First impressions are crucial. And in an age
that’s more technically savvy and visually-minded
than ever before, first impressions can make or
break a budding new business.
People begin to form opinions about your
business within the first few seconds of
interaction, whether they’re looking at your
business card, visiting your website or passing by
your storefront. It’s the reason we can
differentiate between a mom-and-pop shop and a
restaurant chain -- one has a pieced-together
visual identity and the other has a professional,
streamlined brand.
Related: 4 Ways to Make Yourself Memorable
and Leave Great Impressions
The good news? Those first impressions, whether
they’re accurate or off-base, are entirely up to
you. The even better news? These four tactics
will make your new business appear much more
legitimate and won’t crush your startup budget in
the process.
1. Create a streamlined visual brand.
First impressions are 94percent design-related,
so it should come as no surprise that your visual
brand plays a large role in how others perceive
the quality of your business. The key to a
streamlined visual brand is consistency. You may
not have the funds to work with a professional
graphic designer when you’re just starting out,
but by maintaining consistency with your logo,
fonts and colors, you’ll appear a thousand times
more professional at first glance.
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For your logo, keep it simple, scalable and
legible. Develop one logo option for horizontal
formats and one square variation (like an icon)
to give yourself versatility, and use them over
and over again.
For your fonts, take the less-is-more approach.
The best way to make your brand appear
unprofessional and scattered at first glance is to
use a hodge-podge of mismatched fonts. So
instead, choose one font for headers and one for
body text across all of your business’s print and
web-based material.
The same goes for your brand’s color palette.
Choose two to three primary brand colors, and
stick to them time and time again. Not only will a
streamlined brand increase your business’s
professionalism, but it will increase memorability
and recognizability among your new audience.
2. Use high-quality images.
Scroll through LinkedIn for all of one minute, and
tell me you don’t take the people with
professionally-taken headshots a little more
seriously than those who cropped
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