures of their tools due to this.

Perception and unity

People like to categorize themselves into groups. It's why football fans identify themselves with their clubs. Good branding can create that same feeling for people. Apple fans are pretty infamous for their strong ties to the brand. You are either a fan or not. This can work in a brands favor since rivalry can create a lot of publicity and word-of-mouth marketing.

A loyal customer base is a good customer base. Some people will buy anything a brand makes simply because the brand made it.

Tone of voice

A brand can have a specific tone of voice, and it can be cheerful, serious, friendly, professional, direct, funny, or anything in-between. Deciding on your tone of voice and sticking to it is recommended as it comes off as more professional and memorable. The tone of voice you choose largely depends on what type of business you are running and how you want to be perceived.

Photography

Photography can play a significant role in branding, and fashion brands do this very well. Acne Studios, for alt: example, usually has rather different-looking models that tend to be expressionless faces, creating a style of photography unique to them.

How to get started with branding for marketing purposes

You've come to the right place. Baseline automates everything for you and makes brand marketing extremely easy.

Starting a new brand journey

You start by naming your new brand. After all, what is a brand without a name alt: ?

Uploading or creating a logo

Then Baseline will ask you whether you have a logo. If you do, great, click "Yes" and continue to upload your logo. If not, don't worry; clicking "No" will take you to our simple logo maker. There you can create a logo to get your brand off the alt: ground. You get one free with a brand guide.

Once you've uploaded the logo, Baseline will present you with black and white versions of your logo and ask you to confirm that they got converted correctly. These can later be used in our design editor to create branded content.

Color palette

If you uploaded a logo, Baseline will detect all the colors used in your logo and present them to you. You want your primary color, the main brand color, to be furthest to the left. You simply click on them and drag them to change the order.

Generated Gradients

Now that your colors are in order. Baseline will generate various gradients based on those colors and present them to you. Pick your favorite gradients that you want to use with your brand. You get all the values and can easily copy CSS to use in your projects. The gradients can also be used in the design editor for backgrounds.

Fonts

Like we covered previously, fonts can be a vital part of a brand. Baseline lets you search and pick fonts from Google Fonts, but you can also upload your own fonts.

Our example brand, Microsoft, uses "Segoe UI" as their brand font, which is unavailable at Google Fonts. So we have to upload it. Select the "Custom Font" tab above the top input box and upload your font.

Type scale

A big part of having a professional-looking brand is consistency, and a type scale is a massive addition to that consistency. With a couple of clicks, you can set up a type scale for your brand. Simply set the base font size and choose a scale ratio, and that's it. Click "My type scale is ready" to complete your brand.

The brand guide

The brand guide is ready. You are now ready to start your brand marketing campaign.

You should use this brand guide as the source of truth for your brand. Refer to it when you need to use colors, typography, logos, etc. for anything relating to your brand. You can send invites to colleagues or make it public and share it publicly.

Every section provides CSS that you can easily copy to any project you need. Click "Grab Code" next to the headings of each section to see the code. You can copy this straight to your project to easily keep it on brand.

Creating branded designs

Last but not least you are ready to create on-brand designs automatically. It couldn't be any simpler since Baseline takes care of the hard work for you. All you have to do is select a template and Baseline will add your colors, logo, fonts, etc. for you. alt: Then you can tweak it with your own copy and perfect it.

This saves countless hours that would otherwise be spent applying your brand to everything manually. It's easy to use and you don't need to hire a designer.

Conclusion

Branding is a massive part of marketing, and Baseline is your secret weapon to succeed. Baseline has the tools you need to rock it without effort.