It is tough to make a name for yourself in the freelance world – some people succeed and others fail, even though your intentions may have been to succeed. There are many factors that go into this, and branding happens to be one of them.
In terms of freelance animators, it is always important to know the details of your brand in order to know what you should do with it. There are many elements that you need to make your brand recognizable and great, and these include your bio, design, logo, and voice tone – elements that make your brand distinct among many. If you may not know where to begin, here are some tips to help you brand your animation business better.
Table of contents
Know what the brand is
In order to know what the brand specifically is, you need to answer the questions of:
- What jobs do you want to mainly focus on?
- Why do you like doing what you specifically do?
- What do you do best?
- Why did you get the tasks you did?
These questions will focus on you in terms of their answers, and that is important because you are the main part of the freelancing brand. That means that in order to build a successful brand, you need to make it something you do really well, and you can continue doing.
Once you have an idea of the work you will put in your brand, then you can address the brand through answering these questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- Is the business the brand, are you the brand, or is it both you and the business?
- What are the unique aspects about you that stand out?
- What do your clients ‘feel’ about your business?
At the end of the day, you will need to be unique in your approach to crafting your brand. You can also market your business through social media, and let your personality shine through to your audience in this way. This brings us to the next point:
Developing a niche and your client base
As a Dormzi’s freelance animator, or any freelancer anyway, it is very important to know your clients, and target those who will fulfill your business purposes. You are not limited to your target audience anyway, because you can make animation shorts for online brands, art for games, motion graphics for advertisements, sequences for music videos, and so on.
Early on in your freelancing career, you are the one finding your clients, and you can do this in the same way any other job can. However, it becomes much easier for you because you know what you want to achieve, as well as the jobs that you can let go.
Aim to show the clients the packages you can offer them and the results of your work, which means you need to find your niche and work in it. For instance, it would be strange to market yourself ass an animator making pre-school content when you enjoy making dark humor, or marketing yourself as a 3D animator when you only have experience in 2D.
Having your own niche increases your brand recognition in the long term, and you will eventually get many clients seeking you out.
Learning to package your brand
Branding is all about presenting a package, and making sure the brand does not share a name with another brand. You can do this through:
- Using your name – the easiest choice, but it only works if your name is unique. Think Walt Disney.
- Using a personal or business moniker – a pseudonym works brilliantly when you want to create a distinct ‘identity’ for your brand that is separate from your actual identity. You can also change it to a business name easily through adding words like studios, productions, and so on.
- Using a business name – these are more ‘Business’ sounding names, like Pixar.
In terms of a tagline and logo, keep these points in mind:
- Your target market – like genre, age group
- Colors you want to identify your brand
- Ensuring the design is easy to scale
- Whether your name should be in the logo
- The font you will use
At the end of the day, it is important to know the service you want to offer as a freelance animator and create a distinct identity from that.