Brand assets, such as fonts or color schemes, are parts of your brand that separate your business from another. At least, that’s what they should do. If you don’t have a brand identity or you don’t have a way to create your assets quickly, you won’t be able to stay competitive.
Why are brand assets important?
Distinctive brand assets (DBAs) allow you to stand out from the crowd and tell your customers what you’re all about. When you have your own suite of brand assets, you’ll be able to deliver a more unified, consistent experience to your target customers, leading to faster growth.
Some well-known examples of brand assets include:
- Color schemes
- Logos
- Packaging
- Songs
- Slogans
- Company name
- Typography
- Photography
- Tone-of-voice
Although these assets are what make up your brand, they aren’t considered distinct assets until they’re strongly tied to your company and relate as closely to your customers as possible. It’s their uniqueness that transforms your brand elements into something known as a DBA.
With DBAs, you can increase customer loyalty, build consumer trust, ease buyer doubts, and increase your return on investment (ROI) on ad spending. Overall, DBAs create a stronger brand identity, so long as they’re codified with brand guidelines your marketers can use.
To make distinct and customer-focused assets, you’ll need the right tools and the right people.
What you’ll need before you start creating assets
You can’t just throw assets at a wall and see what sticks; you need a well-thought-out and thorough branding strategy. This includes investing in customer and competitor analysis tools.
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Customer analysis tools
Your brand wouldn’t exist without your customers, so if you have brand assets but nothing is sticking, start here. Customer analysis tools help you better understand your customers. When done right, you can use this info to streamline campaigns and create customized content.
Google Analytics is among one of the most popular customer analysis tools because it helps you understand how your buyers find you. Heatmap tools, like Hotjar, help you track user behavior on your site, which helps you see what pages your customers are interested in.
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Competitor analysis tools
Competitor analysis can help businesses without consistent customers understand who they’re trying to attract. By looking at your competitors, you can identify their weaknesses and find ways to improve on their shortcomings in your brand to attract some, or ideally all, of their audience.
BuiltWith uses business intelligence and competitive analysis tools to provide lead generation, profiles or website, and eCommerce data to track a competitor’s market share. WooRank is an SEO checker that scans websites based on SEO performance and search engine rankability.
10 tools you’ll need to quickly create distinctive brand assets
There are hundreds of tools you can use to create unique brand assets, so narrowing them down can be tricky. This list includes the best online tools you’ll need to make DBAs quickly.
1. Online poster creator
The BeFunky poster maker lets you create posters using professional templates. You can change the poster’s background to match your brand’s colors, add your logo directly to the creator, and choose from hundreds of fonts. What results is a custom, professional poster.
2. Online font creator
While websites like FontFont don’t allow you to create custom fonts yourself, they can set you up with designers that can create them for you. But you won’t have a problem finding unique fonts that match your brand, considering you’ll have thousands of unique fonts to choose from.
3. Online color scheme generator
Color selection is a huge process in designing and often takes a lot of tweaking. Coolors is a great tool that creates, saves, and shares color pallets in seconds. Its easy-to-use interface, app, and desktop extension make finding the right brand asset colors fast and simple.
4. Online logo creator
Creating unique logos wouldn’t be so hard if we could all use photoshop. Now, you don’t have to with software like DesignBold. DesignBold is considered the “simplified version of Photoshop” because you can use its library of 12,000+ resources to create stunning designs in minutes. Additionally, using a logo maker app can make the process even more efficient for beginners and professionals alike.
5. Online packaging creator
Tools like Packlane give their customers full control over the design process. You can choose from a wide range of packing styles and sizes and add customization options like text, color, and images. As you design, the tool will populate a quote, so you’ll know exactly what you’ll pay.
6. Online song creator
Companies like Write Me A Jingle will set you up with professionals who can write and record you a film score, theme song, voice-over, and jingle. If you have a podcast or need a custom instrumental track, Write Me A Jingle can also help with the editing, mixing, and mastering.
7. Online slogan creator
eCommerce giant Shopify has an incredible slogan maker that produces up to 1,000 relevant slogans for free without any limits. Shopify’s slogan maker lets you search slogans based on keywords, industry, or item/service relevance, which will help you narrow down your choices.
8. Online photo editor
You don’t have to be an editing genius to create beautiful photos. Websites like Pixlr allow you to edit photos right from your browser for free. Pixlr’s tools can color correct, add filters and effects, and remove backgrounds. If you need a quick editing tool, Pixlr can accomplish the task.
9. Online form creator
Forms and landing pages can help your customers go from the start of the buyer’s journey to the end. However, these assets have to be well designed if you want a high conversion rate. Tools like JotForm allow you to create these assets in line with your brand’s design principles.
10. Online marketing platform
If you want to take a hands-off approach to your marketing and brand assets, consider hiring a marketing department. Or, you can try all-in-one branding platforms like Renderforest. On Renderforest, you can make presentations, logos, websites, videos, mockups, and much more.
Brand assets from a PR perspective
Your business should build both short-term and long-term strategies to make sure your brand is memorable. If you develop a unique voice from your brand using DBAs, you can launch projects using your assets right away. With the help of various online tools, your brand can stay agile.
