Three Ways to Make Your Brand Look Super Legit

We've all had the experience of clicking onto a company website and finding a mediocre site with dated graphics or hard to navigate pages. And even though we’re all busy and can sympathize with a business owner who just hasn’t had for a major overhaul, there’s is a little part of us that says, “This looks a bit dated and unprofessional. Do I trust this person with my budget?” 

Jenni here, and one thing we’ve discovered while helping our clients in the lifestyle industry, is looking “prim’d” and put together is pretty important to customers (see what we did there?). Making your brand look and sound great online subconsciously tells your potential customers that you are trustworthy, you are reliable, and that spending with you is a good use of their money.  Before you go thinking you need to get a new website, or refresh your logo, there are probably a couple of really easy things that you can do without spending any money to make sure that you’re looking polished. 

The mantra behind getting polished online is CONSISTENCY BREEDS LEGITIMACY. This is a saying from the super legit Emily Thompson of IndieShopography, and we’re borrowing it because it’s so true.  Having your brand look and behave consistent online and on all your social platforms is the easiest way to communicate to customers that you are the real deal.

Here are some easy and free places to start:

1. Consistent Brand Colors:

You should have very specific brand colors. Not just “a dark purple and a medium grey,” but RGB or HEX codes that show exactly what colors are yours. If you had a designer come up with your logo, they should have given you this information when they turned over your assets. You’ll want to use these colors on you Twitter page when choosing your background color, or any other place that you can customize (on your website, in your collateral, email signatures, etc).

For example, Prim’d gold is HEX #B49049. You’ll find this color on our twitter background, on our site, anytime you see gold in our blog images, etc. Same color everywhere. 

2. Consistent and Clear Logo:

The second thing you want to check is your logo. We have two versions, our “bug” and our full logo. We use our bug whenever it will be framed in a square, and the full logo when a rectangle will fit better. We never put the full logo in a square place, simply because it’s hard to read and doesn't look as great as it could:

Using a horizontal/rectangular logo in a square space can make it too small and hard to read. Square bug makes everything MUCH clearer and easier to recognize our branding. 

So double check your Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, website, collateral, email signatures, and anywhere else that your logo lives. Make sure that your logo is clear, easy to read, and consistently shown. 

3. Consistent Content On Your Social Platforms:

The last thing that you can do is make sure that when customers come to your site, there is always something new and fresh to see. If a client comes to your site and see your blog hasn’t been updated in seven months that sends the message that your attention is elsewhere, which is not what you want when there's a willing client clicking around your site!

You don’t have to become a content factory, but you will need to spend some time thinking through a plan. We have a small series of blogs about planning your blog posts you can check out (Part One, Part Two and Part Three). On the social media side, Sophie and I usually spend one day a week curating useful posts to share on our Twitter or Facebook. We use Pocket to save articles that we come across during the week, and then use Hootsuite to schedule out some social media posts for the next week or two. Using tools like this makes it easy to consistently post or curate great articles. 

Of course there's a lot more than you can do to clean up your brand presence, but those are three great places to start. Let us know if you have any easy and free tips to add to the list!

---

---