A business’s logo is an easily recognisable graphic symbol that identifies a company and is an integral part of that company’s branding and (visual) brand identity.
Your logo is a vital business asset and one of the most important tools you can use to graphically reflect your brand name, values and personality to the public and differentiate you from your competitors. It is one of the ways to distinguish your brand in a competitive business environment, full of graphic elements that try to outdo each other and attract people’s attention daily.
For Accentuate Web Design and Marketing expert graphic designers, part of their task is designing memorable and meaningful logos for our clients that speak volumes without being too confusing or complicated. Our highly experienced designers have worked on numerous branding projects and are more than capable of creating designs that match your vision for your business.
At Accentuate, we ask our clients to book a Digital Strategy Session, so we get to know you and your vision for your business. We then suggest ways to help you improve your online presence, may that be through website design or revamp, branding, and the use of social media.
What is a Business Logo?
As a business owner, we understand completely that you have to do a lot for your business. It would be easy to contemplate if a business logo matters all that much.
You’re probably also thinking, you have so much on your plate. You have got to get your product right. You have to find customers. You have to pay employees. Can a logo make a difference?
The short answer is: Yes!
For a business, logos are a point of identification, a symbol that customers use to recognise your brand. It would be ideal if you could have people instantly connect the sight of your logo with a memory of what your company does. More importantly, how it can make them feel.
Logos help give your customers something to which they can latch their positive emotions when they interact with your company.
Case in point, if you see a green apple fruit, what comes to your mind? You can immediately connect it to Woolworths, which incidentally uses a stylised green gradient ‘W’ in the shape of an apple for their logo. In a similar fashion, when people say ‘golden arches’, your thought immediately sees a stylised yellow/gold ‘M’, which is the logo of, you guessed it, McDonald’s. Suffice it to say, that these logos are powerful because they immediately connect with the brand they represent.
However, your logo is not your brand, it’s only a symbol of your brand. Simply put, your business logo is a combination of shapes, images, and text that depict the name and purpose of your business. A business logo can make branding efforts like a walk in the park if it is superbly designed.
If you have ever seen the worst logo, what comes to your mind? It won’t be surprising if you say you have trouble thinking of one. Good logos are memorable. Bad ones aren’t.
How are Business Logos Used?
So you finally have a professionally designed business logo done by an expert to represent your brand, what do you plan to do with it? How will you leverage it to brand your business and get your visual identity out there? Here are some areas where your logo can be of great help and use for you:
1. Create and establish an Online Presence and incorporate your logo there.
Having an online presence in today’s business environment is crucial to spreading the word about your business. Even if you conduct your business mainly offline, you cannot turn a blind eye to the possibility that an online presence can get you more customers, since most people today do their shopping online.
An online presence will get the word out about your business ‘out there’ faster and cheaper, especially if you get the services of an experienced digital marketing agency. To execute this, take the following steps:
Step 1. Have a website designed to ensure that not only is it visually appealing and easy to navigate, but also ensure that it is a responsive website that users will get, users can enjoy your website on their smartphones and mobile devices.
Step 2. Add blogs to your website and post valuable and actionable content that attracts the attention of your target audience. Share your values, traits, and personality specific to your business through your content, ensuring they align with your business name and logo. This reinforces your brand in the visitor’s mind.
Step 3. Have your website optimised for search engines. For example, if every image you use on your website is branded with your logo, and every image is Search Engine Optimised (SEO) with an alt-tag and description, Google will index it well. Additionally, your images will also pop up in Google image results along with your content.
Step 4. Invest in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns. PPC advertising increases brand awareness by showing your brand in ads that your target market can see. By creating an ad that shows your logo, you add credibility to what your brand is that stirs the eyes and minds of your potential customers
Step 5. Create social media accounts for your business. If you want to improve your social media presence, be it Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, adding your brand logo helps spread the word on the web. A recognisable logo is important for social media because it makes your business more attractive to consumers.
2. Have a Professionally Designed Business Card.
Perhaps one of the best places to incorporate your logo is a professionally designed business card. Highly useful for creating business connections in conferences and networking events, you can make your brand easily identifiable.
3. Incorporate your logo into Your Product Packaging.
If you offer products, stamp your logo onto their packaging. If you provide a service, affix your logo prominently onto your marketing collaterals and everything you leave with potential customers.
4. Use your Logo on your Website.
Your website is one of the most important places to use your logo on. Any graphic designer, ours included, will tell you that the ideal spot to place your logo is either the top centre or top left of every page on your website.
You may also feature your logo in the sidebar and footer of your website, or you may even use your logo in place of a Home Button on your website.
5. Use your Logo in your Emails.
Emails are used a lot to communicate with clients, it’s a useful marketing strategy to up your game by taking advantage of your email signature design with your logo incorporated in it. Incorporating your logo alongside the signature section of your emails helps make your brand more recognisable and helps in spreading the word.
Create a brand experience for your customers and followers by incorporating your logo in your newsletter. You can use resources such as MailChimp for instance, to incorporate your logo on top of your mailing list or manually place the logo beside your signature at the bottom.
6. Use your Logo in your Social Media.
Social networking sites made it possible to virtually share anything and everything with the world. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have the power and reach that you need to use to your advantage.
Our Social Media Management experts can help you in this department if you’re not sure how to do it or have too much on your plate to handle it yourself. Use your logo with anything you post on these social media sites, or simply use it as your profile or social cover image design.
There are other areas where you may be able to use your logo, such as industry events, comment sections, news sites, popular blogs, and even in your company vehicles.
Why Is Getting a Professional Business Logo Important?
Design matters a lot, and you need to do it properly. Especially if you want people to keep you on top of their minds, and want them to become paying customers.
When you invest in getting a professionally designed Business Logo, you are empowering your business to thrive. A logo builds trust and validates your professionalism, which in turn gets people to stick around. It can even tell your clients who you are, what you do, and how doing business with you will benefit them.
An unprofessional-looking logo makes people question if you will be able to deliver what you promise. You know what we’re talking about if you ever hit the back button to choose another company simply because they look more legit. Poor design will make people leave, or simply choose a competitor that looks more professional.
If you want to increase your credibility with existing consumers and start pulling in new ones, invest in a logo design done by professionals. Our expert design team will be more than happy to be of assistance.
Steps to Designing a Business Logo.
A Business Logo needs to quickly connect with your audience. It’s important to keep it simple for it to work splendidly across multiple media platforms and still look effective at any size.
When it comes to Business Logo Design, we asked one of our resident Graphic Design Specialists, Myra, about her process in creating her designs with great success for Accentuate’s various clients.
1. Evaluate your Brand.
Evaluating your brand is one of the first steps our graphic designers do at Accentuate. We ask clients to define their attributes in some core areas during our Digital Marketing Strategy Session conducted by our Growth Expert Angie Martin to give our designers a good idea of your brand identity before starting.
Myra then reviews your Digital Marketing Strategy Session with Angie and dissects it to understand what your brand embodies and pay close attention to what your business goals are.
Your logo will only be as good as its representation of your business, so it won’t be effective unless we know what kind of impression your brand is aiming for. Not to worry if you can’t articulate what it is you want or don’t know which direction to take, it is up to our designer to draw this information out and draw inspiration from, and our Strategy Sessions are designed to help draw out further direction directly from your vision for the business.
2. Study your Business Background and the History of Your Name.
To give our design team a better idea and draw inspiration in design, Myra studies your background and history, including your business name and how you came up with it.
Your logo serves as the foundation of the narrative, on which your brand is built. All of this is determined by the story you’re trying to impart to your customers, and your logo sets the stage to tell this story.
These elements put together will cascade onto all your branding materials, in turn helping you create a concrete and marketable brand identity.
3. Study Your Competitors.
The best place to draw inspiration and ‘borrow’ ideas from is by studying your competition. They are already out there, and you can see what works well with audiences, and you can gauge what design fails to avoid.
By studying the competition, you can gauge what makes them different from you. We can then emphasise these differences in your logo design and set you apart. If they are going monochrome, maybe we can opt to use colours to stand out. If they go traditional, perhaps a modern logo with fun elements will attract more attention.
4. Draw Inspiration from the Client’s Ideas.
It’s common that clients already have some logo ideas, but before zeroing in on your final design, Myra takes time to draft incorporating your ideas to see how they look. This exercise lets you see what might work and what doesn’t.
This practice in the design process draws out the appearance of certain common threads or themes that can be mixed and matched with different elements until you come up with the perfect concept. Myra then creates variations of your preferred concept by adding or removing elements, changing minor details, and exploring typography and colours.
5. Evaluate your brand colours, fonts, layout, etc.
Evaluating brand colours, typography, and brand fonts is important since it will reflect your company’s offering while resonating with your customers. Colours provide a ton of meanings. The psychology of colours is complex, and colours can evoke emotions and ideas attached to them.
Your business has a unique voice. Your font choice/s should reflect that. We look for fonts that capture your company’s personality and values.
We also evaluate and consider different layouts for your business logo. It might look great on screen but fall flat on stationery, business cards, or even a billboard. To ensure maximum flexibility of your logo, Myra suggests a simple, clean layout with fewer features, so it can be scaled to suit different mediums.
We do, at times, receive poor colour choices or font combinations as requested by clients. Admittedly, it is a challenge to create simple and remarkable logos that are recognisable, especially if clients already have a vision in mind that they want to see in the final output. However, our team is skilled at navigating these parameters to ultimately come to the table with something appealing for all parties.
6. Refine the Logo design with feedback.
You don’t need to be a designer to appreciate that everyone can be a critic. That’s not always a bad thing. Working on the same image for hours, or perhaps, days, or months, you’re susceptible to miss or overdoing elements causing clients to request changes.
A fresh set of eyes on the final draft can reveal room for improvement not noticed before. At the very least, we can gauge people’s reactions to the logo to make sure that it is generating your desired effect. Revamping logos is a big part of what we do to bring your brand in line with modern trends and make it appealing and memorable to your target audience.
7. Deliver the Final Logo Files.
With the logo finalised, It’s time to deliver the final files. We include the basic variations of the logo. It’s best practice to inform the client of any fonts used in the logo should they need it for future branding.
All this information is great to include in your brand style guide to ensure that you will be given easy-to-follow directions on how your logo can be used long after it’s completed. This makes a great gift to our clients and helps in increasing their confidence in the brand vision we’ve created for them.
For Myra, she says it’s not a walk in the park to develop a logo that tells everything about a business with just one abstract/graphic. But it is rewarding for her and our entire team when we come up with something that hits the mark the first time, with no major revisions, and the client approves of the design and begins using it, leading to positive results.
Now, Over to You
As you can see, your business needs a logo; it’s a vital part of building your brand and growing a successful business. If you don’t have a logo that stands out, then you are missing out on a great opportunity to make your business stick in the minds of your audience.
Having a professional business logo designed doesn’t have to be all that complicated. That’s what our experts are here for. We have even made the process as pain-free as possible. Begin by booking a FREE Strategy Session with our team experts, so we can begin reviewing your brand’s visual concept.
When you’re ready to take the next step and have a professionally designed business logo for your business, our Graphic and logo Design team can help to bring your brand vision to life.
