When you hire a professional designer to create your brand design on behalf of your business, chances are, you’ll come away with a wide variety of resources to equip you to successfully use your brand design cohesively throughout your business — resources like your brand files in all of your brand colors and diverse file types, your brand manual, and more. 

So, once you’ve received all of these resources from your designer, how do you go about using your brand design effectively? How can you ensure your brand and business are perceived the way your professional designer has advised? Today, we’re sharing 5 key ways to use your brand design both cohesively and effectively.

How to Use Your Brand Design Effectively

Perhaps you’ve recently had your brand designed by a professional designer, or your design process will soon conclude — and you’re wondering how to carry your brand forward successfully. You’ve likely received a wide variety of resources — from your brand files to your brand manual — and you want to ensure your brand design is used well.

Today, we’re excited to share 5 key ways to use your brand design both cohesively and effectively, to ensure your brand design works the way both you and your professional designer intended.

1. Use your brand manual to guide you in your web design or template customization process. Beyond social media, your web design likely serves as an introduction to your business for your prospective clients or customers. Use your brand manual to ensure your brand designs, brand color palette, and brand font styles are used consistently and cohesively throughout your web design. Web design is truly an art form — so maintaining consistency is key. That way, when someone journeys between your social media, your web design, and your third-party apps like your project management system or client management system, they are receiving the same cohesive experience from beginning to end. This not only helps you to build brand awareness — but it also communicates to your clients that they are journeying through a thoughtful, polished, and elevated process with an established, credible, and trustworthy business.
2. Use your brand manual to guide you in social media content creation. Similar to your web design, we recommend using your brand manual to ensure your brand designs, brand color palette, and brand font styles are used consistently and cohesively throughout your social media posts. Now, this may be more relevant to certain types of businesses than other types of businesses. For example, photographers and videographers will likely continue using social media to post their work above all. However, for educators, content creators, podcasters, and small businesses who create graphics or graphic designs for social media marketing, creating consistency when designing graphics is key. When you use a design program like Canva, you can use your brand manual as you add your brand details to the “Brand Hub” area of Canvas. This makes using your exact brand details consistently truly seamless, quick, and easy! You can choose from among Canva’s thousands of design templates, and apply your exact brand details accurately.
3. Create consistency among your printed marketing materials. If your business uses business cards, letterhead, notecards, postcards, packaging, tags, or other printed marketing materials, be sure to use your brand consistently from one marketing material to another. This ensures no matter where, when, or how someone comes upon your business and your marketing materials, they are experiencing a polished experience. When we think about the brands we love and look up to most, we often think about the ways their brand is seamlessly, and consistently used throughout each area of their business. This shows a brand doesn’t need to be complex or ornate in order to be memorable — it simply needs consistency and thoughtfulness. 
4. Add your unique brand details into your newsletter marketing system. Our chosen newsletter marketing system, FloDesk, equips business owners to add their brand design, color palette, and font styles within FloDesk, so their brand can be used seamlessly in pop-ups, opt-ins, newsletter campaigns, and more. When we think about the entire journey your customers or clients may go on — from social media, to your web design, to your newsletter community — we wholeheartedly believe creating one consistent, cohesive visual experience can go a long way in building a trustworthy relationship between you and your audience members and communicating dependability from one platform to another. 
5. Remember your brand keywords, and the feeling your brand design should create. Of course, there is so much more to branding than the visual elements covered in brand design. Details of your business like your copywriting, your brand voice, your approach to marketing, and your client experience all work together to create a brand. In the end, we recommend remembering your brand keywords and remembering the feeling your brand design should create. When you do, you can compose your social media captions with purpose, write your newsletters with the appropriate voice, and create a client experience uniquely-aligned with the foundational details of your brand. As an example, if your brand is intended to be luxurious and elevated, having too casual a brand voice can feel mismatched. Instead, keeping your brand keywords in mind, and creating a consistent feeling from one facet of your business to another, helps to ensure your brand is used cohesively and successfully from beginning to end.

Today, we shared 5 key ways to use your brand design both cohesively and effectively. If you’re hoping to learn more about your brand, try our free guide: “How to Create a Luxury Brand.”

About Brand It, Build It Podcast, Hosted by Kelly Zugay

Hosted by Kelly Zugay, co-founder of With Grace and Gold, The Brand It, Build It Podcast is a leading small business marketing podcast for small business owners, creatives, and founders. Weekly, brief, actionable episodes will equip you to build a successful, sustainable small business. Since 2014, With Grace and Gold has provided award-winning custom brand and Showit web design and completely customizable Showit website templates for small businesses worldwide.