40+ Essential Tools for Branding and Marketing
Establishing a strong, recognisable brand is crucial for any business looking to stand out in a crowded marketplace. But with so many potential tools and strategies, where should you start? This comprehensive guide explores the must-have tools for branding to help convey what your company represents and attract your ideal audience.
Defining Your Brand Strategy
Before diving into design and assets, laying out a strategic brand foundation is critical. This involves getting crystal clear on the following:
Understanding Your Target Customer
- Conduct market research to identify consumer demographics, psychographics, needs, pain points, and buying motivations within your organisation as specific as possible by creating buyer personas.
- Analyse competitors to find gaps or opportunities for customers better. Track brand awareness favorability metrics.
- Plan CX touchpoints across channels based on the customer journey. Map out how to delight customers.
Refining Your Brand Messaging
- Outline brand positioning compared to competitors. What makes you distinct? Better? Different?
- Define your value proposition through a tagline. How do you solve problems uniquely?
- Craft consistent messaging and tone across channels and touchpoints. Align with your personality.
Building Your Brand Guidelines
- Logos: Create a visually iconic and recognisable logo that represents your brand. Establish variations, spacing, sizing, and usage guidelines.
- Typography: Choose complementary fonts that reinforce your personality. Set visual hierarchy.
- Colour palette: Pick 2-4 branded colours that align with your style. Ensure proper contrast ratios.
- Image style: Show ideal image tone, filters, and compositions aligned to the brand.
- Voice & tone: Set writing style guidelines with tone words, sentence structure, point-of-view and best practices.
Why It Matters
Formalising your strategy and guidelines first gives creative efforts a North Star to orient towards. It ensures continuity internally across teams to better connect externally with customers.
Your brand strategy is the foundation for all branding efforts. Clearly define your target audience, brand mission, personality, positioning, and messaging upfront.”
Defining Your Brand Identity

Before diving into specific tools, let's review some branding basics. Your brand identity encompasses your company's personality, values, mission and unique selling proposition. Some key elements include:
Core Values and Personality
What specific values or personality traits define your organisation? Are you innovative? Friendly? Helpful? Determine 3-5 key characteristics.
Positioning Statements
Summarise what makes you distinct in 1-2 straightforward, memorable sentences focused on your target buyer.
Mission Statement
Explain your overarching goals and reason for existing in 3-4 concise sentences.
With these pillars defined, you can explore tools to convey this identity.
Creating Visual Brand Assets
Bringing your brand identity to life visually is what makes it tangible. While you can hire a design agency, there are also DIY tools to create professional brand assets.
Logo Design
Your logo is the cornerstone of your visual identity. It should communicate your personality quickly. Logo design tools on the market range from:
- Canva: User-friendly drag-and-drop templates to customise a logo with images, shapes, and fonts. Free basic package.
- Tailor Brands: LOGO generator with AI recommendations based on business name and industry. $15/month.
- Adobe Express: Logo maker with 70M+ icons, fonts, and colour combinations. Part of the free starter plan.
- Shopify Logo Maker: Simple app to combine symbols, imagery, and text. Free built-in tool for Shopify users.
Pro Tip: Create logo variations like horizontal, vertical, monochromatic, and favicon.
Graphic Design
Visuals should have a consistent look aligned with your brand style guide across the following:
Social Media:
- Profile images
- Headers
- Posts
- Story covers
Website:
- Hero images
- Icons
- Product photos
- Email banners
Sales collateral:
- One-pagers
- Presentations
- Flyers
Top DIY graphic tools include:
- Canva: Layouts and frames for every asset and visual content type. Photo editor. Font and brand colour tools. Photo library. Analytics.
- Adobe Express: Quick image resizing and editing. Design templates for web, social and ads. Importing brand colour logos. Integrates with Premier Pro.
- Figma: Free graphic design software for collaborative creation of marketing visuals. Prototype web or app screens.
- InVideo: Create customised video content quickly, like testimonials, brand storytelling, explainers and more, with ready-made templates.
“Consistent visual branding increases revenue by 23%. Use tools to align imagery, icons, filters, and logo placement to your guidelines.”
Packaging & Merchandise
Make sure your packaging captures attention on shelves while conveying product benefits. Merchandising is also helpful for trade shows or company swag. The top tools are:
- Canva Print: Custom print projects like clothing, mugs, banners, and packaging. Direct mail services.
- Printify: Print-on-demand drop shipping for merchandise, including mugs, hats, notebooks, and posters, with no minimum orders. Syncs with Etsy, Shopify
- Shutterfly: Premium full-service printing services for business cards, marketing materials, apparel, packaging and more. Get started guides.
Logo Design Platforms
Your logo is often the first touchpoint between prospects and your brand. An effective logo should:
- Visually communicate your personality
- Look sharp and professional
- Stand out amongst competitors
- Remain clear and recognisable at any size
Thankfully, there are many user-friendly design platforms to create logos without needing advanced graphic design expertise.
Top Logo Makers
Some top DIY logo makers include:
- Canva: Intuitive drag-and-drop editing and a massive fonts, icons, templates and stock images library. Free and paid plans are available.
- DesignHill: Gets logos designed by professional designers based on your brief. It is more affordable than hiring a solo designer.
- Looka is an AI-powered logo maker that provides multiple logo options based on your business name and preferences. Has free and paid tiers.
- LogoMaker: Easy tool with 10,000+ icons and images. Has a basic free plan.
When designing your logo, check that it looks good on websites, business cards, signage and more.
Brand Style Guidelines

Brand style guidelines, also called brand books, detail how your branding assets should be used across channels like websites, product packaging, ads and collateral. Including usage guidelines and visual examples on aspects like:
- Typography
- Colour palettes
- Image filters and editing
- File naming conventions
- Graphic elements
- Tone of voice
- Logo placement
Having documented guidelines maintains a consistent brand experience, even as more creators work with your assets.
Creating Your Guide
You don’t need design expertise to create a helpful style guide. Many platforms exist to format your guidelines in an easy-to-reference document.
Top picks include:
- Lucidpress
- Canva
- Guidelines
- Frontify (has free branded templates)
Asset Management Platforms
As your branding materials multiply, an asset management system helps store, organise, access and update files from one central interface.
Key Features
Solutions like Bynder or Brandfolder enable you to:
- Upload and preview fonts, logos, images and more.
- Search and browse assets.
- Control user permissions and access.
- Embed assets across web pages and apps.
- Receive notifications for reviewing/updating files.
- Gain insight into asset usage and performance.
For small teams, Google Drive or Dropbox may suffice. However, a dedicated digital asset management system can be invaluable for larger organisations or strict brand oversight.
Website Builders

Your website brings your brand to life digitally. An intuitive website builder makes it easy for anyone to create an on-brand site showcasing visuals, products, content and more.
Top website builders include:
- Squarespace: Gorgeous templates, superb hosting and analytics. Easy ecommerce integration.
- Wix: Robust free plan available. Freelancers can manage client websites easily.
- WordPress: Open-source CMS with thousands of plugins. Requires more web know-how.
- Webflow: A design-friendly builder where you can add interactions without coding.
- Weebly: Great for beginners with a straightforward editor and low learning curve.
Build a site that aligns with your brand identity and style guide. Update images, products and content regularly so visitors keep returning.
Email Marketing Platforms
Email marketing enables consistent engagement with contacts and followers. Tailor your emails to match your brand personality while offering valuable content.
Leading email service providers like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or ConvertKit help you:
- Design sleek, on-brand email templates
- Create pop-ups and landing pages
- Automate onboarding flows and segment contacts
- Track email analytics like open/click rates
- Integrate with ecommerce platforms and CRMs
- Ensure mobile responsiveness
- Follow anti-spam and compliance rules
Test different subject line content formats (text vs video) and send times to keep improving engagement.
Social Media Tools

Social platforms like Instagram and TikTok present prime opportunities to strengthen awareness and loyalty among current and potential fans.
Solutions to enhance your social presence include:
- Buffer: Schedule posts across networks and analyse engagement.
- Canva: Easily design sharp on-brand graphics and videos. Integrates with Buffer.
- Sprout Social: Collaboration, analytics, and automation in one robust platform.
- Hootsuite: Another popular social media management tool for teams. Offers bulk scheduling.
- Tailwind: Instagram scheduler for caption ideas, hashtags, and auto-posting.
The audit which platforms your audience favours and the types of content (inspirational quotes, behind-the-scenes footage, etc.) that perform best.
Design Collaboration Apps
When multiple team members create or edit visual branding assets, cloud-based design platforms enable smooth collaboration.
Top picks include:
- Figma
- Sketch
- InVision
- MURAL
- Miro
Central features include project management, version histories, design systems alignment, developer handoff, and robust connectivity with other apps. Some offer free plans.
Analytics Platforms
Website analytics provide invaluable context for visitors engaging with your pages and content.
Key metrics to monitor:
- Traffic volume: How many visitors land on your site in a given timeframe? Is it trending up or down?
- Bounce rate: What % leaves without visiting another page? High bounce rates indicate unattractive/confusing landing pages.
- Scroll depth: How far down pages do visitors scroll before leaving? More scroll depth signals they’re engaged.
- Conversion rates: What % complete key actions like downloading content or making a purchase? It can indicate how compelling your offerings are.
Free tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar surface these metrics in customised reports and heatmaps.
Mixpanel offers an in-depth understanding of your user base for a monthly fee, including retention cohort analysis across web and mobile.
Optimising Brand Consistency

Maintaining brand alignment across teams and external touchpoints prevents fragmentation, confusion and dilution. Consistent messaging and visuals drive familiarity to boost conversions.
Brand Guidelines Software
Centralise your branding rules, writing guidelines, colour codes, logos, and typography in a digital style guide rather than a static PDF for easy access. Options include:
- Frontify: All-in-one brand guidelines platform. Governance features. Permissions by team, job role and project. Analytics reporting.
- Dropbox Paper: Collaborative workspace to build customisable brand manuals with folders, editing capabilities, comment functions and integrations.
- Lucidpress: A brand templating toolbox for documents and slides. Includes a style checker for brand accuracy and formatting control. Add feedback and track changes.
- Brandfolder: Digital asset management for centralised access to approved brand assets and guidelines. Integrate for distribution within web apps.
“93% of inconsistent branding yields 23% lower revenue. Enforce guidelines digitally with templates, access permissions and analytics.”
Cohesive Messaging
Beyond visuals, ensure language and messaging align across marketing, sales and customer service teams. Create toolkits with approved:
- Positioning statements
- Taglines
- The tone of voice rules, e.g. sentence length, perspective
- Boilerplate descriptions
- Customer testimonials
- FAQ responses
Store in a content collaboration system like:
- Google Docs: Store messaging in public or private Google Docs. Add comments. Assign user access roles for permissions. Use Docs, Sheets, Slides.
- Confluence: Create an internal messaging wiki with templates, formatting guidance, commenting tools and permissions by group. Gain visibility on content utilisation.
- Airtable: A cloud-based database and spreadsheet tool for collaborative content and data entry. Set automation, track changes and link data across projects.
Align written and visual brand messaging across teams and touchpoints with digital toolkits governable by permissions.
Auditing Performance
Check if branding efforts meet guidelines and objectives via:
Brand tracking surveys: Measure awareness, consideration, favorability, and NPS over time.
Brand listening: Monitor your brand's sentiment, associations, and perceptual gaps on social media review sites.
Web analytics: Assess website metrics like traffic source conversions against goals.
Campaign reports: Review email clickthroughs, promotion sales figures, and ROI.
Focus groups: Gather first-hand qualitative feedback on brand sentiment from customers.
Fundamental analysis tools include:
- Google Analytics
- Tableau
- Qualtrics
- SurveyMonkey
- Social Searcher
- SurveySparrow
87% of consistent brands outperform the stock market by 106% over ten years. Monitor performance to identify gaps.
Monitoring Tools for Branding

You’ll want to keep tabs on what consumers and the media say regarding your company. Brand monitoring tools aggregate mentions of your brand, products, executives and other keywords across channels.
Popular options include:
- Google Alerts (free)
- Talkwalker Alerts (free plan)
- Mention
- Hootsuite
- Brand24
- Awario
Features often include sentiment analysis, influencer identification, and the ability to receive real-time notifications to respond promptly to buzz-worthy news or customer service complaints.
Conclusion
Strong brands don’t happen by accident—they require intention and consistency. Defining your identity and conveying what sets you apart amidst the noise is crucial. The platforms explored above help organisations of all sizes manage branding elements, create engaging assets and experiences, and monitor effectiveness so that premium brands become household names in their space. Don’t wait to invest in the tools needed to share what your exceptional business represents.