Branding is important no matter what type of company you run, but not all branding is created equal. Depending on your intended market, certain styles, colors, and even fonts can elevate your brand above the competition.
This is no less true for an accounting firm or CPA. Especially since financial matters can be a touchy subject, you want to make sure that your brand design draws in potential clients and reassures them that you’re trustworthy.
Accounting branding doesn’t need to be complicated to get the right message across. With a few key elements, you can ensure that your branding is simple and effective.
Here are the basics of what you need choose to brand your accounting firm:
- Logo
- Color palette
- Fonts
- Images
- Tone
- Branded marketing materials
Let’s go through these key elements one by one.
Design Your Logo
A business logo is usually the very first encounter that a potential client has with a company. Your logo needs to accomplish a few vital objectives:
- Communicate the brand name clearly
- Make the type of business obvious
- Send a message about the brand personality
- Appeal to the target audience
Designing an accounting logo that effectively hits all of those marks sets the tone for the rest of your branding. Accounting logos often use money or numbers-related imagery (more on images in a minute), and typically stick to a combination mark style, using both an icon/symbol/graphic and the name of the company as a two-part logo.
Logos for financial matters are most effective when they are kept very simple and clear, so don’t add too many elements to your logo design.
Choose Your Colors
As you put your logo together, you may use it to set the color palette for your brand. Alternatively, you may choose your colors before you design the logo. It’s really up to you, but the main point is that you stick with consistent colors in order to ensure cohesive branding.
The psychology of color comes into play here. We tend to react in certain ways to certain colors. Leveraging this tendency in your branding can help you to appeal to your target audience, as well as use subliminal messaging.
For instance, money and finance-related branding often uses the color green, because that color is associated with money.On the other hand, banks and other financial institutions frequently use blue in their branding. Blue is seen as the most trustworthy, traditional color, as well as being calming.
For your accounting branding, blue and green are both trending in the market, and the psychology of color backs up their use.
Take the example of PWC’s brand logo here. It is easy to differentiate from others in the industry due to the unique combination of colors. Red is associated with excitement and energy while orange can bring out positive feelings.
So, you can always choose an accent or add a pop of color to your accounting logo memorable and appealing.
Pinpoint Your Fonts
Font choice can also be influenced by the psychology of fonts to enhance your branding and messaging. However, while there are fewer broad font types to choose from, there are thousands and thousands of font families that you could consider!
The easiest way to go about picking a primary and secondary font is to take a look at what message each type of font sends.
The basic types include serif, sans serif, script, and display. Typically, accounting and financial firms stick to the first two. Serif is a favorite, as it is viewed as the most traditional, trustworthy, reliable type of font.
Sans serif fonts are seen as modern, clean, and stable. Either type would be an excellent choice for an accounting firm.
As far as actually choosing your fonts, “Best of” lists like this one from Typewolf and tools like Google Fonts are excellent assistants for whittling down your choices.
Pick Your Images
It’s important to highlight your industry or niche with the imagery. Most accounting and CPA brand designs tend to keep it minimalist.
You will mostly come across simple wordmarks that draw attention to the company name with powerful typography or bold initials. You can opt for relevant images or symbols that instantly tell people about the accounting services or bookkeeping business.
Geometric shapes and abstract icons can work really well in such logos. Try to avoid adding a lot of different elements in the design as that could be confusing or overwhelming for the target audience. Regarding the images that you choose for your branding, you will need a few different types.
Regarding the images that you choose for your branding, you will need a few different types.
- Logo image — this will be a simple, stylized icon or symbol. Consider a symbol such as a graph, a checkmark, a ledger, dollar sign, a calculator or computer, or an abstract symbol that carries the personality of your brand.
- Marketing images — you will want to have some photos, stock or otherwise, that can be used in your marketing. Images of clients, accountants, computers, ledgers, and so on are all ideal. You may not use each image, but it’s a good idea to have a stock of the type of image you want to use in your branding, to make sure the branding stays on-message.
Clarify Your Tone
It’s very important to understand the personality behind the brand before you finalize your branding, and even more important to go back to that personality and ensure that it shines through in each piece of marketing. This includes your logo design.
One of the most telling pieces of information in clarifying your tone and personality is your intended target audience.
Know what sort of accounting you do, and who you will be working with. Does the brand have any specialties? Will you work only within a certain geographical area? Do you work with businesses or individuals?
All of these should inform the tone that shows throughout your branding. It’s especially important in crafting copy, as it ties closely in with the words you choose.
Your tone should also reflect the values and goals of the brand, the personal identity behind it, the commitments you make, and what your clients should expect.
Optimize Your Marketing Materials For Branding
The final aspect of creating excellent accounting firm branding is tying everything together into branded marketing materials.
This includes, but isn’t limited to, the following:
- Business cards
- Branded giveaway products, like pens, notepads, coffee cups, etc.
- Each page of your website
- Email blasts and marketing
- Follow-up emails
- Social media
- Newsletters
- Fliers
- Sites like Yelp and other local recommendation tools
To optimize your marketing materials, ensure that every aspect, from visual to written content, fits into the parameters set by your branding style guide.
Consistency is a key indicator of reliability, and any finance-related firm, such as a certified public accountant, will only grow and thrive if customers perceive them as reliable.
To boost your business and help it to grow, follow a consistent, effective branding outline that fits your brand personality and sends the right message.
Get Feedback
When it comes to creating a strong brand identity, it’s always a good idea to get feedback from your team members or test the elements before launching your platform.
Ask a small focus group what they think about the logo or brand colors. This can help you understand how people might perceive your brand message and respond to the visual elements.
You can also ask other employees or designers to give feedback on the icon, fonts and imagery. At the end, this could make it easier for you to build a loyal clientele and create familiarity within the audience.
In the accounting and finance industry, it’s important for businesses or accountants to maintain brand consistency.
With feedback, you can make improvements or changes to the elements in a short time and avoid any mistakes as well.
Leverage Digital Platforms
For brand awareness and recognition, you need to find out where your audience is located. It is essential to have a user-friendly and interactive website that allows people to learn more about your business or services.
The web page also plays an important role in branding. You can send out the right brand message with your logo or favicon, brand colors and typography on the website.
It’s also a good idea to create a blog where you can share helpful tips and industry insights. This allows people to become familiar with the tone of voice and interact with the company as well.
Today, most people look at companies or services on social media platforms before anything else. To establish credibility and attract the attention of a younger audience, you should set up social media pages too.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can make it easier for you to reach out to potential clients and offer instant support too. Make sure that the visuals and brand voice is consistent across different platforms.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this ultimate CPA and accounting guide to branding will help you create an effective strategy to promote your business and services.
Before you start working on, plan a brainstorming session and come up with clear brand guidelines and goals. This will make it easier for you to create visual brand elements such as the logo design or imagery that boost recognition and familiarity.
About the Author!
David Anderson is a business graduate with a marketing major. He specializes in communication design and has helped many brands achieve their goals in marketing communication. Now he writes for freelance clients on topics related to brand design, visual communication, and marketing.
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