The foundation of good sales and marketing materials is a strong and consistent brand.

The first step to setting up your marketing machine is to build your startup brand assets.

You need a visual brand identity.

Most people think of the visual identity when they think of the brand including things like a logo, color palette, typography, imagery, and many others. And creating a consistent visual identity is important when you are trying to catch the attention of your target market.

And you need to create a written brand identity too.

Most entrepreneurs, however, forget that you need to also create consistent written brand assets like a tagline or catchy 1 liners or 1 paragraph length positioning texts that are used consistently when communicating about the value proposition of the business.

Make your life easy by starting with a solid brand foundation

If you take the time to create a good-enough first version of your visual and written brand assets, building out any of your marketing materials including your website, brochures, marketing emails, etc. will become a breeze. And even better, your team will be more likely to share a consistent message about your value proposition when they are in the market talking about your company — and help you to acquire those important first and subsequent customers faster and better.

Building your brand assets is easy if you have done your prep work

Brand building happens after you have validated that you have a viable business model. When you were validating your business idea, you worked on many things including your vision and mission and your OKRs, and you interviewed extensively and did market and competitor research to develop your value proposition and understand why your offering is unique. This work is the meat that informs your ability to position your service and develop your brand assets. Don’t forget to leverage that hard work!

Read about branding from some experts in the field

To learn more about how to design your brand identity read this article by Nate Butler from Column Five titled How to Create a Powerful Brand Identity.

Get started now

Use this Marketing Basics template to start creating your startup’s brand identity.