Maintaining consistency is very important for branding. A successful brand consists of multiple components functioning in tandem like a finely tuned machine, engaging with consumers and impacting their purchasing choices.
Different techniques are required for each component, and different branding tools are necessary for each technique.
So as a marketer, you need to make sure that your brand is accurately reflected in every message, interaction, action, and content that you create. And how can you achieve this? Through the use of branding tools.
With that in mind, you will find the top branding tools available in the market and learn about their usage in creating successful brands in this article.
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What are the best branding tools?
There are various types of media formats involved in marketing, such as written content, imagery and design, video, and more.
To convey the fundamental identity of your company through all these elements, you need high-quality branding tools. Let’s classify them into different categories and check out the branding tools in each category.
Brand asset management tools
Whether it’s publishing a blog post, sending an email, or interacting directly with the customer, any form of communication with your audience should follow the same brand rules. This way, you can ensure that your brand always comes across exactly the way you want.
But keeping everything consistent isn’t that simple. And once your branding efforts extend to social media, guest blogging, and business collaborations, things get even more complicated.
The solution to these problems is to use a brand asset management tool. Here are the best ones you need to know about.
Frontify
Frontify is a solution for brand management that lets businesses create brand style guidelines, color schemes, and logos. So companies can maintain consistency across all their marketing collateral and build a unified brand image.
A web-based platform like Frontify lets you cover all aspects of maintaining your brand, from creating a brand kit with premade templates to conveying your brand guidelines across the organization. This includes sharing the brand rules with external vendors, creative teams, and other stakeholders.
Dash
Frontify is great for managing your core brand assets. But a realistic organization with a dedicated branding team will have other needs too.
Besides the basics like your logo and color palette, you may also need to store and manage other types of content. These could be product photos, podcast files, infographics, and videos. In such a scenario, you will need a more comprehensive digital asset management (DAM) software.
Say hello to Dash. Dash doesn’t just let you organize your photos and videos, but also lets you deploy these materials easily.
For example, you can upload photos directly from Dash to Shopify to use in blog posts and product descriptions. And you can also post content on your social media channels using API connections with Hootsuite.
Brandfolder
Similar to Frontify and Dash, Brandfolder can help you keep consistent visual branding across all your marketing channels. Because it ensures that everyone in your team always has the latest version of your brand assets.
Brandfolder doesn’t list its pricing on the official website. But I have learned through my industry peers that it can cost around $1,600 per feature. Certainly not a big deal for large enterprises, although small businesses won’t find it easy on the pocket.
Brand voice/writing tools
So you have a style guide. Now you need content that increases the reach of your brand. And you’re going to need a lot of it, from email and social media posts to product descriptions and advertising copy.
That means you’ll have a number of in-house and freelance team members working on different pieces of content simultaneously. So these tools will help you maintain a consistent voice across all those pieces.
Copy.ai
As the name implies, Copy.ai is an AI-powered branding tool to write original and engaging content for various channels. It will help you generate fresh content in a way that’s consistent with your brand voice, cutting down the time and effort you spend on research and drafting.
Grammarly
Grammarly started as a spelling and grammar checker. But it has come a long way since then. This advanced writing application also helps you paraphrase and fix sentences and paragraphs to match your voice and be more impactful with your written material.
The higher your quality of writing, the more trust and authority you’ll be able to build in your niche. So Grammarly is a tool that you should definitely consider.
Hemingway Editor
Hemingway Editor is a no-fuss, clean text editor that helps make your writing simple, readable, and confident. This software can spot complicated sentences and mistakes. So it’s massively helpful for companies seeking to communicate effectively with their customers.
ProWritingAid
Apart from checking for accurate grammar, ProWritingAid provides recommendations related to writing style and vocabulary. It helps when you want to take the readability of your content to the next level. So you can improve your message and interact with your target audience without any glitches.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT needs no introduction, since it has already taken the business world by storm. It’s an AI-powered language model with the power to create text that resembles content written by humans.
Though not always entirely accurate, it provides brands with a decent alternative to produce written material that resonates with the market.
You can use ChatGPT for not just marketing messages and content, but also for things like generating topics and customer support responses.
Email branding tools
Despite being one of the first digital marketing channels, and one that has been around for decades, email marketing is still alive and kicking. That’s because the strategy has managed to maintain its promise of a great ROI.
Now, to realize that ROI, you need your emails to be consistent with your branding, including how it’s designed and the voice of the message being communicated. That’s where these branding tools come in.
Unlayer
Unlayer is a robust drag-and-drop email editor with many advanced settings for small businesses and online stores.
This HTML email builder has plenty of stunning templates that you can use for free. The paid plan gives you access to advanced capabilities such as dynamic exports to email providers, reusable blocks, and saving your progress for later.
Dyspatch
Dyspatch is a well-known no-code email builder that lets you build email templates fast. Its email template designs can be used anywhere for free as HTML files.
You can customize them with Dyspatch’s built-in drag-and-drop email builder, or bring them to your current email service provider. Customization within Dyspatch also allows you to use interactive blocks such as product data and surveys.
Postcards
Postcards helps entrepreneurs and marketers build emails quickly and easily. It comes with a large collection of email templates and unlimited exports. Plus, it works well with popular email marketing platforms.
You also get a vast selection of building blocks, but these are only for users who have purchased the premium plan. The free plan limits the template blocks available to you.
Stripo
Stripo is another one of the popular email builders. It supports dynamic AMP features to build interactive emails for your target market. Similar to other email builders, it has a robust drag-and-drop editor and several email templates.
Stripo’s basic features should be enough for a small business on a budget, while paid users get advanced benefits such as email client testing and extra templates.
Topol
Topol is a free email newsletter creator designed for ease and efficiency. Its drag-and-drop editor can be used in isolation or integrated into other tools as a plugin.
With an intuitive interface, it gives you most of the functionalities that are part of any other visual newsletter builder.
Email signature generator
Every component of your email message should illustrate your brand identity. And your email signature is no exception.
So HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator is one of the best email branding tools you should consider using. It’s easy to use and straightforward.
With several themes and features, it makes it a breeze for you to create a professional-looking email signature for your business. And the best part? It’s free.
Social media branding tools
Social media is an important promotion channel for any business. According to research by Sprout Social, 84% of consumers will purchase from a business they follow on social media instead of a competitor. So you must up your social media game with one of these social media branding tools.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite lets you manage content for all your chosen social media channels from one place. It can schedule updates to be posted later and keep an eye on your social media traffic.
By tracking the performance of your social media campaigns with Hootsuite, you’ll be in a better position to refine your strategies and increase audience engagement.
Brand24
Brand24 is a social media tracking application that monitors brand mentions and delivers sentiment analysis.
With Brand24, businesses can respond to customer feedback and complaints quickly, improve their brand image, and stay connected with their target market.
Buffer
Buffer’s neat UI and robust analytics reports make it a great choice for scheduling content and gaining meaningful insights from audience engagement data.
By using Buffer, you can organize your social media posting plan, increase productivity, and maintain consistency across multiple social media channels.
Instagram branded content
The popularity of influencer marketing is rising by the day. Collaborating with thought leaders and complementary brands to post social media content is one of the best ways to increase your reach and brand awareness.
But a branded content campaign can be difficult to execute in the right way. Many social media users are often sensitive to content that’s overly promotional. So you need to be more subtle and articulate, not to mention transparent.
That’s where Instagram’s Branded Content tool can fill the gap. Using this feature, brands can tag other accounts in their content with ease. And they can do it in a graceful, honest way, where the audience knows that the content published is part of a business partnership.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is known for providing in-depth performance analytics and social media listening tools. It’s a great help for businesses who want to better understand and engage their customers.
Search engine branding tools
No brand awareness strategy is complete without considering search engine optimization (SEO). This includes ensuring high visibility in search engine result pages by ranking for relevant keywords. The following tools can help elevate your search engine presence.
Semrush
Semrush is an indispensable tool for SEO professionals, with a wide range of features such as keyword research, content analysis, and competitive research.
The software can also customize data based on device and location, allowing you to refine your SEO strategy for a specific target market. As a result, it’s one of my go-to resources for all things SEO.
Moz
Moz is known for its top-notch SEO-related content. And its SEO software helps you boost your search engine presence. Just like Semrush, Moz has several tools like keyword research, backlink analysis, and website audit. And these tools let you optimize your website for higher rankings in search engines.
Visual branding tools
Custom social media photos, infographics, advertising banners, and other types of visual content are crucial parts of your branding. So they should be designed according to your brand’s color theme, typography, and other style guidelines.
Now, you can hire a team of talented designers, which is great. But it can be expensive. Or you can go with the more affordable option — using these easy-to-use design tools to create visual assets yourself.
Canva
Canva is the most popular DIY design tool that simplifies the image design and editing process. It does that with an intuitive interface and a vast collection of beautiful templates.
With Canva, you have the power to design visual content fast. And without compromising on the quality.
Piktochart
Piktochart is another awesome tool for people and businesses without professional design training. It lets you easily create infographics, newsletters, ebook covers, and more to achieve consistent branding across all your promotion channels.
Adobe Lightroom
As you can see, there’s no shortage of brand design tools to help you create social media posts for any network under the sun. And many of these tools are meant for specific social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
But what if you want to pick just one for all your social media needs? My recommendation would be Adobe’s Lightroom.
Lightroom is a powerful photo-editing solution tool that lets you modify and manage social media graphics. It comes with many user-friendly options to align your social media images with your brand identity.
Adobe Illustrator
A great logo goes a long way in conveying your brand message at just a single glance. And the undisputed champion of logo design tools is Adobe Illustrator.
While facing stiff competition, this software continues to evolve and come up with new features that make it easy for users to make stunning and memorable logos.
In fact, one of my favorite features is its ability to scan your hand-made drawings and bring them into the canvas for further editing.
It doesn’t have a free plan and it takes some time to get used to, but it’s worth every penny if you’re serious about logo design.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is another visual design tool that provides many templates for fast production and editing of engaging visuals like animations, social media graphics, banners, and more. And you can use it to create decent designs without any specialized skills.
Video branding tools
Video content is a key part of any well-rounded branding strategy. But creating professional-looking videos is often challenging. These tools help make it easy.
Wistia
Chances are you’re not a professional videographer, and that you don’t have the budget to hire a team of video editors either. That’s why there are video branding tools that level the playing field for small businesses.
Wistia, for example, is a video-hosting platform with plenty of customization options that make your videos look branded and polished. You can use it to add business logos, change colors, insert calls to action, and even overlay text.
There is no free plan, so you’ll have to shell out some bucks to make full use of Wistia’s capabilities.
Lumen5
Looking to convert your blog posts or landing page copies into video content? Check out Lumen5. Lumen5 is an AI-driven solution to convert text into engaging videos. \
This is great for brands who want to extend their marketing efforts to video marketing without too much effort. Using Lumen5, they can convey their brand narrative in a dynamic way, leading to a significant boost in audience engagement.
Final thoughts on branding tools
In conclusion, branding tools play a vital role in establishing and maintaining a brand’s identity and reputation. From creating a logo to designing a website, social media presence, and marketing materials, branding tools are necessary to communicate the brand’s message and values to the target audience effectively.
With the increasing competition in the market, businesses need to focus on building a strong brand image that resonates with their customers and sets them apart from the rest.
Therefore, investing in the right branding tools can go a long way in establishing a successful brand that delivers value and generates customer loyalty.
Did I miss anything? Did you try these tools? Do you have any questions or comments? Share your thoughts below in the comments section.
