How to brand your digital stationery business
Have you created a digital planner, listed it for sale, and then struggled to make sales? The recipe for a best-selling digital planner has lots of ingredients, and one of those is branding! This is one ingredient that we don't talk about very often, but creating an aesthetically pleasing planner is one of the best ways to draw potential customers into your shop listings. The first thing your target audience is going to notice is the cover of your planner – and that's all about your design, colors, and fonts.
So how can you brand your digital stationery business in a way that attracts your audience? There are a few steps we can take to make stunning planners that your audience won't want to pass up. Let's break down the process of branding your collection together...
Identify your niche
Wait, what's a niche? It's a specific group of people you're targeting within your industry. Your niche should be at the intersection of three things: your passions and interests, the problem you solve, and the services you offer. This ensures that you enjoy the work you do while still working in a profitable niche.
As an example, let's say that I am passionate about all things organization and productivity. I see a problem in the world of small business owners, they aren't organized enough and are losing out on time and money-making opportunities. I sell digital planners, so I know that my products can help small business owners save time and increase revenue. Therefore, I can niche down and specifically market my planners to entrepreneurs!
Different kinds of designs appeal to different people. So first things first, we need to figure out what is going to appeal to your audience the most.
There are a few questions you can ask yourself to start building an ideal client avatar that you can use to shape your branding:
What is the age and gender of the audience I'm targeting?
What is the biggest issue they're trying to solve with a planner?
What are potential customers looking for in a digital planner?
If my ideal client was a Pinterest board, what would it look like?
Not only is this a fun exercise, but it will help you to start thinking like a customer and decide what kinds of designs are going to convert more into sales.
Niching also helps narrow down all the branding choices you'll need to make. If you're marketing to a feminine audience, then you know that a black, red, and orange color palette isn't going to resonate as well as one with softer, more neutral tones.
When you niche down, you'll have fewer competitors to worry about. Now, you can look at how others in your industry and branding themselves and what you can do to stand out as different while attracting a certain group of people. From our experience, a successful stationery business niches down as soon as possible and starts selling more products!
If you'd like to read more about the benefits of niching down and how to choose a niche, read the blog post linked here.
Pick your colors
Brand colors are at the center of your branding (right next to your logo, but we're not really talking about that in this blog post). Colors can completely change the look and feel of a product. Let's take a look at a few of our products as an example. We've designed and sold all these planners, but they all look slightly different since we're trying to attract different kinds of women with our designs. So what can we learn from the color choices here?
Our color palette is consistent throughout our various types of planners, which helps us to create a cohesive, branded look that helps us show up as professionals
The colors we've chosen are typically thought of as "feminine", which is a good thing since we're trying to attract mothers and female business owners!
Since each design and planner uses slightly different colors and patterns, they are easy to distinguish from one another
All these same things can be true for your products when you choose a color palette and stick to it! We suggest selecting 5-7 colors that work well with each other and contain a few different kinds of colors:
Neutrals - these are shades that you can typically find in nature. They are usually lighter colors and are gender-neutral, which makes them the perfect addition to balance out a color palette or use as a text color on a darker background.
Darks & lights - a well-rounded color palette has some contrasting colors. We don't want various shades of the same color, instead, we want to mix things up a little! This is especially helpful when it comes time to create content. We want a high contrast between text color and background color while still sticking to your color palette.
Accent colors - there's no fun in every color palette looking the same! Your color choices are a way to show your personality and help you stand out. Each color has some psychology behind it – that's the reason why yellow is generally considered a happy color and blue is calming. Think about how you want your audience to feel when they interact with your brand, then look for a color that aligns with those feelings.
Final thoughts
The bottom line is that we want your color palette to excite you! A boring color palette isn't going to motivate you to create new products or promote your business. Exciting color choices will motivate you to keep creating and might even give you some more ideas!
How can we help you with stationery branding?
We could go on because there's really a lot involved in the branding process! You may find it best to hire a professional designer to help you bring your vision to life in a way that’s functional and guaranteed to resonate with your audience. Together we can create a custom digital planner, complete with your own stationery branding! Click here to learn more about how we can work together for custom design services.
Hiring a professional designer is expensive and can take a lot of time, especially when you're first starting your business and don't have much of either. That's why we've created Brand Stationery Packs! These are easy-to-use PDFs that give you six different color palette options and an in-depth guide on using them. You can learn more and shop our Brand Stationery Packs here!