If you’re going into business as a restaurateur, you already know that your business has a huge capacity for growth and success. However, this capacity is only as great as your drive during your earliest startup efforts, not the least of which is branding. Branding is the key to starting your business right, but it requires a lot of focus and even more knowledge to work through this process properly; you’ll want to work with a professional designer to help get your corporate identity illustrated to your unique business needs. Whether you opt to work with a local agency or use a crowdsourcing platform like Designhill is up to you, but the first step of solid brand is to work with a design professional.

Establish Your Target Customer

While more or less everyone loves food, that doesn’t mean you should build your brand to appeal to everyone. According to Food Service Warehouse, a restaurant’s design concept should cater to a specific audience rather than seeking out the lowest common denominator—high-class restaurants don’t try to market to the same audience as fast food chains, after all.

The key here isn’t to decide who is going to buy the most food, but what kind of customer toward which you want to cater. Everyone eats, so you have a pre-made demographic out there somewhere; your brand needs to be designed to it in. Picture your “perfect customer” and then try to dismantle that fantasy into noteworthy characteristics, including things like age, socio-economic status, family size and so on. When you find what you’re really looking for in a customer, you’ve found your target.

Once you have your target, get with your design professional to decide how to build a brand that appeals to your ideal demographic. Start with your logo, using it to draw in your target customer through color and style. If you’re aiming for families with small children, bright colors and fun imagery is the best option; likewise, if you would rather look for empty-nesters or a slightly classier customer, you’ll want to lean for elegant simplicity.

This is one way that seeking logo design by Designhill or other crowdsourcing platforms could offer you the edge you need to succeed. Because you’ll be working with multiple designers all aiming for the same goal, you’ll get to see each designer’s unique perspective on appealing to your target customer. Not only does this give you a much wider range of designs to choose from, but it could help you understand how to appeal to your customers a little better—before you even open the doors to your restaurant.

Maintain Consistency

From palette to typeface, your brand needs a consistent image. This is one place where hiring a professional graphic designer makes all the difference; not only do they know how to make sure your image appeals to the right audience, but a professional can make sure that appeal is consistent across all your design-driven platforms. Your logo should be the number one image for your brand, while everything else should be modeled after it. Maintain the same general color scheme, utilize similar or complementary typefaces on your website, social media banners, advertisements and more in order to make your brand new brand image rock solid.

According to a Chron report from marketing pro Heddi Cundle, founder of Travel Gift Card, a major element of strong branding is color choice. Blues are traditional, capable of instilling a sense of elegance and familiarity, but browns and earthy tones are great for dining facilities thanks to the way the human brain processes these colors: instead of being dirt, brown can be reminiscent of everything from rich fudge ice cream to a well-done steak, making this a great choice to inspire hunger in your audience. Just make sure that the impact of that color isn’t lost through overuse. Trust your design professional to help you choose a palette that gets your brand the powerful start you need to succeed.

Do Your Research

Remember that while your designer of choice can offer their graphical expertise, truly understanding your customer—and your competitors, for that matter—is up to you. Restaurant Branding Roadmap declares that market research is the first step toward branding a restaurant properly; find your top 5 to 10 competitors, see how they’ve handled the branding conundrum. Find what you feel “works” about their logo designs and what don’t, then use this information to help you decide what you want to see in your logo. If you find that you really don’t like circular logos, it’s your responsibility to include that in your design brief in order to make sure that you and your designer are on the same page from the get-go.

Take the time to understand your industry, your customers and your competition, then launch your startup right over the competition with powerful, professional branding. Handle it right and you’ll have created a brand that will succeed for years to come.