Any new business owner knows that starting and building a brand is an investment of time and resources. If you know the importance of a strong and professional brand, but aren’t yet an established business with ideal funding for professional branding, creating a brand might be intimidating. Good news: You can build a professional brand on a budget and feel confident sharing it with your audiences. Today, I’m sharing how to do just that.

Start with a Brand Strategy

Creating a plan for your brand is essential to its success. You can certainly hire expert brand strategists to whip your branding into shape. But you can actually develop a brand strategy for free as a new business. You just need to allocate time to do it and find the right resources.

Our free guide, The Plan Behind Your Brand, takes you through the crucial steps to strategizing a brand. From defining your vision and voice to planning your visuals and creating an action plan, you’ll get the tools you need to create a professional brand on a budget.

Purchase a Semi-Custom Branding Kit

Believe it or not, you can get a professionally-designed brand without hiring a graphic designer to create it. Skip trying to sketch something that looks good or picking random designs that might not align with your business. Instead, use premade designs made for businesses just like yours.

With our semi-custom branding kits, growing businesses get a primary logo and alternate logo designs, custom color palettes, a brand board, and professional Canva templates to build a cohesive marketing plan. 

Use Free Font Options

As you dream up your growing business’ branding and imagine what fonts will best represent your brand, it may be disheartening to learn that some of those beautiful font options come with a cost. Fortunately, you can use various free font resources to find the perfect fonts for your business but without a price tag.

Google Fonts is one of my favorite free sources for high-quality, professional fonts that will not cost you a dime. If you need font inspiration, take a peek at our post on Google Font Pairings for some of my favorite free combinations.

Try Free Tools Like Canva 

You might have noticed that some design software out there is rather expensive. Canva is a fantastic tool for business owners who want to create professional designs and customize impressive visuals. And that’s without having to spend precious budget dollars.

We created our Ultimate Canva Starter Kit to help business owners create beautiful designs in Canva without having to sort through countless templates and designs. The kit comes with templates for social media, PDFs, business marketing activities, and 30 days of content prompts to help you get started. 

Take Advantage of Free High-Quality Stock Photo Sites

Don’t think that quality photos have to come with a price tag. There are a lot of sites that offer a fantastic selection of stock images for free. Free stock photo sites all have different licensing arrangements and requirements. Just be sure you’re clear on how you’re allowed to use their images.

A few of my favorites are:

• Unsplash
• Pexels
• Canva (I recommend Canva Pro for access to a huge library of stock photos, videos, graphics, and even audio)

Create a Brand Guideline for Consistency  

Consistency is key to building your brand and its loyal following. And, marketing your business with consistent branding isn’t an activity that costs anything. Once you’ve created a brand you love, using it correctly throughout your business is one of the most cost-effective ways you can gain recognition, trust, and the interest of potential customers. The key is creating a brand guideline to help you do so.

Your brand guidelines document houses all of your brand values in one place. That way, you, your employees, and any vendors that you work with will have a clear-cut outline of how materials for your business should look. 

Our easy-to-edit Brand Guidelines Template has helpful content prompts for designing the business of your dreams. Designed for use in Canva, the 20-page customizable template will be your central reference point for all aspects of your branding.

Use Organization Tools to Streamline Your Branding Activities

Staying organized will help you to make the most of your resources, plan your marketing activities, and keep your branding files in one place. Tools like Google Drive and Asana have free options that let you store your documents, manage your task calendar, and even share tasks with your team so that you don’t waste time or money where you don’t need to.

The Sonrisa Digital Etsy shop is full of Canva templates and helpful planners to make branding and marketing simple and achievable for growing businesses on a budget. Stop by to see what valuable resources are waiting for you.