How to offer brand identity development as a service
A practical guide to offering brand identity development services: style guide, visual asset bank, professional communication, and a solid digital presence.
The team behind Polimake. We explore the intersection of technology, creativity, and automation.
Brand identity for clients: the pillars and deliverables that sell the service
Developing a professional corporate identity for your clients is one of the most direct ways to improve their brand perception, their sales, and their bargaining power. As a freelancer or agency, you can offer brand identity development as a high-value service that combines design, communication, and digital presence. This identity should be integrated into the client's marketing plan and reflected throughout all of their communication, improving their online presence and strengthening their content strategy. The identity should reflect the company's values and be applied across its corporate design to create a coherent, recognizable brand. Brand identity improves engagement with the target audience and is an essential part of digital marketing. Brand identity is part of your social media plan and website, improving ROI and strengthening your brand.
In this guide we'll cover the basic pillars you should work on in every project: the brand style guide, a visual asset bank, the way the company communicates, and what's known as digital basics (website, social media, and content). If you want to dig into the conceptual foundation, you can supplement this with our guide on what a brand guide is and the article on online presence.
Goals of a brand identity project
- Brand identity
- Logo and primary colors
- Typography
- Icons and graphics
- Templates for slide decks, letters, and other resources
- Company photographs and shots of products, services, and facilities
- Summary videos and several explainer clips
- Business cards
- Social media and added "baseline" content
- A complete website (copy + imagery + articles)
- Branded products and packaging
1. A brand style guide
A brand guide is absolutely fundamental. In short, it's the Creative Bible of the business. In other words, a set of fundamental creative principles that must be respected at all times. As we explain it: if you need to pick a color, you pick one from that brand guide. If we're talking about using a typeface, a font, or text somewhere creative, we must respect and use one of the ones we've selected. If we show visual imagery, we have to source it from our image and video library. And most important of all, the logo must appear somewhere.
Among many things, to start with we need:
- Logo and primary colors
- Typography
- Icons and graphics
- Templates for slide decks, letters, and other resources depending on the company
In addition, packaging and engraving the logo and colors onto the product or service is essential. After that, business cards, flyers / pamphlets, and other physical materials come in handy. Many are falling out of use, but for corporate events they're still a traditional resource that remains very much present.
2. An asset bank for the brand
Summary: Gather a wide variety of high quantity and quality digital assets for the business, and upload them strategically.
Since 2020 we've been generating free stock content for our clients under the code polimake-stock, which over the years has significantly enhanced our corporate image. The reason: we've built an enormous library of images, videos, and sounds of everything we've done and seen, maintaining a high standard of quantity and quality in every digital asset.
It has given us the option to choose from a broad range of high-quality graphic resources representing each thing. With the balanced style we like, technical professionalism without the plasticky or fake look (the way traditional stock looks). These resources have been key on social media. You can see them, for example, in these four pillars, all of them our own images.
What's more, they're our own resources; we hold the full license, and so do all our clients.
Photographs and videos of the company, products, services, and facilities are fundamental. This is the material that will fuel social media. A complete summary and several explainer clips in each digital distribution.
3. Communication, communication, and more communication
Summary: Use communication not only to reach more users, but to communicate with higher standards to your clients.
It's clear that when you communicate something, you're transmitting information from a sender to a receiver. The better designed that communication—that message—is, the better impression it gives to the person receiving the content. So investing a great deal of time and resources in videos, images, graphics, and training helps. On top of that, a good volume of social media posts helps project an active brand that's eager to share. Professional identity shows in how that brand communicates.
It's not just the potential reach of this communication that matters, but it also trains the team to communicate better. Thorough training is absolutely fundamental to giving a good impression. That email contact, that new outreach from the sales team. If it all has a much more professional tone and a much broader, more appropriate vocabulary, it directly impacts the corporate image.
We're not only talking about written communication, but spoken too. Speaking with someone mediocre isn't the same as making a good impression, driven by good pronunciation, emphasis, and vocal modulation.
4. Digital basics
Just as a company has things like computers, counters, warehouses, and other physical resources, a company with a digital storefront also has basic elements: what we call baseline content.
You need a website. Don't expect it to get a lot of traffic; all you need is for it to be the right visit to be able to close a transaction. We tend to call the simplest sites a portfolio website, which is basically taking one of your flyers or pitch sheets into the digital realm. Showing your logo, a few photos, talking about you and your company, your history, who you serve, and how big you are are some of the questions that need to be answered there.
Setting up a website tends to be a hectic moment where many decisions are made and everything is made to look nice. Once it's finished, its maintenance and cost are minimal. Simple hosting would cost around 10 euros a month, and a WordPress system to display your site, which is free and open source. There are simple templates where a professional brand identity design has already been done.
Many companies stop there and don't move on to the next step. You have to maintain relevance online. That means creating content on some of the available platforms. One of them can be your website. That is, a page you fully control. But it surely gets far less exposure than the major social networks. That's why we recommend: have a digital presence on social media. It doesn't have to be very expensive productions; you simply have to be honest, approachable, and consistent.
If you want to connect this foundation with a broader strategy, you can lean on our marketing plan and the social media plan so that the entire brand identity pushes in the same direction.
Checklist for a brand identity project
Before delivering an identity project, review:
- A clear brand guide (logo, colors, typography, correct and incorrect uses)
- An initial library of photographs and videos of the company, products, and team
- Basic templates (presentations, documents, social media pieces)
- A defined tone and communication guidelines for the team
- An updated website with the new identity and key minimum content
- Social media profiles aligned visually and verbally with the brand
Frequently asked questions about brand identity services
How is brand identity different from a logo?
The logo is just one of the brand's visual elements. Brand identity includes colors, typography, tone of voice, graphic resources, photography, website, social media, and everything that builds the overall perception the public has of the company.
How long does a typical brand identity project take?
It depends on the scope. A basic project can take a few weeks; if it includes research, naming, website, and content, it can stretch over several months. It's important to define phases and deliverables from the start.
How can I package this service as a freelancer or agency?
You can offer it as a branding package that includes a brand guide, visual resources, social media adaptations, and a basic website. From there, you can add recurring content and campaign services.
How often should a brand's identity be reviewed?
You don't need to do a full rebrand frequently, but it is worth reviewing the consistency of the identity at least once a year and adjusting it when the business changes its positioning, target audience, or product range.
Brand identity, yes—but as a strategic service
Offering brand identity development as a service lets you support your clients in one of the most strategic aspects of their business: how they present themselves to the world. A coherent, well-crafted identity makes all subsequent marketing, sales, and communication efforts easier.
Integrate this kind of project into a broader vision, connecting it with the marketing plan, the social media plan, and ongoing content creation. That way, the identity will stop being just "a nice logo" and become a living system that drives the brand's growth.