The first step to marketing for your marketplace is to establish an effective branding strategy that differentiates you from your competitors. Your branding is the visual representation of your marketplace and the first point-of-contact between your customers and your business, hence you must be mindful of this process. For example, although your logo design should be something simple, much thought must be put into this critical and major component of your brand as it will appear on every piece of correspondence since it is the "face" of your company.

This creative process can be a source of stress, especially if you lack design skills to properly convey your intended style of design aesthetic for your brand. Let your creative juices flow with the help of these simple tools – no prior design knowledge necessary!

Logo

There are many simple but important design rules behind a good logo creation – your logo must be simple, versatile, enduring and memorable. Before diving into logo creators, you should also keep in mind the importance of a thorough research in order to kick start your logo design process.

There are an abundance of logo creators available on the Internet, most of them extremely user-friendly and allows you to make a logo within seconds. Logo maker by Ucraft is one such tool that is highly customizable and contains various features that allows you to tweak any aspect of your logo elements. With more than 220,000 icons and different text fonts available on the site, even non-designers can create beautiful logos with this tool. The app allows you to export your logo for free as a transparent .png file that you can reuse everywhere.

LogoGarden is another handy site that offers a wide range of design tools, fonts, colors and editing features online that allows you to create a stellar logo. The site also offers logo design tips and samples that you can refer to. For those who prefer to work with a graphic designer, you can opt for their professional logo design services which comes at an affordable price.

Business name

Given that there are numerous marketing and branding implications, picking an appropriate business name is almost as important as your company function. For those who lack inspiration and are struggling to identify a perfect business name, why not seek some ideas from online business name generators to help with the brainstorming process? Explore websites such as namemesh.com and businessnamegenerator.com, which allows you to type in keywords about your business to the search bar, before generating countless name suggestions that you can shortlist and run by your business partners or colleagues. Remember to do a simple web search to ensure that the name is not already taken, before checking if the domain name is available.

Brand creatives

Canva is one of the most simple graphic design programs available. With its easy drag-and-drop feature and countless professional templates, it takes a lot of stress off the designing process. Whether you are creating a logo, a social media picture post, an infographic for your blog or even gift certificates, Canva has a wide range of editing tools and layouts for them, such as photo filters, a great selection of fonts and thousands of elements that you can use. Canva also contains millions of stock photographs and illustrations, while allowing you to upload your own as well.  Canva is free, though you can purchase the nicer looking templates and features for $1 each.

Stock image libraries, which we will explore in the third chapter, contain valuable resources for your designs, such as stock photo images or elements that you can utilize in the design process of your visual branding identity. These stock photo sites give users the ease of access to stock photos and making the sourcing for visual content much more convenient. For those seeking to minimise costs in the design process, you can use the Creative Commons Zero photos or free stock photos that are available on site, whereby you can copy, distribute, modify and use them without seeking permission from its source. You can also find Premium or pay-to-use images on the site.

Sources of inspiration

Everyone needs a dose of inspiration to get their creativity flowing. You can refer to the following sites to jumpstart your creative process:

• For general visual branding: Pinterest, Designspiration, Behance Network, Flickr

• For logo design: Logo Pond, Logo Faves