Finding and creating your brand can be overwhelming. It comes with a price tag, and it can be hard to even know where to start. If you have some time to invest, however, there are ways you can start creating a cohesive brand right away to propel your business forward. Read on to discover easy and cost-effective ways to create your own custom brand and distribute it for effective self-promotion.
Creating your Brand
Our Branding Workshop is an excellent place to start your branding journey; it walks you through engineering your brand from beginning to end. Branding takes self reflection and a clear artistic voice. This workshop provides space to reflect on other brands you like and allows you to brainstorm and grow into a well-rounded representation of yourself. It will also help you figure out what type of font represents you and what a color might say to your audience. Do you know what materials you need to start your brand? This workshop can help you answer that.
2) Canva
Canva is a go-to for DIY graphic design. With Canva's help, you can create social media graphics, letterheads, business cards, and logos. Once you design your logo, you can save your color scheme, logo, and fonts to your "brand kit," which will be readily accessible for all of your future projects. If you have multiple brands you are creating on Canva, you can save a secondary brand kit. If you have trouble finding a font you enjoy, explore a website like fonts.com where you can purchase one for a nominal fee and upload it into Canva, other applications like Microsoft Suite, and most website platforms. You should always save your color formula and fonts in at least two safe places. Colors have multiple formulas, and you can use Google to find all of them if your website platform uses a different formula than Canva. You can create everything on their free plan; however, some of their graphics cost $1, and you cannot resize your documents if you need to post on multiple platforms. This fee can be waived if you sign up for their pro plan.
Your pictures and videos say almost as much about your brand as your logo and color scheme. Modern Singer has many articles to help you choose the right headshot and craft the perfect on-brand pre-screening video, but what can you use for those everyday pictures on social media? In a word: presets. Presets are pre-configured edits that you can apply to any photo with just one click. They act similarly to filters, but are more intricate. Often, your favorite influencer or boutique on Instagram or Facebook will have presets for sale. To use your presets you must download Lightroom, which is a mobile application where you can apply presets to any photo in your camera roll. VSCO includes presets built into the app that you can add to any photo. Unlike Lightroom, VSCO is public so others can see your feed, similar to Instagram. If you use the same 2-3 presets your feed will look more uniform.
Your Instagram and Facebook stories are a good option to promote your brand with quick turnover, allowing fresh content to reach your audience. You can make story templates on Canva and choose your favorite filters on Instagram itself, but another way to make templates is to use such apps like Over and Unfold. These apps allow you to pick from various background layouts, styles, and collages that match your brand to make posting to your stories a quick and efficient process.
How to Distribute your Brand
1) Your Website
You can hire a website designer, but you can have more control by using Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly, which are all affordable and user-friendly options. Most website builders allow you to add your logo, use your own color scheme, and upload your fonts. Be sure to save your color formulas and font picks from Canva to make your website and brand kit cohesive. When you are planning the layout of your website, consider having a light background such as white, off-white, or gray, then add your brand color(s) for menu buttons, frames, or text backgrounds. Be bold with the placement of your logo. You can use it as the favicon (the emblem that appears to the left of some websites in the browser), for your website, or put it in the middle of your landing page.
2) Your Social Media
A good way to showcase your brand is to create graphics: infographics, posters, and advertisements, which are most easily done on Canva. Add your logo to the cover or final shot of a video to keep it fresh in your audience's mind. Instagram and Facebook have stock colors for stories, but did you know you can customize them, too? Save your logo as a picture and select the paint dropper to change the color of your text. These little tricks can really help you make a splash in the vast world of social media.
3) Your Press and Audition Materials
Stand out amongst your colleagues with a branded resume and repertoire list. The Modern Singer Branding Workshop walks you through the elements of a perfect letterhead to incorporate on all of your press materials. Your press materials will be even easier for the audition panel to keep together if the letterheads are the same, and they may remember you better if your logo stands out.
4) Your Email Signature
Your email signature is essentially free marketing. You can use your logo as a picture with a link to your website, or simply incorporate your brand colors. Fonts will be a bit hard to incorporate here, but you could always create an email signature graphic on Canva as a JPEG file and add it to your email signature template. Your email signature should also include the best ways to contact you and a clickable link to your website.
Your brand will evolve as, you, the artist, grow, but changes and adjustments are easy once you have a brand baseline. Your brand is a reflection of yourself and your business, so put your best self out there, and have fun. Show off your brand by tagging us on social media @modern.singer!