The first flag to signify a country was used in the early 800s. Ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome used symbols to represent various kingdoms and cities. Tattoos are the oldest form of branding, which can be dated back to 3700 BC.

These markings, or brands, are much more than their shape, colors, or placement. They were created with purpose. Markings become symbols or brands when they are given meaning. In ancient times, brands could signify strength, ownership, marriage, kingdoms, or general groups with a commonality.

Today, many companies are defined by their brand. So much so that consumers are known to be loyal to a brand, not a company. Your brand is the face of your company. How your audience perceives your company is done through your brand, what it means to them, and how they interact with it.

Don’t think brands are important? Just look at this image. How many companies do you recognize?

These symbols and markings should be nothing more than just symbols and markings. Yet, we instantly associate these icons with a certain company, cause, or even feeling when we see them.

Why is that?

It all goes back to what makes a marking a brand: there’s a meaning behind them.

This meaning can let consumers know that your product or service has a certain standard or that your company has a friendly, open feel.

Either way, branding shapes how your audience perceives your company.

What Does a Brand Include?

A brand is a meaning, feeling, or purpose that can be physically seen by an audience. The most common form of branding is the company’s logo, as seen above. Other areas that can be influenced by your brand can be your website, landing pages, advertisements, social media pages, trademarks and more.

Even things such the company’s colors, font type, and layout or UX design can play a role in defining the company brand and how the audience perceives that company.

Why is Branding Important?

In the age of the Internet and with social media, it has become easy to start a business and get your company’s information out into the world. Though, with all this information comes hyper-competitive markets and white noise that will swallow your business up.

A strong, well-defined and recognized brand, cuts through this white noise and, if viewed positively, helps your customers select your business from the hundreds or thousands of competitors.

As Seth Godin puts it, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for the consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”

Your brand is your business’ personality. It sends signals to consumers what your business represents, the quality they should expect, and the values your company stands for.

When your business defines a standard, style, and simplified set of principles that your company is based on, your consumers can start to easily identify your business from just a logo, color, direction or product.

Imagine being able to establish trust and loyalty with your audience through just the color of your logo.

To help your business establish its brand identity, we gathered a list of the top 10 branding tools. This list of branding tools is what we use at Solomoto to instill our brand in all our marketing materials.

Before you even start a company, you need to pick a name for it. Of course, it’s important that you pick something catchy, memorable, and gives a good impression. Have you thought about your website domain, though? The name you came up with may be perfect, but if someone else already owns the domain, it’ll cause problems down the line when you try to grow your online presence. Name Check allows you to check if someone already owns a domain for free as well as if the handle is already taken on social media platforms.

Need to create a stunning, professional logo for your company but don’t have the design experience to do so? This is where LogoJoy comes into play. LogoJoy uses artificial intelligence and advanced learning algorithms to produce designs just like a designer would. This site is great for fast, high quality logo designs that you can get in 30 seconds or less.

Canva is one of the greatest free websites and apps that is easy, simple to learn, and produces high quality content. It is an absolute must for any business that wants to have a social media presence. With Canva, you can create beautiful designs and documents with access to thousands of free, professionally designed layouts, millions of free images, photo filters, and hundreds of beautiful fonts.

Fiverr is a great website where you can hire cheap freelance developers, writers, designers, and marketers to help you improve your business brand. Starting at just $5, Fiverr’s most popular services include logo design, social media marketing, video voiceovers, and photoshop editing.

SALT is a free app made for businesses looking for impressive but easy-to-use marketing materials. The app allows businesses to resize images, add custom logos or watermarks to images and add texts to photos. This app is necessary for businesses who are interested in keeping their company image consistent and secure across all content.

Venngage is a free website that is great for creating infographics for your business. If you are interested in producing stunning, high quality infographics to promote your business, we would recommend none other than Venngage. There are hundreds of templates to choose from, you can easily add your business’ data in charts or tables as well as customize your infographics design.

Google Alerts is a great, free service to help you manage your web presence and find out who is talking about your brand. It allows you to listen to conversations that you may not be aware of by allowing you to track your business and its key phrases. You will never miss a conversation with your business again with this free service.

Hootsuite is great for business owners that need to manage everything on their own. You can sign up, link all your accounts together, letting you access all your social media profiles in one place. You can schedule posts for a future date and track your posts to see what’s getting viewed and what isn’t.

Twitter is a great way to engage with your audience, follow the latest trends, and promote you and your business. Naturally, the more followers you have on Twitter, the more presence you will have online. There are plenty of tools that help you increase your number of followers, but it is equally important to understand when and why people unfollow you. Unfollower Stats is a free tool that can alert you when you lose a follower and track those numbers to help you figure out why you are losing your audience.

There are thousands of other tools specifically made for companies to get a leg up on the competition and enhance their presence, and brand image. Most small business leaders don’t have the time search for the perfect tool or get used to 100 different interfaces. Solomoto gets rid of all that junk.

Solomoto is an all-in-one international software as a service (SaaS) platform for small to medium businesses. Solomoto allows business owners to easily manage all their digital marketing activities and customer relations on the web, social media, and mobile environment from one dashboard. No prior experience or knowledge is needed to use Solomoto.

With a free account, Solomoto selects the most efficient solutions for small businesses and integrates them into the platform. Some of Solomoto’s features include a website builder, social media manager, post scheduler and automation, SEO analysis, and social media and search engine advertising campaign builders.

These, are the top 10 tools that can help you create and improve upon your company’s brand. Remember, as you explore these tools and seek help in establishing or redefining your brand’s image, keep in mind your core values and what you want your audience to think of when they see your business’ logo or name.

Also, the best way to see how your audience views your brand or logo is to ask for their feedback. Don’t be afraid to test what colors, themes, fonts, or ideas work best with your audience.

When you optimize your brand, you will begin to maximize your success.

Best of luck,

The Solomoto Team

P.S. What are the biggest struggles you are having with your current marketing strategy right now? Share them with us in *the comments below* or get in touch with one of our team members over Facebook or Twitter, and we will do our best to help!

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