As a start-up founder, you have a lot on your plate. You’re responsible for everything from growing your team to serving your early clients to refining your product market fit, to pitching and fundraising. With so many moving parts, it can be tempting to overlook one crucial component of start-up success: your brand.

In this article we dive into the importance of branding for start-up companies. Keep reading to learn about what branding is, why it matters for your business (yes, even for post-Series A start-up companies), why branding guidelines will save you a lot of time, and how to create a brand messaging framework. Let’s jump in!

What is branding? 

Branding, by definition, is a marketing practice in which a company creates a name, symbol or logo and design that is easily identifiable. In other words, your branding is what sets you apart from the competition and helps your potential customers and investors identify your company. Beyond your logo, your company’s brand represents who you are and how you’re better than other players in the space. 

Branding also encompasses your company’s visual identity, voice, and values. For start-up companies, your brand has the power to make you stand out and become more recognizable as you expand into new markets or geographies. Strong and consistent brands gain traction, get more visibility in crowded markets, and increase awareness early on.

Arch Collective recently partnered with Venteur, a pre-Series A company, on a branding project to quickly develop Venteur’s brand and visual identity. This project included delivering a new company name, tagline, messaging framework, logo, color palette, visual assets, and a defined brand story. Venture’s founder and CEO Stacy Edgar was thrilled with the results stating, 

“The Arch Collective team was instrumental in helping Venteur refine and better articulate our story. Not only is Amanda an exceptional strategist, she has assembled a dynamic team of experts who are so fun to work with. I fully recommend Arch Collective to any startup.”

What is a branded style guide?

A company’s branded style guide informs the composition, design, visual identity and overall look and feel of a company’s branding. The guidelines typically include assets like logo, color palette, fonts, approved imagery, and some direction on creating visual assets.

For Arch Collective’s recent rebrand, we worked with one of our talented Collective members, Nichole Marsh of Cole Creative. Nichole is an advocate for brand style guides to ensure consistency across a company’s visual identity.  In Nichole’s words,

“The purpose of a style guide is simple – to give you all of the tools, knowledge and confidence that you need to utilize your new branding. And to utilize it well. As your business grows, you’ll need to make more decisions involving design and I want you to feel completely comfortable doing that on your own. [The style guide] outlines everything you need to know – from logos to colors and fonts, and so on. With a style guide, you’ll have a resource to reference again and again while trying to maintain a cohesive brand.”

Why do start-ups need branding guidelines?

Now that you know what a branded style guidelines are, let’s get into why you need them. Branding guidelines can help inform both written and visual content. This includes imagery for social media posts, marketing collateral, website copy, sales and data sheets, landing pages, emails, and the list goes on. 

Branding guidelines really help in-house and contract graphic designers, marketers, and web developers, navigate your brand and carry out the external expression and representation of a company.

Previously, we worked with a pre Series A funded client. There were no branding guidelines in place so this meant the Arch Collective team had little direction to work with when it came to creating branded assets. For example, we went to build a company overview 2-pager. Our designer pulled imagery from the client’s website and decks to create the visuals of the PDF’s design. Unfortunately the CEO didn’t like some of the images selected, even though they were in their decks, and so we went back and forth with revision upon revision. Had branding guidelines been in place, it would have saved a lot of time and frustration on both ends. 

That’s why we highly recommend that every organization, no matter the size, have branding guidelines in place. They can be simple, including things like your logo, branded colors, fonts and some approved imagery. That way, anyone creating externally facing content (written or visual), can accurately express your company’s brand.

What is a brand messaging framework?

A brand messaging framework is a structured and accessible written representation of what your company does, who you serve, the value your products offer, and ultimately what you stand for. Through the process of building a framework, you should be able to clearly articulate and define the value that you bring to customers. 

What goes into a messaging framework? You can go wide or keep it narrow. We recommend including the following key areas: your target audience, brand tone and voice, key differentiators (this can be your team, technology, founding story, purpose), your brand promise, brand pillars (what you stand for), elevator pitch, value proposition, positioning statement, and key benefits to customers. 

Gathering the inputs of your framework can look like this: sit down with the founder or CEO to develop the mission and vision. Meet with customers to understand why they choose your product over others. Ask your head of product or strategy to learn about key differentiators.

Why do start-ups need a brand messaging framework?

Your brand’s messaging framework is a tool that can be utilized and shared cross-functionally - everyone from product to PR to customer success to sales. Your framework is really the foundation to crafting website copy, product messaging, sales enablement content, social media copy, press releases, and more. Being able to reference your messaging framework, especially when you’re in a pinch, will save you tons of time and numerous rounds of copy revisions.

Think about this scenario: without a messaging framework, you can ask seven people from the same company, “what does your company do?” and you’ll get seven different responses. This can be really confusing to your customers, the press, and employees. Your brand messaging framework ensures that every stakeholder is on the same page, telling the same story. 

Closing

Your brand is the visual representation of who your company is and what you ultimately stand for. In the words of marketing expert, Philip Kotler says, “The art of marketing is the art of brand building. If you are not a brand, you are a commodity.”

If your pre-Series A is looking to build a consistent and memorable brand, we would love to hear from you! We offer pre-Series A funded companies a customized branding package. Get in touch with us today to see if Arch Collective is right for you.