5 Brand Items To Create for Your Contract Service Business
As you are trying to digitally market your contract service business, you may begin to realize you are missing items like logos, brand colors, or a brand style.
Without these things, you can start to feel like you are running into roadblocks during the creative process.
One of the most beneficial things you can do is to start by creating the 5 core pieces of your brand: logo, company colors, company fonts, company persona, ideal customer.
By creating these core items, you can form a brand guide that you can reference as you create your website and market your contract service business.
1. Company Logo
One of the first things you should do when creating your company branding and digital materials is to create a company logo. This helps you lay the foundation for your brand and build brand recognition by using it with your materials.
To create a logo on your own, you can use free tools like Canva, LogoMakr, DesignEvo, and Hatchful by Shopify. When creating a logo in one of these free tools, you will need to be aware of what elements and icons might have copyright or usage restrictions or attribution requirements.
The reason this will matter is because you will want to trademark your logo, you will need to ensure that you will be able to. While you can hold off on trademarking your logo for a while because you will most likely be able to claim common law ownership over it, the best course of action is to get it trademarked early.
To search and see if a logo like yours is being used, you can search it on Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS). If it is available, you can apply for a trademark on the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Another option you can use to create a logo on your own is by hand sketching the logo and refining it or recreating it in a digital tool later on. The same process for getting your logo trademarked will apply for a hand designed logo too.
We recommend you get your logo trademarked once you create it so that you can ensure you have full ownership of it.
When creating a logo for your company, you will typically want to include a combination of the following:
Your company name
A unique font
A unique icon
Your company colors
Some logos will include all these elements, while others will only contain a few of these. Generally brands will start out with more information or include their company name in their logo at the beginning to build brand recognition.
Another option for creating your logo is to pay someone else to create it for you. If you plan on having someone else create your logo for you, we recommend you also have them create a brand kit for you with things like brand colors and complementary colors, company fonts, and other branding items.
2. Company Colors
The next piece you will want to create for your branding is your company colors. You might have begun this process when selecting the colors for your company logo. If you haven’t created your logo, it can be helpful to select your brand colors beforehand so you can pull colors for your logo from your company colors.
Depending on your industry, there might be standard colors that are used. For instance, landscaping company logos usually include colors like greens, oranges, yellows, and blues.
Plumbing company logos usually contain blue and gray with black, orange, and red as accent colors. HVAC company logos are typically a mixture of blue, red, orange, and yellow, and sometimes include purple or black. Roofing company logos are usually a combo or red, orange, blue, yellow, and brown.
To get an idea of the typical color schemes for your industry, you can search “[industry] company logos” and check out the images of logos that appear. You will want to note common colors and come up with a unique color pairing of your own so that your logo doesn’t copy other company’s logos too closely.
One good way to get around your logo colors matching too similarly to other company’s logos is to use different shades of colors if you happen to like a color pairing that already exists.
To test out your own unique color pallets, you can use the free color palette tool from Adobe to generate your own unique color palette.
3. Company Fonts
Once you have determined your company logos and colors, you can select your company fonts. The reason you will want to do this third is because this gives you a great chance to leverage your logo and colors for inspiration on your brand style.
Depending on that style, you can select a font that best fits the brand personality you want to convey. Serif fonts are more traditional, sans serif fonts are more modern, slab serif fonts are sturdy, script fonts are elegant, and decorative fonts are unique.
To learn even more about font types, you can check out Visme’s “Ultimate Guide to Choosing Your Brand Fonts.”
To try out different font connections, you can use a free tool like Fontjoy or Designs.AI font tool.
4. Company Persona
After you have your brand style set, you will want to write down information about your company persona. Your company persona is the personality of your company.
It will set the tone for how you speak to customers in your marketing, sales, and customer service. It will usually not be too far off from how you conduct yourself as a business owner and service provider for your community.
Do you offer full transparency, quality service, attention to detail, no BS, etc? Think of your organization’s mission, core values, and service philosophy and jot the details down.
Once you have all of these details collected, you should start to incorporate them into a description of your brand persona (personality). Once you have this set, you can provide it to your sales team, content manager, and customer service team to provide them with a guide of how they should communicate with and serve your customers.
5. An Idea of Your Ideal Customer
The next piece you will want to consider is your ideal customer. If you offer a broad service with multiple ideal customers, you can segment your ideal customer types.
For instance, you might be a landscaper offering landscaping services to homeowners and business owners. With this in mind, your prospective customers will be broken into two groups: residential and commercial.
If you want to take the segmentation a step further, you could consider the unique needs different commercial clients may have. For instance, a business park, versus an outdoor amphitheater, versus a retail outlet.
Once you have an idea of how you want to segment your audience, you should jot down information about each, their pain points, and their motivations.
Create a Brand Guide That Helps You Maintain Brand Consistency
After you create each of these core pieces of your brand information, you can create a brand guide. Your brand guide will be a document that your teams can reference in each of their roles to represent your brand consistently.
This brand guide can also help to inform how you want to structure your website and to determine what collateral you need to create to market to your ideal audience.
If you have questions about how to create your brand items, feel free to reach out to us today. Want to learn more about digitally marketing your contract service business? View our “Guide To Marketing a Home Service Business Digitally.”
