DIY-ing Your Brand in Canva? Don't Skip This Step
DIY-ing your brand in Canva? That’s amazing!
Canva is a super intuitive tool that can help grow your brand as a small business owner. While the sky is the limit with what you can create in Canva, many people skip an important step when it comes to their branding.
When we think of branding, we often think about the fun stuff: the logo, color palette, and typography.
The truth is that a strong brand requires much more than just aesthetics. To effectively communicate your values and mission to your dream audience, your brand needs to be strategic, unique, and consistent.
The missing link between so-so brand visuals and ones that are purposeful, clear, and informed? Brand strategy.
Brand strategy takes your brand beyond the surface-level aesthetics and morphs it into something that truly represents how unique you are.
The Importance of Strategy in Branding
A strong branding strategy helps you understand your target audience, define your brand voice, messaging, and more. Without a clear understanding of these key components, your brand may not effectively resonate with your target audience, and your message may become inconsistent or confusing.
I like to picture it as the foundation of your brand. Your brand strategy is who you are and the visuals like logo, color, and fonts layer on top of that.
To illustrate the importance of strategy in branding, let’s use one of my favorite brand examples: Nike.
Nike's "Just Do It" slogan has become a globally recognized and celebrated brand message, but it’s not just something that sounds cool. Nike spent significant time and resources researching their target audience, developing a brand voice, and creating messaging that would effectively communicate its brand values. Their slogan represents the aspirational and emotional side of athleticism and those are things that are infused into every bit of the Nike brand.
Quick win tip: Conduct a market analysis to better understand your target audience. Look at your competitors' branding and messaging to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand. Many people lack clarity in who they are solving a problem for so if you can showcase that and show how you rise above the competition, you’re on a great path.
The Risks of Skipping Brand Strategy
Skipping the strategic branding process and relying solely on aesthetics can be risky for your brand. Without a clear understanding of your target audience and messaging, your branding may become inconsistent or confusing, which can lead to poor brand recognition and lower customer engagement.
With the amount of competition and saturation in the online space, it’s more important than ever to craft a unique brand that represents who you are and what you help people with in the clearest way possible.
Quick win: Conduct a brand audit to identify any inconsistencies or weaknesses in your branding. Use this information to refine your branding strategy and make improvements where necessary.
How to Develop a Branding Strategy
Developing a branding strategy requires careful planning and consideration. To get started, begin by researching your target audience and identifying their needs, preferences, and behaviors. From there, define your brand's values and mission and create a brand style guide that outlines your brand's visual and messaging components.
Quick Win: If you're struggling to define your brand values, try creating a "brand mood board" using images and colors that you feel represent your brand. This can help you visualize your brand and give you a starting point for defining your values and messaging. Additionally, if you're using Canva for your branding, you can create a template for your brand style guide to keep all of your branding elements organized and consistent.
I also have an article here with a printable list of 100 brand adjectives you can use as inspiration.
DIY Branding in Canva or Bringing it Back to Canva
So how do you integrate your branding strategy into Canva? Let’s chat about how you can utilize Canva in the best way for developing your brand strategy.
Use Canva Docs to reflect on your target audience, gather notes on your competitive audits, and brainstorm your brand adjectives.
Search the templates library for moodboard templates to help capture your vision.
Another helpful template to look for is a brand identity moodboard. It’s basically a moodboard for your final brand elements.
Once you have your strategy defined, use the Brand Kit feature to organize your logos, brand color palette, and typefaces.
Whether you use just one of these features or all of them, Canva has a ton of tools to help you get organized and gain clarity on your brand.
Looking for more branding resources? Check out these articles on my site:
Conclusion: DIY-ing Your Brand in Canva? Don't Skip This Step
In conclusion, branding is much more than just aesthetics, and a successful brand needs to be strategic, unique, and consistent. When DIY-ing your brand in Canva, it's important to not skip the strategic branding process. By integrating a branding strategy into your Canva designs, you can ensure that your visual elements align with your brand's overall messaging and identity. Take the time to develop a branding strategy before jumping into DIY branding in Canva, and you'll be on your way to building a strong and successful brand.
