Have you noticed I haven't told you what my brand name is or showed you what my logo is? And that's because I don't have it yet. At this point, I have my brand architecture established with a mood board for creative inspiration. But now it's time to make decisions. In the rest of the lesson, we're going to learn how to select our brand name, create a logo, pick a visual style, and establish our voice and tone.
Let's start with the name. There are countless ways of approaching naming your business. I've added a few links to the Resources below to help you name your business, not to mention Shopify also has a handy business name generator you can use to find your business name, and I've added the link below as well. For my organic-made phone cases, I'm going to go with The Neutralist I think it's effective and it demonstrates what my business is all about.
I want to find something that would speak to my boho yoga audience, so I looked at words that communicated the centered, relaxed, grounded feel. I played around with words like neutral, natural, zen, relaxed, and eventually, after looking at the variations of all of them, I landed on The Neutralist. While there are no tried or true methods to coming up with the best name for your business, there are a few elements you should think about as you name your business.
First, try to be different. Use a name that is unique that when you look at the competition, how can you stand out? Second, your name should be easy to say and understand as well. If you're going to be telling people about your brand, they need to know how to type in to a search bar and really find your business online. If you're using weird spelling, it's going to be difficult for people to find you.
Considering there are billions of websites out there, you'll have to be pretty lucky if your first choice is available. Consider adding words to the beginning or the end of your name, like "shop" or "get," so that there's a better chance your domain will be available. You'll also want to consider this across your social media handles as well. If you can align your website URL with all of your social handles, you'll be in a much better position, and it'll be a lot easier for your audience to keep track of you.
So next stop, your logo. Let's be honest. You've probably thought about this a lot already. You might already have a good idea of what your logo should look like, but you may think you might not have the artistic ability to make it yourself. And that's all right. Most people don't. Plus, if you're starting to build your brand and you're new to entrepreneurship, try to keep things as simple and easy as possible.
If you have the ability, by all means, dive into Photoshop or Illustrator and give it a shot. But for the vast majority of you out there who don't know how to use these tools or what I'm referring to, you can use Shopify's free logo maker, and I have a link below. It's an awesome tool that allows you to take your business name and slogan, if you have one, ask you for the industry you're in and the artistic direction you want to take, then it proposes a bunch of different logos which you can tweak with different colors and elements.
This is how I created my logo for The Neutralist, and I'll show you exactly how I did this in the next lesson. Now, what makes Shopify's logo generator really valuable is that when you've decided on your logo, it actually creates all of your brand assets for you. Your brand assets are files like your social media profile picture or your business card. The logo maker automatically creates all of the different file types and sizes so you don't have to do it manually later on.
It's free, and it gives you a lot of flexibility, so I definitely recommend starting here when it comes to creating your logo. Next up, and this one's pretty quick, you're going to pick your visual style. Ultimately, you're just picking a direction. With this part of your brand, consistency is key. For me, I'm picking bright earthy colors. Finding the perfect color palette can be also very tricky.
So in the Resource below, you can find professionally picked complementary color palettes that can be a great starting point for you. Finding photography that shows my target audience in an environment that they care about is also an important step for my visual imagery and can be for yours as well. You can take your own product photography or use a free stock library like Burst as a great starting point.
And as you'll see in the next module, when we start building our shop, I'm going to find a theme that also goes very well with my visual style. The last piece of your brand identity I want you to decide on is your voice and tone. Many big e-commerce sites treat their web visitors like numbers. You have a huge opportunity to be different here. You can be human.
You can have a personality. You're not Amazon, after all. We talked about this a bit in the brand pillars, and we're going to expand on this right now. You want your mission and brand pillars to really come through in what you say and how you say it. I'll use an example to illustrate this a bit more. I'm going to share three product descriptions and you decide which one sounds the most aligned with my brand architecture.
Starting with "Check our innovative smartphone cases made from the newest, advanced materials." Or option two, "See this year's hottest look and make your smartphone stand out from all of your friends." And last but not least, "Save the world one phone case at a time." Guess which one I'm going with. And that's right.
That's the third one. And you knew that because you listened to me talk about the brand architecture and what it stood for. The two other descriptions are totally viable, but for other brands, not mine. I hope you're seeing how the voice in tone comes through. It's tough to do. And at a big e-commerce company, there are many employees that have several copywriters to do this job specifically.
What's important today is that you recognize the importance of your voice and tone and keep working on it. As we're starting to build our stores in the next module, always keep your voice and tone in mind, from your Home page headlines to your messaging all the way at the end of the checkout. As I demonstrated, your voice and tone comes through when you start writing each page of your website.
E-commerce copywriting is a talent, and you need to develop it. I'll leave you with a few good approaches to copywriting. So first copywriting tip, write your ideal customer. Don't think all about the different types of people who might buy from you. Focus on only one single persona. You can make them up in your head. And if you want, from everything I've seen, this is always the best way of going about it.
Now, a second major tip. When writing your website, lean on your brand architecture. Let your brand be your mission, and let your mission come through everything you write. And use your brand pillars to make decisions on words you want to use as well. The last key piece of advice I can give you on writing for your website is keep it simple. Stay away from long-winded sentences and blocks of text.
Remember, the majority of your audience is reading on a smartphone, so a block of texts might not be very inviting. I've also included a couple links to help you start thinking about SEO, or search engine optimization, but we'll leave it there for now. One final thought. Nothing is more important to your brand identity than consistency. Keep your brand identity consistent with your brand architecture and keep the elements of your brand identity consistent with each other as well.
And remember, your brand is like your business personality. When someone's personality changes from one moment to the next, you get concerned and uncertain. The same thing will happen to brands as well. At this point, I'm pretty confident you're on your way to building a killer brand and an eye-catching brand identity. In the next lesson, you can watch an implementation video where you can watch me create a logo, buy a domain, create a Coming Soon page, and use the design principles in the previous modules to help influence them.
In the next module, I'm going to walk you through the store building process. Using our brand architecture as a guideline and brand assets we've created using a Shopify logo generator, we're going to make a beautiful looking shop. See you in the next lesson.