The Importance of Branding on Envato Market

Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/the-importance-of-branding-on-envato-market/

What is Branding?


Effective branding is more than just having a great logo. It’s a way to convey your personal or company personality, values, strategy, and what customers can expect from you. In essence, branding can simply be defined as:

"..a name, term, design, symbol or other feature that distinguishes one seller's product from those of others." (Wikipedia)

Brand Quote

Why is Branding Important on Envato Market?

With 50,000 (and counting) authors already on Envato Market, it's imperative that your presence (profile) and content (items) on Envato Market stand out from the competition in order to attract more customers and offer something others cannot offer. The benefits of branding include:
  • Envato Market customers will remember you and will be more likely to find and use your work in the future.
  • Will represent and portray you as a professional and experienced creator resulting in greater reputation and customer trust.
  • Opportunity to show and re-inforce your quality and value.
  • Will help differentiate you from everyone else.
  • Customers are more likely to become loyal to you and your brand.
  • It's a variable you can control yourself and is relatively quick and cheap to execute.
  • Creates an emotional attachment to your work (and future item releases) that may help influence future purchases.

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Where to Start?

But how do you begin to define your own brand to make you and and your items stand out from such a large crowd? It all begins by asking yourself some key questions:
  • What are my overall goals and mission?
  • What are my benefits over my competitors?
  • What do my customers already like about me and your items?
  • What qualities do I want customers to recognize in my services and items?
As you begin to think about those kind of questions you can start to get a better idea of who you are and how you want to be perceived. This, is the foundation of your branding strategy.

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Visual Branding

Customer experience on Envato Market is obviously very visual (yes, even on AudioJungle!). This is because all content, whether it's accessed via the Web, mobile, or tablet devices, is predominantly accessed and absorbed visually by users. Users are attracted to visual elements such as color, shape, typography and words you use to name your content. Customers can also very quickly form an opinion (whether right or wrong) about you and your products by how visually appealing and well designed your brand is.

If you’re serious about competitive advantage, it’s crucial that you branding is as high a quality as possible. This may mean getting someone on your team to focus entirely on your brand, or seeking external help in the form of hiring someone to help you with your Envato Market brand. Either way, think beyond creating something that’s merely appealing to your personal taste and preference and instead, create what captures your character and what will appeal to your audience

Brand Quote

Tips for Envato Market Authors

Although there's no magical formula to perfecting branding, here are some tips that may help you as an Envato Market author as you consider your own brand development:
  • Consistency is key! Many, if not all, of the best brands in the world are consistent. Consistent tone, consistent messaging, consistent visually and emotionally.This helps increase recognition. Think about branding around the world from companies such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, and McDonalds etc... When their brands are seen, they are immediately recognized. Be sure to not only have a consistent visual identity, but use that same identity everywhere! So not only on Envato Market, but on your own websites, business cards, via social media channels and everywhere else!
  • Research all the Envato Market homepages and search result pages. What branding works? What stands out to you and is easily recognizable? Chances are, if you think it stands out, most of the other customers will think so too.
  • I'm a great coder or musician, visuals don't matter, right? Wrong! Customers often associate high quality visuals with trust and professionalism. If an author can be bothered to create/add highly effective visual branding for example, it shows that they care about their products, and the experience they want to provide their customers. Buyers often want to be associated with what they buy because of the way certain things look. Provide a great experience with as high a standard as possible for your potential (and existing/returning) customers.

Branding Examples on Envato Market

Here are just a few different examples that highlight either effective or unique branding across Envato Market. You may be able to find even more (or better!) examples yourself, and in which case, we'd love you to post them to the comments in this thread as you discover them! It's important however to study such examples as a means of learning and applying what you learn to create something entirely different (as opposed to stealing or copying ideas).

ProgressionStudios

Consistency is key! ProgressionStudios have a unique logo and are very consistent about the way they brand their item thumbnails and item preview images:

ProgressionStudios

ProgressionStudios

ProgressionStudios

Net-Labs

Again, even something as simple as visual consistency within item thumbnails can help with branding, as demonstrated here by ThemeForest author Net-Labs:

Crusader12

What I love about Crusader12's unique branding is his consistent use of animal imagery. Not only do his circular-shaped item thumbnails appear consistent with various implementations of animals, but item pages are branded to to re-inforce the brand messaging:

KennyWilliams

GraphicRiver and ThemeForest author KennyWilliams uses clean and minimal branding to provide a distinctive and compelling aesthetic that imbues professionalism: Also notice the consistency in typography both in item thumbnails and image previews and the interchanging use of color with the contrasting hues of dark gray and warm yellow.

ThemeWoodmen

Look at how fun and playful this branding is by ThemeWoodmen. Both the account name and imagery is playful and brings a smile to the user's face: The "woodmen" identity is continued through the clever icon thumbnails depicting chopped tree trunks.

Alumo

Visual branding is also very useful for musicians and producers wanting to stand out from the crowd. Here we have AudioJungle author Alumo using rustic turquoise imagery to convey a friendly and inviting brand. Once again, note the continuation and consistency in the use of color and typography:

Branding Resources

For more detailed help with how to get started with branding yourself or your company, please consider the articles and resources below from all around the Envato network:

Show us Your Favorite Branding on Envato Market

We'd love to see and hear about your favorite branding on Envato Market! Post images of high quality branding that you've stumbled across that you love. Likewise, consider sharing how you approach branding, and also use this opportunity get help from fellow community members on how you might brand your profile, portfolio, and item pages!

16 Likes

This is a useful post :+1: and I’m glad that you also included some branding resources (I’ve just finished reading some of the articles).

I’ve always liked how Laborator and pixelgrade named their themes, how ThemeGoods or InspiryThemes designed their item thumbnails and the list can continue.

What about a small contest, awarding some of the authors that focus on branding? This way, there’s a big chance of increasing the branding among Envato authors. Maybe something similar to Forum Superstar, awarded monthly, voted by the community, with a brand new badge…

1 Like

Not a bad idea, @abusinesstheme, thanks for the suggestion! I think brand consideration is pretty essential for authors though, I hope authors are motivated to consider it without the need for a contest as it can create lots of immediate benefits and opportunities that become long-lasting.

Great examples by the way! Here are some images from the authors you referenced as it’s always good to see them all in one place. :thumbsup:

###Anyone else got any great examples of Envato Market author branding, either your own, or from other authors? Share them below! :star:

1 Like

@scottwills
Any chance of moving the “Inline Preview Image” and the “Thumbnail” out of the form that requires a review when editing/updating an item?

I would love to update these two images for all of my items, but that puts them all back in the review queue, making more work for the reviewers and longer wait times for the image updates.

2 Likes

Wow thanks for all the tips! It’s a really interesting read and helped me spot in a second the flaws in my own choices :smile:

1 Like

Hi @Luminary! I’m not part of the team responsible for that unfortunately so take this with a pinch of salt: I’ve not heard anything about that changing anytime soon. For the record though, the reason that is obviously done is so nothing contentious or misleading gets added/posted - it’s a just a nice check the review team take care of for consistency on the site and for buyers. The good news however is that whenever you submit those kind of small updates, they’re typically fast-tracked (that’s why it shows as a 0 or 1 day turnaround here). In summary: Probably much bigger fish to fry amongst all the other tweaks and new features being worked on. :fish:

Anyway, before we both get flagged for off-topic, back to the branding… :slight_smile:

Thanks for the tips, Scott! Great post.

Off-topic? Us?? Never!

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Hi @abusinesstheme, we are really glad that you like our Branding :smile:

Have you seen our Periodic table on our Portfolio

(view large version)

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Awesome post on importance of burning your name into the mind of a customers!

Little late to this, but this is a fantastic, in-depth post: need more stuff like this! Thanks Scott!

Especially enjoyed the branding resources at the end for further reading. Great addition. I also recently worked through this guide which may also make a good addition to the list. While it might not be Envato-specific, I think there’s a lot there that crosses over quite well!

Either way, will be keeping a closer eye on these posts in the future.

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