7 Branding Tools To Get Your Brand Off the Ground

The right branding tools help you craft your brand’s look and feel, monitor your competition, and track brand performance and health.

A brand is a collection of perceptions associated with a business, organization, or individual. From storytelling to messaging to packaging, a brand’s actions influence perceptions and emotional connections. 

Essentially, your brand lives in other people’s minds, and you can’t fully control how they perceive it. But if you’re thoughtful and thorough in your branding efforts, you can shape a clear, positive identity that sets you apart from competitors. 

You can spend a lot of time and money perfecting your branding strategy—most big brands do—but if you’re just starting out and looking for the right branding tools, this guide is for you. 

What are branding tools?

Branding tools are the software platforms and guides you use to shape and communicate your brand values and personality and nurture brand recognition and awareness. These tools help you craft your brand’s look and feel, monitor your competition, and track brand performance and health. The brand guidelines you create keep stakeholders on the same page and ensure a consistent, unified brand presence. Together, these tools coordinate to build cohesion and customer trust.

Branding tools to help you get started 

• Market research: Statista and Voxpopme
• Logo creation: Adobe Illustrator
• Brand monitoring: Brandwatch
• Brand consistency: Brand guidelines
• Asset management: Frontify
• Correspondence: HubSpot email signature generator

Consider these top branding tools for building your brand foundation and sharing your brand story:

Market research: Statista and Voxpopme

To distinguish your brand from competitors, you must identify and monitor them. Fortunately, a simple Google search and some research with generative AI tools like Perplexity can go a long way to comparing your strengths to those of your competitors—particularly if you’re starting a small, local business or self-funding your venture. 

For a deeper dive into your category or consumer insights, consider Statista and Voxpopme:

Statista

Statista is a global data and business intelligence platform that provides access to statistics, reports, and insights on a wide range of topics. Depending on your account type, you can access thousands of industry and consumer trend reports, industry forecasts, demographic insights, and competitor analyses. Statista also provides high-quality infographics and projections you can use for investor pitch decks. The platform’s Research AI tool responds to complex questions with summaries of relevant statistics. 

• Features: Statistics across 170 industries in more than 150 countries and AI search function. 
• Pricing: Create a free account to access more than 220,000 statistics and a wealth of infographics; pay $200 monthly for more than a million stats and the most recent data; or pay $600 to $1,300 for additional features such as reports and forecasts.

Voxpopme

Voxpopme specializes in video feedback and qualitative market research, allowing you to capture authentic, unfiltered feedback. In contrast with text-based surveys, respondents record video responses so you can hear directly from your target audience. (The name “Voxpopme” comes from the Latin phrase vox populi, meaning “voice of the people.”)

• Features: Video feedback, capacity for custom questions, dashboards and reporting, and integrations with other market research tools.
• Pricing: Voxpopme operates on a custom pricing model, depending on the project scope, number of participants, and features required.

Logo creation: Adobe Illustrator 

Adobe Illustrator is the gold standard graphic design tool. Despite a learning curve, its nearly limitless customizations facilitate unique designs. 

Illustrator can help with nearly all your design tasks—from creating logos and web icons to branded merch, business cards, infographics, and other brand assets featuring your brand colors and typography. 

• Features: 1 TB of cloud storage, 24/7 tech support, thousands of fonts, more than two million free Adobe Stock photos, and 500 monthly generative AI credits. 
• Pricing: Subscriptions start at $38 per month per license. 
• Free alternative: Shopify’s free logo maker offers hundreds of templates to customize a unique logo, which you can add to business cards using Shopify’s free business card maker.

Brand monitoring: Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence and social listening platform that monitors conversations related to your business so you can track customer sentiment. Keep tabs on brand logo uses and online conversations influencing how people perceive your brand. 

• Features: Custom dashboards, industry insights, word clouds, and more. 
• Pricing: Request a free demo for a quote.
• Free alternative: Google Alerts can help you stay on top of brand mentions, but you won’t get any analysis. 

Brand consistency: Brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are the rules you develop to dictate how your brand looks and feels. They prescribe how internal and external partners use your brand logo, fonts, colors, illustrations, social media graphics and photography, and your brand’s voice and tone. 

Thorough brand guidelines serve as a reference point to guide employees and agency partners throughout your business. When a photographer needs to choose between a bright studio shoot or a naturally lit outdoor session, or a writer wants to know if they should be casual or formal, brand guidelines have the answers.

• Features: Basic brand guidelines cover logos, brand colors and fonts, and voice and tone. 
• Pricing: Pricing varies dramatically, starting in the low thousands and ranging as high as six figures or more. Developing guidelines with internal staff or independent contractors generally costs less than hiring a large, experienced branding agency. Other factors that affect price include scope: Do you want a basic package, or do you need to include guidance on packaging and product design? What about comprehensive spelling and grammar rules (and brand complexity)? Are you a regional or global brand? How many countries do you operate in? Do you have sub-brands?

Asset management: Frontify

Once you’ve developed assets that adhere to your strict brand guidelines, you need to manage them. Frontify is a digital asset management (DAM) system designed to keep brand files organized and accessible. 

• Features: Customization tools, collaborative workflows, template creation, drag-and-drop interface, user-friendly asset libraries, and integrations with creative tools such as Figma. 
• Pricing: Schedule a demo with Frontify for a quote.
• Free alternative: Store up to 15 GB of content, visual assets, pitch decks, videos, and more on Google Drive. 

Correspondence: HubSpot email signature generator

Ending emails with a branded signature reinforces your brand identity with every company email. HubSpot’s free email signature generator can help you design and share a signature with your team. It may seem like a small detail, but professional cohesion can help foster a positive brand reputation.

• Features: Signature templates can include contact information, web and social media links, custom color palettes, logos, and headshots. 
• Pricing: Free.

Branding tools FAQ

What are the 4 Cs of branding?

The four Cs of branding are:

Consumer or customer (What are consumers looking for?)

1. Category (What are your competitors doing?)

2. Company (What’s special about your company?)

3. Culture (What’s happening in culture?)

Considering these elements can help you home in on a brand identity.

What are branding tools?

Branding tools are the software platforms and guides you use to build and communicate your brand’s values and personality. They help ensure you share a well-developed point of view consistently.

Why do companies use branding tools?

Companies use branding tools to focus their efforts and consistently communicate the most important elements—brand values, personality, mission, and value proposition.