Make Your Mark: Branding Best Practices for Artists

If you’re an aspiring artpreneur, you’ll know that good creative work is only half the battle - you also need a head for business and, amongst the most important of your business considerations, is branding. Presented by SoHa Arts, here are some of our tips on how to construct a unique, marketable identity that best represents you.

Make Your Mark: Branding Best Practices for Artists

Brand Name

In the digital age, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of a brand name. The words you use can often make all the difference between success and failure - determining your memorability, search engine rankings and helping customers to identify with your brand. There are a couple of guidelines that are worth following to ensure that your chosen name is the right name.

First, try asking yourself, is this name clear and understandable? Is it too similar to a competitor or will it infringe copyright? Is it compatible with visual design and does it spark inspiration? It can be easy to imitate existing wordplay, but this is inadvisable as you don’t know which trends will be hot and which will become tedious in the future.

It’s also important to factor in domains. An ideal brand name is unique enough that you can secure a distinctive website domain and social media handles. If your brand is called one thing but all of your URLs/handles are called something different, it creates a dissonance that can confuse or mislead your customers/clients/partners. Worse still, is if those trying to find you end up landing on the page of a competitor.

Values

It’s important, early on in your venture, to identify clear brand values. Your values are the things that you, as a company, believe in and believe contribute to success. It’s often tempting to list every positive attribute you can think of but, after putting these into practice, you might quickly find some are counterintuitive to financial success or contradict your business practices.

If you are an eco-minded company, for example, this will have to factor into your choice of materials, production process, and supply chain. Pick carefully which values are most important to you and your company.

Those with experience or education in business acumen will find themselves at an advantage here. If you want to strengthen your business skills, consider an MBA degree — thanks to online programs, it’s often possible to acquire a diploma at the same time as working on your creative pursuits.

Just remember, when looking for a school, first ensure that it’s accredited and offers competitive tuition rates.

After you’ve identified which values are most representative of your business, you can use these as a means to market yourself. For example, as much as it is a way of conducting business, being eco-minded is also a unique selling point.

Use your brand values to form a clear mission statement and a guideline that informs your social media voice, email decorum, work attire, and selling strategy.

Aesthetic

Appearances are crucial in shaping a brand. Your aim should be to construct an aesthetic language that speaks to your values and can be easily associated with your product/service, distinguishing you from the competition.

If you are already a visual artist/creative, it might be worth trying to incorporate existing designs, illustrations or productions into the visual presentation.

Your logo is the most significant visual asset per square inch. This is often the first point of contact with your brand and generates familiarity. It’s easy to think of logo creation as an easy DIY task, but (if you’re not a graphic designer) you’re almost always better off hiring an expert to do the job for you.

Luckily, there are plenty of platforms that allow you to find and hire a designer at reasonable rates.

Branding is never something to be taken lightly - if you don’t have the business acumen or experience to go it alone, there’s no harm in asking for some expert help. Just make sure, either way, that you carry out plenty of research before making decisions.

SoHa Arts is a creative community made up of 38 individual studios and workspaces including artisans, creatives, and entrepreneurs. Learn more, at sohaartsbuilding.org

Written by Charles Carpenter of healingsounds.info

Image by Pexels