The key to professional branding is consistency. Of course, your brand assets need to look professional and visually pleasing, but the consistency in implementation is crucial. Many entrepreneurs who don’t have a design background and go the do-it-yourself route, or hire freelancers for one-off projects, end up with inconsistencies across their different brand assets. You can have beautiful graphic design pieces in place to promote your business, but if there is no cohesiveness, your branding won’t come across as professional or be memorable. To help you avoid this mistake, let’s take a look at some guidelines and resources on how to match your website and other branding assets.

Set the Right Design Direction with Your Logo

Your entire visual direction for your branding assets should be determined by your logo. If you haven’t launched your business yet, tackle your logo as the first creative project, and then strategically build out the rest. When you are making creative decisions for your logo, don’t simply go by what looks pretty, rather focus on landing on a design that will convey the right message that is aligned with your business’ core offering and values. You can achieve that by choosing the right colors. Different colors evoke different emotions so make sure you study the psychology of color and pick a color palette that speaks to your core demographic.

Develop a Brand Consistent Website

Once you have finalized your logo, it’s time to build out what’s arguably, your most important brand asset and promotional tool – your website. All too often entrepreneurs make the mistake of building a custom website or purchasing a template and treating the logo as merely an afterthought. If you have your logo in place first you can incorporate your branding colors, complementary photos, and images. To make sure your website and logo are well tied together, visually implement the core color of your logo throughout your pages as accent colors. You can also use your logo’s secondary colors to establish an even stronger connection.

Use Visual Aids Across Your Branding Assets

Tying your website and other branding assets together isn’t limited to repeating the core color and including your logo consistently. There are a lot of visual aids you can use to create brand consistency. You can leverage these tools to instantly boost the quality of your brand assets and to strength your branding:

• Images: Images are a great tool to create consistency across all of your promotional material. Using professionally shot photos in your social media posts, flyers, website header, etc. can easily elevate your design. The trick is to find a set of photos that you love and to use those exclusively across all of your brand assets. This will give your designs much needed cohesiveness.
• Icons: Another way to separate your designs from amateur attempts is through the use of professional icons. The trick is to stay away from cheap looking clipart and to stick to one set of icons. There are a lot of free icon sets available that you can find and download online. Once you pick a set, use it across your presentations, website, business card, etc. where appropriate.
• Fonts: Similar to photos and icons, fonts are a great way to elevate your designs and content. When it comes to fonts you want to be careful not to use too many different kinds. Choose a couple of fonts that read well and are visually pleasing and use those exclusively through all of your content pieces.

Some Free Resources to Help You with Implementation

Creating a beautiful brand that’s also consistent across all of your different items can be intimidating, especially if you aren’t operating with a large budget. Luckily there are resources available that you can use for free to build out matching brand assets for your website. Here are a few free tools to get you started:

• Paletton: This tool lets you find matching color combinations quickly through an interactive color wheel.
• Business Cards: One of the most effective offline promotional and branding tools is still your business card. This resource lets you create free printable business card designs in minutes.
• Burst: This resource allows you to search and download high-resolution images that you are allowed to use for commercial projects.
• Free Icons: As the name implies this website offers professional icons that you can download for free.

The resources and tips listed in this article will help you come up with your own designs as a quick solution. If you are looking for fully custom branding, our team at Millennium can help you succeed.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman led B2B branding, positioning, and digital marketing firm who knows how to create value that emotionally influences your customer’s buying decision, giving you the competitive advantage. As your trusted partner in B2B software technology and manufacturing, we provide the branding and positioning framework that make an impact – so you can focus on what you do best – run your business successfully. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, and a worldwide presence, the professionals at Millennium Agency would like to learn more about your business.  Visit www.mill.agency or book time here.   

Sparking up interest for your cannabis brand can be challenging. With fierce competition and so many rules and regulations to keep track of, your brand can easily get swallowed up. Adapting to your consumers’ needs and creating content that draws in new audiences can seem like an impossible job, but with some help from us, those challenges can be put to bed.

1. Blazing Brand Strategy

As you would with any marketing campaign, having a strong brand strategy is essential. You can’t market your products if you don’t know the core values that drive your company to success. Start by defining your company values. Then identify the problems you want to solve for your consumers, and work on communicating your message on various platforms.

2. A Smoking Social Media Campaign

Social media is your best friend when it comes to marketing cannabis effectively to your audience. The images that can be curated from your product line(s) and displayed on Instagram are unmatched. As Instagram is very image-centered, it’s essential to put your best greens forward. Behind-the-scenes footage of products and your store can also create a feeling of transparency to your business, a trait Millennials and Gen Z value in their brands. Additionally, one of your top goals when marketing cannabis should be to educate not sell, but what does this look like in terms of social media? You can include recent and relevant industry news, educational graphics and links to recent studies to educate your audience and get them interested in the industry.

3. Weeding through Websites

You may feel nervous about what you can post on traditional social media platforms, but there are websites out there specifically for cannabis brands to show off. Leafwire, Mjlink and Weedable are a few of the platforms that stand out to us. Connecting with other cannabis brands or wholesalers is made simpler with these platforms and you know your audience is already there looking for a brand like yours. Just create some content to draw in the customers.

4. Captivating Cannabis Content

Now that we’ve established where the best places to market your content are, it’s time to focus on the content itself. As we mentioned above, one of your top goals is to educate your audience instead of trying to sell to them. This can be done with blog posts, case studies, eBooks, white papers, podcasts, webinars and more. All of which our team of experts at Cannabis Brands can handle for you if you don’t know where to begin!

5. Mary Jane Media Coverage

Getting the word out there is especially critical for cannabis companies because the industry is still in the early stages with lots of fierce competition. Writing media pitches to news outlets could be the best way for your company to get noticed. Try outlets like Cannabis Business Times or Marijuana Venture as these are geared specifically to the cannabis industry.

Marketing in the cannabis industry is very challenging. Constantly trying to stay on top of changing rules and regulations while creating meaningful content to combat your competitors is a lot to handle. However, we can help with the content to alleviate some of that stress, contact our team of experts at our sub brand, Cannabis Brands!

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!