The top tips
-
Find your Purpose to Influence More People
Great brands have a purpose. They make promises, then keep them. As a result, they influence their investors.
The biggest mistake new startups often make is that they don’t truly know their purpose. They dive straight into marketing without having any idea of how their business is going to work, the product they are working on, or their customer base. You need to find your purpose as a startup. Ask yourself “What is the one thing that you can do that sets you apart from them?” When you figure that out, that is your purpose. Keep developing this and you can end up influencing more investors. Promise your potential investors that they can rely on you to fulfil your purpose.
-
Create a Real Voice
Just like creating visual guidelines for your logo, colours, and typography, your brand system needs emotional guidelines. How your brand treats people in the written and spoken word can make or break you. That’s where voice and tone come in. Your voice is your company’s overall verbal persona and attitude. Your tone is how your company’s persona adapts to speaking in specific situations. Your voice guides your tone, your tone considers who it’s addressing. Although this can change depending on who you speak to, your overall tone should stay the same. Create an established tone that’s consistent in order to relate to your clients and investors.
-
Create Consistent Branded Content That’s Always Fresh
When you have a brand identity, you need to focus on consistency, not repetition. Newer startups have a tendency to shy away from creating content that showcases their brand environments, as they are worried about how these brand rules could slow them down. Make sure that everything is consistent but different. This keeps things fresh and creates interesting content that investors will actually want to engage with.
-
A Great Brand Identity System Precedes Great Marketing
Marketing can be easy when you get your brand right from the start. Your brand is the long-term marketing tool that shapes your day-to-day marketing activities. The core of your strong startup starts with your purpose. It can then build up to a larger more visual brand environment that you can play around with. Influence your audience early, and start to appeal to those all-important investors that you want to target. Take the time to share your brand.
Peter’s Yard is a specialist Swedish bakery, best known for its delicious range of sourdough crackers or knäckebröd. Peter’s Yard and Country have worked together for over seven years.
As a uniquely multicultural product, the brand needed to reflect both British and Swedish culture. The branding also needed to be multipurpose, the imagery had to be consistent across the packaging, the website, as well as various advertising including trade show stands and features. Peter’s Yard continues to grow as a brand and has been releasing new products that ship out all over the world. With every new venture, Country has been helping to push the brand forward.
Throughout our time working together, Peter’s Yard has gone from a small artisanal brand to an everyday favourite available in big-name stores like Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. They have also been the first business to receive backing from an incubator fund set up by Lotus Bakeries. Lotus has acquired 20% of the shares in the business. Without our initial support when they were a start-up, they wouldn’t have been as attractive to investors. Using tips like ours above helped them to get investor ready.
