After asking a handful of experienced and successful authors from our community to share their top hints and tips, we’ve created a list of four key things to consider when setting up your brand. Links to the contributing authors’ shops have been included at the bottom of the page to provide you with some good examples of strong branding in action.
1. Usernames
One of the biggest changes you can make is to create a username that sounds professional and trustworthy (please contact authors@tes.com if you wish to change your username). For example, instead of ‘JSmith100724’ which sounds a bit generic, ‘SmithResources’ is more attention grabbing, easier to remember and demonstrates that you’re a seller and not just a user. Using a consistent brand name across your Tes shop, website, blog, email address and social media accounts creates a cross-platform unity for your brand.
2. Consistency of resource layout
By creating consistency of layout across your resources you can ensure that they’re instantly recognisable as belonging to your brand, even if someone quickly glances at them. Plus teachers will find it easier to use your resources if they all follow the same professional, clear and structured format. When resources, such as a collection of lessons, are designed to be linked together you can re-use the same basic structure time and time again. You can create templates on PowerPoint and Word so that all your resources use the same classroom-friendly fonts, colours, layout and style. Remember to ensure that all the fonts, colours and backgrounds are readable from the back of a classroom. By ensuring your lessons all follow a similar structure you’ll helps students by providing them with continuity. Teachers will also become familiar with your style and build trust and confidence in your well-structured materials, meaning they’ll be more likely to return to get other resources.
To be sure this is working, pick a random page or small section of one of your resources and ask yourself whether a teacher would know that it belonged to you if they caught sight of it. Would they be able to match it up as belonging to the same brand as one of your other resources? If the answer is no then think again about how you can add more consistency across elements of your resource collection.
3. Cover, preview and profile images
Creating consistency across your cover and preview images will also help to build your brand. Use a similar layout each time that highlights the details you would want to know about the resource before clicking on it. If all your cover images are created in a similar style, they’ll become easily recognisable to teachers who’ve previously downloaded or purchased your resources and will also add to the professionalism of your shop as a whole.
You could consider having your logo professionally designed and you can be quite creative with this, incorporating elements of your subject specialism in the design to make it clear what kind of resources you have available. For example, one author picked three brand colours and this process resulted in a logo of an open book indicating a focus on English resources. The same procedures can be used in creating your shop banner.
4. Catering to your audience
It’s important to consider that there is more than one audience for your resources – primarily there are teachers and pupils, but also parents, personal tutors and school leaders to name but a few. The style of the branding must appeal to all of these groups.
Consider how you emphasise the quality of your resource in your promotional imagery. Show your audience that it’s beyond what they can easily produce themselves – if they can easily make it themselves why download or purchase it from you? One way to do this is to clearly present the variety and quality of your resource content.
With these tips in mind it’s time to get out there and build your brand! We hope that our experienced authors’ suggestions prove useful.
Thank you to our contributors, you can visit their shops by clicking on their shop names below: