The 10 Best Branding Tools For Startups

If you want to know what people really think about your brand, you can use Attest to get the answers.

It’s a consumer research platform where you can create surveys and ask your target audience questions related to your brand and products. Attest will then help you connect with the said audience and collect their answers and data. Based on this data, you can tweak your brand strategies to match your customers' needs and wants. This will help you improve your brand’s identity and customer relations.

This branding tool can help in many other ways:

• It allows brand tracking so you can check your brand’s health and performance and find areas of improvement.
• You can get to know your consumers better by creating detailed profiles of your target audience. This will help you make your brand more appealing to the right audience.
• You don't have to guess if your ads, packaging, or logos will work. You can just test them with real people on Attest and then improve based on their feedback.
• It also provides a thorough market analysis to help you understand your competitors and new markets you might want to explore. This helps you plan your branding strategy and find the right place for your brand.

Attest is a good branding tool through which you can learn more about your customers and keep an eye on your brand. But there are a few things it might not be able to do that you should know about:

One of the most essential parts of managing a brand is handling brand mentions online & engaging with your customers. Brandwatch is a branding tool that can strengthen your brand identity and monitor your interactions without much hassle.

It’s a platform that can help you track your brand mentions across many platforms so you can know what others are saying about your brand. This will help you address any potential threat or false claim quickly. You can also analyse competitors, find influencers you can collaborate with, learn about the latest industry trends, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns through this branding tool.

With Brandwatch,

• You can optimise your brand messaging and content to better resonate with your target audience.
• The Brandwatch Consumer Research tool gives you access to consumer insights that can help you better understand your customers' wants, needs, and perceptions of your brand.
• You can also use Brandwatch to measure the impact of your marketing strategies and brand campaigns and make data-driven adjustments to improve their effectiveness.

Brandwatch is a powerful tool for branding, but it has some limitations you should be aware of. There could be restrictions on the data you can access through the Brandwatch API, and integration limits can make connecting the platform with other tools challenging. There are also rate limits on the number of API calls you can make within a given time period.

Canva could be your go-to branding tool if you want to create eye-catching graphics for your brand but don't have a background in design. There are many customisable templates available on Canva, both free and paid, for all your branding needs.

Whether you want to make a brand logo, a website, or a video, there are designs and layouts for everything. You can change a few things here and there to easily get a professional-looking design for your brand.

Not just that Canva can also help your brand in many other ways:

• You can set up a brand kit with your brand's colours, fonts, and logos. This will help you maintain brand consistency across all your graphics and designs.
• You can take inspiration from hundreds of Canva templates as well, which can be a great starting point. However, make sure you don’t directly copy the templates and instead use your brand kit to customise the design.
• You can also use the magical resize feature to easily resize your designs for different platforms without having to start over each time, ensuring consistency in size and layout.
• Canva even offers graphic design tips specifically for non-designers. These tips cover aspects like font pairing, alignment, and white space, which can help improve overall design quality.
• There are many tips on design, social media marketing, and branding too, which can help businesses of all sizes improve their marketing strategies.

Although Canva is a user-friendly design tool, it lacks advanced features found in professional software and has limited font options. So, if you want to create a complex design, Canva might not be the best choice. Also, if you’re using the free version, you won’t have access to many features and templates.

If you're struggling to manage your brand and want to store and organise all your brand assets in one place, Frontify could be the ideal tool for you.

It's a brand management platform that gives you all kinds of tools to easily organise, share, and manage your assets, such as logos, templates, guides, etc. You can also create brand guidelines through Frontify and make sure that everyone is on the same page about your brand.

With the help of its branding tools,

• You can create a guide to document your brand's rules and best practices. This will ensure that everyone uses the brand consistently.
• You can share your brand assets with employees and partners and control who can access what, so the right people always have the latest files.
• Teams can also provide feedback and approve assets together, even if they’re in different locations.
• You can also easily build templates for common marketing materials. This makes creating new assets that match your brand quick and easy.
• You can manage multiple brands in one place as well. Frontify allows you to organise assets for each brand separately while still keeping everything centralised.

While Frontify is a useful brand management platform, it may have some limitations when it comes to customisation options, template functionality, and practicality for very small or very large businesses.

Meltwater is for those who want an effective way to monitor their brand’s online presence and get useful insights so they can make better brand strategies. It provides tools to help you track your brand’s media coverage and online presence.

All you have to do is just sign up for Meltwater and connect your brand's social media accounts and relevant online platforms. Once connected, Meltwater will start tracking and monitoring mentions of your brand name, allowing you to get insights about public sentiment, media exposure, and potential reach.

Other than this,

• You can get insights into how your brand compares to competitors.
• You can also measure brand awareness by using surveys, website data, social listening and search volume analysis.
• Meltwater also offers many other features like social media management, influencer marketing, media relations, data and API integrations, etc.

Meltwater is a useful tool for branding, but there are a few things about it that might not be so helpful:

It can't keep data for a really long time, so if you want to look back at old information, it might not be there. There are limited customisation abilities and sometimes you might see errors, which can be frustrating when you're trying to use it.

Even though Meltwater offers support 24/7, some users say it's hard to get help quickly when they need it.

Adobe Creative Cloud is for businesses that want to make their brand look visually appealing and stand out. It has a collection of all the softwares you'd need to design and create visual brand assets like logos, social media graphics, videos, etc. With branding tools like Photoshop, Premier Pro, Illustrator, etc, you can make professional-looking designs that will improve your overall brand identity.

• Creative Cloud lets you share ideas and projects easily, even if you're not in the same place.
• With Creative Cloud, you can make professional-looking marketing materials that grab people's attention and make your brand memorable.
• The tools help you create brand guidelines and store things like logos and colour palettes. This way, everything you create looks polished and perfectly reflects your brand.
• The Adobe Creative Cloud platform has a lot of great design tools, but there are some noticeable limitations.

You won’t have much space to store your files in the "cloud." You’ll have to keep deleting things or moving them somewhere else if you need more room. If you’re new to designing, using these branding and designing tools could be overwhelming. Also, the apps on your computer need to check in with the internet every once in a while to keep working. If you don't go online, they might stop working.

If you're looking for a unique and creative name for your brand, BrandBucket is the perfect branding tool for you. It's a platform where you can browse and purchase brand names based on your given keyword. You can even choose the style of the name and the industry you want it to cater to.

By using BrandBucket:

• You can get high-quality, unique business names that are hand-picked by experts.
• You’ll be able to save a lot of time which could go into brainstorming brand names.
• You can also check availability of the names you like right then and there on the same platform and find any new trending names that you didn’t think of earlier.

While BrandBucket is a convenient branding tool, there are a few things to keep in mind. The number of names they offer is limited, and the way they group names might not always match your taste. You also can't change the names to make them more personalised, and the prices can vary a lot. So, while BrandBucket is a good tool for branding, it might not have the perfect name for everyone's brand or budget.

As important as creating a brand logo is, it's just as difficult. You want a logo that stands out from the crowd, is creative and eye-catching, but also reflects your brand. This is where Looka can help you. It's an AI-powered branding tool that simplifies the whole logo creation process and creates unique, customisable logos and identities for your brand.

Just provide the AI with your brand’s name, slogan, and what it represents, and the AI will create suitable logos for you in various templates and styles.

• You can create as many logo options as you want until you find the perfect one.
• After you pick your logo, Looka's Brand Kit uses your logo, colours, and fonts to create other brand assets like business cards, social media posts, and emails all in one place.
• Over 300 templates are made for different types of businesses. The easy Brand Kit editor allows you to change the design of things like business cards, social media profiles, and emails.

While Looka's AI-powered logo design and branding tools are convenient and affordable, there are still some limitations to consider.

You’ll have limited options to customise your logo after purchase, and Looka has a very strict 7-day refund policy. The selection of symbols and icons to include in your logo is somewhat limited compared to a fully custom design, and there's a risk that the final logo may not be as unique or original as one created by a human designer.

Looka also doesn't offer a free version, so you have to pay for their basic package to download your logo files.

Finding skilled professionals to make your creative vision a reality is not easy. Whether you need a logo, website, or any other design work, it can be challenging to find the right person for the job. That's where this branding tool- 99Designs can help you.

It's a platform that connects you with talented designers from all over the world who can bring your ideas to life. These designers compete with each other to help you create your brand assets, and then you can pick the best one.

You also get to manage the entire design process by providing feedback and guidance to the designers. You can even use polls to get public feedback on design concepts and inspiration galleries to spark ideas.

Other than that,

• You can choose from a variety of design services like logos, websites, business cards, social media graphics, etc, to build your brand's identity.
• An account manager will be assigned to you to guide you through the process, provide tips and inspiration, and give you a contest review within 24 hours of starting.
• You can also browse through inspiration galleries to spark ideas and get a sense of the best brand identity designs out there.

Overall, 99Designs provides a convenient way for brand managers to crowdsource design work, but there are a few limitations. 

The platform's prices could be higher than hiring individual freelancers directly, especially if you opt for top designers. There could be plagiarism issues, and designers might not always explain their design choices. Sometimes, there can be too many submissions to review, which can get overwhelming.

Finding a unique name for your brand that clearly represents what you do and is good enough to be liked and remembered by your customers isn’t easy. This is where Branpa can help. It’s an entire marketplace where you can sell or buy brandable domain names easily. Based on your given keyword, it will give you a lot of name options to choose from. You can even get suitable logos along with these domain names.

• You can keep track of any domain names you want to sell or buy.
• Brandpa shares these domains on social media and through ads, which helps more people see the domains.
• Brandpa's commission structure is easy to understand, with no hidden fees. They take a percentage of sales depending on the amount of the sale, with lower percentages for higher sales.

This is a great branding tool for quickly finding brand names. It does have some limitations, though: it has a minimum pricing requirement of $1,000 for listed domain names and does not offer refunds once the logo design process has started.