Sonic Branding on a Budget: What Small Businesses and Content Creators Can Do

If you are a brand or content creator looking to dabble in sonic branding but don’t think you want to take the leap yet into working with an agency, you can still create an effective sonic strategy on your own!

Sonic branding is one of the most efficient ways a brand can spread their budget to increase growth, drive sales, and increase brand recall rates and it doesn’t need to be a complicated process. Like choosing your font or your brands colors, being intentional with the sound language your brand uses can be done at any scale - though a professional agency will bring insight, speed, and expertise that can help speed up the process.

So how do we begin?

First off, we should have a clear idea off who the brand is from an emotional standpoint. Are we a playful brand or a more serious one? Is our target audience Gen Z teen women who like anime and hang out at hot topic or middle aged blue collar barflies who watch football? Really dial in who your brand is and what the target audience is - if you’ve been in business for a while you probably already have a clear idea but even so I find creating a brand mood board can really help this process.

Once we have an idea of who we are as a business, I’d take a look at all the touch points where sound interacts with customers. This can be the obvious ones like social media content or the more “hidden” ones like the sound that plays when customers enter the store or the hold music. Be as thorough as possible here, as the more you identify the more opportunities you can uncover. Also try and see if you can identify any trends, you may not know it but there’s a chance you already have some semblance of an identity forming. If you’d like, we can help you with a brand audit here - just shoot us an email!

From here, we should start crafting the actual audio identity. Depending on your touch points, you should figure out which assets are most important. If you’re doing a lot of video/audio content I’d focus on a brand anthem. If you’re an app, streaming platform, or content producer, maybe it’s a sonic logo. Whatever it is - this should be the heart of who you are as a brand.

I typically start businesses with a brand anthem, as this music can be extrapolated and varied to create a ton of other assets. If you are doing this on your own, go through whatever royalty free music libraries you have access to (and the rights to use!) and find 2-3 tracks in the same musical aesthetic that you feel really captures your brand. You want to pick one of these to use most consistently but an additional 1-2 for a little variation every now and then can’t hurt. Your goal is to use this main piece of music in as many pieces of content as possible. Like your visual identity, consistent usage is key.

Here’s where things differ for you at home vs working with an agency: when you work with an agency, you can be sure every track has a very similar aesthetic, same instrumentation, and more. You can even “pull apart” the track and say only use the guitar + drums rather than the full track for different versions. This creates many variations on one piece of music versus having many variations on the same piece. You can even set the music in different contexts, preserving the main tune while conveying different emotions - like playing the same piece of music but this time it’s jazz rather than a rockband or holiday themed for a special promo. This is where a custom made sonic identity is really powerful. And eventually this can turn into a full internal music library that you can draw from for many different purposes rather than paying for access to use the same tracks that everyone else is.

That being said, if there is one or two elements in your track that you feel really connect with your brand - maybe it’s an instrument like a ukulele + claps or a specific rhythm they are playing - you can isolate that and find pieces of music that have that same element. Over time, this builds into a relationship where that is the identifying element that is consistent for you across platforms/pieces of music.

Once you have a brand anthem and chosen your key elements, you can create a custom sonic logo in a DAW (that’s digital audio workstation) by layering different audio clips. There are many free or cheap DAWs available online, you can even use Garageband that comes with every Mac computer. You can use a service like Splice to find some samples to drag and drop in until you find some that you like and work together. Try to keep the logo 2-3 seconds max - the longer it is the less it is a “logo” and more of a “jingle” or “Brand Anthem”. So like your visual logo, this can be done at home quite easily.

The last thing I’d recommend trying to do is codifying this. Create a small one page document that writes out what your sound is. Some things to include would be describing the aesthetic of the music, key elements, how it can/should be used, etc. Your goal is to make this a resource that anyone besides you (presumably the owner) can use - like for example you hiring a marketing firm or a social media manager - can see and make informed choices from and maintain your branding over time and across platforms.

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