Five Things to Consider When Branding Your Shopify Business

Branding for your Shopify business means creating a unique, recognisable, and clear image of your offering. Your audience should be able to recognise your brand at a glance, understand who your company is and what you can do for them. Your brand should be uniform across all platforms like your website, social media, emails, marketplaces and if you’re managing a Shopify app, the Shopify App Store.

We’ll walk you through five things you need to consider when branding your Shopify business, so your journey to having a standout brand is easier! 

The first thing you should do is create a clear vision of your brand. 

You and your team should ask and answer these questions:

Determining your purpose, or value proposition, in the market is a lot like defining your unique selling proposition, which will inform all the branding decisions that you make. 

What is a value proposition?

Within the Shopify app ecosystem, your value proposition is how your app will deliver the promise made by your company to a merchant. 

If you’re a Shopify merchant, it’s how your products deliver a transformational experience to your customers.

To break that down, it means you are making a promise to merchants that specifies:

Writing all of this down answers the question "Why should consumers use our brand over the hundreds of other similar brands out there?" 

After you have determined your value proposition, you can start to drill down into who your audience is. 

If you are starting out, this might not be easy, but you can start answering these questions:

If you already have your first 1,000 customers and want to build a stronger brand, customer research is essential. 

Conducting customer research will help you understand how you differ from your competition. Your customers will be able to tell you why they chose YOU over the other similar products available. 

Having this knowledge will let you incorporate your differentiating factors into your branding. 

For example, your customers might comment that they enjoyed that you had friendly support staff, easy-to-use website or that your brand was simple and resonated with them. 

You might also discover that customers using your products are not the customers you thought they were. If you build your solution for start-up stores but discover that mid-market stores love to use your app, you'll have to adjust your brand positioning!

On the other hand, you might discover that people are using your products in a completely different way than you designed them for.

That's why research is so essential when branding your Shopify business. If this all seems overwhelming, you should consider hiring an expert Shopify marketing team to conduct customer research on your behalf.

Simple visual identity

Simplicity is critical when creating a visual brand identity for your Shopify business.

Remember, your logo, colour palette and font must be simple and easily recognisable because they will show up everywhere (and simple is better for the planet!)

Your logo is often the first thing people see when they discover you, so it has to be bold and visually appealing.  

Don't create a too busy, trendy, or text-heavy logo, or your brand could look dated in a few years.

Short, catchy taglines

Your tagline will be the most important message you convey on your website or if you’re an app company - in the Shopify App Store. Your tagline should tell potential customers, at a glance, about your brand in a single sentence. 

Make sure it stands out!

Go back to your customer research and value proposition to create a tagline representing your brand that uses verbs and sentences that imply an action for the customer! Doing this will encourage them to click through to your product. 

Now that you have a simple visual identity and know your position in the market, you need to create brand guidelines. 

This will be your go-to when creating new assets for your website, videos, social media, and images on the app store (apps). It’s also incredibly important for any copy and content you write.

But what should be included in your brand guidelines?

What to include in a brand guide:

Logos

You'll need to have a file of your logos, including png and SVG file types and the following variations:

It would be best to have these different sizes so that your team or external organisations can use your logo in various situations, like for print, when you sponsor a digital event, or overlay on another image. 

Colour palette

Every Shopify business should have a set of brand colours (no more than 5) when creating visuals. 

Your colour palette should include: 

colours, which colours are accent colours, and so on so that all your visuals are consistent across platforms. 

Also , consider accessibility and digital sustainability - learn more here.

Fonts

Your brand guide should include a list of font styles and families acceptable for use. You should also point out if you use title or sentence case for headings and other helpful style guidelines, like sizing and spacing.

Use system fonts where you can, it’s better for la planet!

Tone

Go back to your value proposition and customer research and remember what you stand for and why your merchants resonate with you. 

Remember, your voice should match your visual tone.

Be specific with what your brand voice is. Your brand voice might be:

Be sure to include examples of your voice in the guide so anyone you hire can communicate to your merchants in the same tone!

Creating a brand guide removes the guesswork for your team and external contractors like social media managers, content creators, and videographers. It helps you stay consistent across the internet and in real life. 

Brand consistency is vital for you to build brand recognition and improve brand loyalty. According to smallbizgenius "presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%"! Some of the most successful Shopify businesses out there have scaled quickly because they started out thinking like a big business that takes their brand seriously. 

Wrapping it all up

Now you know how to create a unique, recognisable, and clear image of your Shopify business and ace your branding. 

If you are excited to start defining your brand voice but want some expert guidance, we'd love to help! 

💚 We help Shopify businesses to develop digital marketing strategies that are environmentally friendly, following our zero waste approach. Take a look at our services if you're a Shopify app team looking to brand your solution.