The thing with startup ideas is that they need to be ‘started’ to succeed. How many times have you thought of your dream venture but found yourself wondering where to start? It seems like a hustle, but it won’t sound much of a problem anymore if we lay it out in simple steps. We can summarize the steps in three components: Custom Logo Design, WordPress website, and Social Media.
No matter what idea you have in mind, whether you want a small business or a larger one, the basics boil down to these three. The sudden push towards digital advancement due to the pandemic has further emphasized the adequacy of online tools for starting a business.
Even the largest organizations like Google have entirely shifted to working from home for the time to come. This might be the best time in history to start the business that you had always wished for.
You only need three aspects covered to begin, and that is what you will learn today. In this article, we will discuss the steps to building a startup from scratch, using the three online components.
Kit Component 1: Custom Logo Design
Whenever you think of starting a business, the first thing after deciding on a product or service is the venture’s name. Next is the company logo design, and then comes the branding collateral.
All that may seem scattered with no connecting point to organize the brainstorming. Well, the solution is to start with the custom logo design. It may feel counter-intuitive to begin the branding journey backward, but it works. People think in abstract terms before they can come up with concrete elements.
As you will start thinking about your business’s nature, you will think about some elements that can relate to it. Maybe a color, a particular symbol, or some word that feels like it. Stay on that route and build ideas from there. What does the element look like when put together? What kind of name would suit it?
Now, you can create a list of names that can represent both your business and the custom logo design you are imagining. Your list does not have to be perfect. It is a rough draft of what you have in mind. Go haywire, pen everything down!
Then sit to yourself and look at these scribbles. Think about why you wrote down or sketched a certain word. Make connections and play with words to come up with a bunch of names. And right when you think it isn’t working, you will get what you are looking for!
Once you are sure about some names and have a rough idea of the logo design you want, you can take help from a logo design company that may further guide you. If you are stuck anywhere in this process, you can ask for name suggestions and design inspirations from them.
However, when you hire a design agency, do not just ask them to do whatever they want. Make sure to discuss the design you are looking for and the kind of business you are setting up. This may not only help the designer create an appropriate design for you, but it will also provide you satisfying results.
Make sure to discuss the target audience, purpose, and message that will be the core of your brand’s image.
Once the logo design is final, you must ask the agency to provide you the brand collateral inspired by the logo design and brand colors to ensure a unified look & feel.
With the logo design and branding collateral being finalized, you are almost done with the graphic designing part. There will be more, and it will be discussed in the latter part of the blog. Let’s move onto the second tool of the startup kit, the website.
Kit Component 2: WordPress Website
Now that you have a business name and a custom logo design along with the branding collateral, your next stop has to be the website. A business can exist but never be adequately visible to the target audience without a website.
As the website is the component provides credibility to your business and marks your online presence. You also get to generate more leads that convert into customers later. Also, without a website, you stay deprived of the various benefits of the organic business you can earn from SEO efforts.
Therefore, we strongly suggest you get your website developed as the first priority once you are done with the logo design.
And when it comes to website design for startups, WordPress is the one you should opt for, hands down.
We have plenty of reasons to suggest WordPress as your website’s software.
Firstly, WordPress is a robust Content Management System (CMS) that is powering 35% of all the websites on the internet.
It has multiple plugins to add all kinds of functionalities to your website as per your requirements.
A massive community of developers supports every function and keep updating the features more frequently than one can imagine.
Secondly, more than 40 big brands use WordPress for their websites, and this list includes a vast variety from the magical, Disney, and the techie, Microsoft News.
There are many other benefits of choosing WordPress. Here are some of those to help you make the decision;
1. Easy to Manage CMS
The most crucial factor that makes the WordPress website a priority for millions of businesses is its easy-to-use interface. It is a Content Management System pretty much like a social media platform. Once your website is built completely, you can take over from there and manage it without any expert help.
You only have to make sure you hire an experienced website design company, so they create an SEO friendly and efficient website for you.
2. Free Plugins and Themes for Pretty Much Everything
Every business website has its particular requirements. In any other software, these added functionalities and aesthetics may cost you additional bucks. With WordPress, that’s not the case.
WordPress has 54,000+ plugins that are free of cost. These plugins provide endless functionalities. From security to appearance, there are plugins for each and everything.
Yoast SEO is one great example of such plugins. It assists with the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your content from multiple aspects.
WordPress plugins help in building the exact customized website that you can dream of. There are no limitations except that some plugins are paid, but with over fifty thousand free options, you will not have to buy any.
WordPress also has a massive variety of free themes to cater to every type of business and blog. Whether you have a simple business site or e-commerce store, there are more than 5,000 free themes in WordPress to cater to your needs. You can also change your website’s theme at any point. Changing the theme does not cause any harm to the content as well.
3. Lower Cost of Development and Maintenance
A website should not cost you an arm and a leg. Magento and other such software are extremely expensive, time-taking, and impossible to maintain without an expert. From website development to maintenance, everything costs loads of money.
Contrastingly, WordPress will cost you many times lesser than others and nearly for nothing for maintenance. And it works great for simple and eCommerce websites equally well.
Websites are the central hub for your business’ online presence that adds to your credibility. You can not entirely benefit from your company and become visible to potential customers without an SEO optimized website. WordPress is the best choice you can go for if you want higher results with lesser effort.
Kit Component 3: Social Media
After website and logo design comes social media. We have already understood and witnessed that any business without an online presence does not really exist. One aspect of the online presence was having a central hub for the customers to refer to in the form of a website. The other aspect of your brand’s online presence is the social one.
If you have a creative logo design and a professional website without a social spirit, your brand will not be able to build a long-term relationship with the customers.
Brands have to engage with their target audience through social media channels where they are actively available. As a new business, you must explore and understand your target audience and the platforms they prefer.
You can gain this understanding by looking at your competitors or hiring a professional digital marketing agency specializing in social media marketing. They would not only conduct the analysis for you but also provide you with smart strategies to up your social media game.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, you need to acknowledge that we are not living in an age where the TV was the source of information. If you are a new entrant in the market, you must mark your presence online as strongly as possible.
Nowadays, even the smallest of businesses are available on social media platforms.
According to recent stats, Facebook has 2.4 billion active monthly users. That means you get to reach a massive audience with people from all demographics. It becomes incredibly easy to find your target audience and engage with them if you follow the right digital strategies from the beginning.
Instagram is another popular social media app where 72% of the users make their buying decisions. With more than 1 billion users on Instagram, you surely wouldn’t want to miss this one too. It is another opportunity to influence your customers’ choices by becoming visible to them at the right time.
There are many other social media platforms, including Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, and Pinterest. However, starting from Facebook and Instagram must suffice as a beginning for most of the ventures.
Conclusion
Many aspiring entrepreneurs struggle with the starting point of their ventures. They face a hard time deciding where and how they must begin. In this article, we have mapped out the apparently overwhelming journey with simple directions. A startup’s execution can be divided into three components: Custom logo design, WordPress Website, and Social Media presence.
While reading the article, you must have realized that building your own venture can be relatively easy once you know where to start. If you still find it difficult, you can always hire a creative digital marketing agency for website, logo, or social media services to professionally kickstart your business.
A note of advice for all aspiring entrepreneurs at the end; “Start small, start simple; no matter how you do, just start anyway and do it today.”
Sameea Jamal is a Senior Executive – Digital Marketing at ACE Digitals Pvt. Ltd, who finds her passion for topics like Custom Logo Design, Digital Marketing, and SEO. She has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over three years, with LogoGrand being her primary focus lately. You can reach her at sameea.jamal@gmail.com or find her on Linkedin.
Many people take the logo quite lightly and forget about the long-term impact it has over branding.