Your digital branding is often the first thing people notice when interacting with your brand online. Whether it’s on social media or through your website, it’s important to stay up to date and fresh. I’ve put together my top tips for updating the digital branding for your brand or business.

All brands and businesses when starting up or modernising complete brand building exercises which then follow up with a full marketing plan. You want to know exactly what your brand will look and feel like to your target audience. This includes pinning down your brand logo, digital presence and what you can do to increase community engagement.

Tip 1: Select a cohesive colour theme.

A simple, easy to follow colour palette for your brand will help you stand out no questions asked.

You want this to reflect your brand identity and remain in touch with what the brand represents, while remaining unique to other businesses and big names.

Whether your colour palette is calm and relaxing neutral tones, or all-out eye-catching bring yellows and greens, you need to ensure your colour palette is noticeable across your platforms.

Fast food companies often use the colour red to encourage feelings of hunger, which is why you’ll see this in the logos and marketing for KFC and McDonalds. Therapy and wellness brands will use cooler colours such as green, blue and purple to spark feelings of calmness.

You can use this colour palette to represent you everywhere in your marketing and outreach, including your email marketing, leaflets, business cards, social media profiles and website.

This doesn’t just mean sticking to one shade of one colour for everywhere and everything. You can choose a colour palette of complementary and cohesive colours. Think of it as an eyeshadow palette: what is the colour story here? What are you trying to do?

Tip 2: Choose complimentary fonts

Your font choice is the next step to ensuring a cohesive brand identity. You want to choose a font style for each individual style of text you’ll find on your platforms:

• Headings and subheadings
• Paragraph and body fonts
• Annotations
• Quotes
• Logos

You should spend time getting to know your brand and the personality of your brand. Are you cheeky? Are you serious? Are you elegant? Are you low end or high end? How your brand is perceived is conveyed through the fonts you choose for your website and brand imagery.

You may decide to browse a graffiti font collection as inspiration for your brand logo if you’re aiming to become a well-known cult skate brand and that’s a great choice. This is cohesive with your brand niche and will help you stand out.

It’s then important to find a font collection which compliments your logos and headings–something maybe a little less graffiti, but still in-keeping with your branding.

It’s often found that good branding will pair a bold (often serif) header with a sans-serif, plain subheading to ensure trustworthiness and approachability. However, to appeal to younger audiences you may want to choose thick, rounded sans-serif fonts for a youthful and friendly feel.

Your ideal brand fonts will be unique, memorable and legible. They should be capable of working on all platforms (if coded into the HTML or CSS) and should communicate your brand personality effectively.

Tip 3: Reflect your new branding everywhere!

This ones the biggie. You’ve updated your full branding including logos, fonts, brand colour palette. It’s now important to stick to that one word that’s popped up: cohesion.

Without cohesion it will be difficult for your audience to identify you across platforms. What you find on your website and your marketing guide, you want to find everywhere.

Use your new logo as your icon on social media platforms. Use the graffiti font (or other style–it’s completely your choice!) you found previously to create banging sale banners and social media graphics. Keep your colour palette the same everywhere whether that is in individual posts on your blog or across different pages on your website.

Tip 4: Remain flexible.

You may be stuck with your new branding for a while–which is usually the case as you want to remain easy to find and follow across the web and offline.

You’ll need to try out various fonts, colour palettes and full branding before settling on what you want. You need to make sure what you want works well for every medium (print, web, mobile).

Your fonts themselves will have multiple font weights (such as light, regular, semibold and bold) to ensure a clear hierarchy in text and this will be specified in your brand style guide.

Lastly, you need to ensure everything is legible. It should be easy to recognise, read and understand your text (your colour palette can help here–contrasting colours will make things easier on the eye).

So–now you’ve got your basic brand package and guidelines together, you can go forth and play about with what your brand will look like across the web!