Five Branding Tips for Your Small Business
Five Branding Tips for Your Small Business
We’ve covered the importance of good branding and the need to invest in it to grow your business here, and we’ve also provided you with six easy steps you can take to create your brand. Today, we’re going to give you five handy tips to strengthen your existing branding, increase customer trust in your company, and improve recognition of your brand in the marketplace.
So, here we go with five branding tips for your small business:
Number 1: Humanize your Brand
We touched a little on this topic in our last article, in Step 5 – Finding the Right Voice for Your Brand.
Your potential customers will more easily relate to your brand, and your messages will resonate with them more strongly when your brand has a unique but relatable personality and voice.
If you were to think of your brand as a person, it would have the following three things:
1. An Identity: Who is it? How would it introduce itself to your intended audience? How would it describe itself and its purpose to your target customer?
2. A Personality: How does your brand behave? What does its voice sound like? For example, does it come across as serious, business-like, trendy, or funny?
3. Experience: Ask yourself how you want your brand to be remembered? What do you want people to feel when they think about your brand? What words would you like people to use to describe your brand?
This last sentence is important. It is saying: “how would you like people to describe your brand?”, meaning, the way that people perceive your brand is entirely in your control. This is what you hope to achieve through good branding and, if you have this, you can say that you have a strong brand.
The ultimate purpose of branding is to enable your target audience to create a relationship with your brand; to trust it, engage with it, be loyal to it, and recommend it to others. By humanizing your brand, and making it easy to relate to, this process will often occur naturally.
Number 2: Be Consistent with Your Branding
We also talked in our last article about how consistent branding is key. Without it, you run the risk of confusing your audience and undermining all the hard work you have done to create your brand in the first place.
All of the strongest brands maintain a consistent tone, vision, and appearance across the many mediums they use to showcase their business, from their website to social media channels, to advertising and marketing efforts.
When you first set out to create your brand, you hopefully did so with a clear set of brand guidelines. Brand guidelines help you, and anyone who works for your brand, to adhere to a set of rules that determine what your brand sounds like, what it looks like, and how it behaves. It also helps you to maintain consistency across all outputs coming from the various departments of your company.
Consistency allows your brand to stand out from the crowd, and to be recognizable. People feel more comfortable with brands that they feel familiar with. This promotes trust and will hopefully lead to your brand becoming their preferred one over time.
Branding consistency is helped greatly when we create a brand strategy. This leads us to our next point…
Number 3: Create a Brand Strategy… and stick to it!
While brand guidelines help you keep your branding consistent, a long-term brand strategy helps you to grow your brand in pursuit of specific goals and plans.
You should develop your brand strategy in line with your organization’s vision and mission statements. You use these to describe your company’s purpose and aims to everyone else, including your employees.
A clear brand strategy helps everyone who works at your company to understand your core mission and values, and what they are working towards. It also helps your customers and B2B clients understand who you are and what you can do for them.
An effective long-term branding strategy, adhered to and updated as your business grows, will lead to greater marketing efficiency, and increased market visibility, recognition, and success.
Number 4: Make Your Brand Unique to Your Business
To stay current in your industry, you need to have a good idea of what your competitors are doing and how well they are doing it. It can also help inform you of any gaps in the market or to help you see how you could improve your brand.
Make sure that this doesn’t lead to imitation, as this can actively work against your brand. Use your competitive analysis to help you understand what sets your brand apart from your competition and what makes your products or services unique on the market.
Your uniqueness will make your brand be more memorable, not how well you have copied your competition.
Number 5: Make Your Brand Work for You
Having a strong and consistent brand can also help you attract the best talent in the market and ensures that your employees are proud to work at your organization.
Employer branding is how you market your company to new and existing employees and can help create a proud workplace culture. Employees that are proud to work at a company make the best brand ambassadors for your business.
Are you ready to take these branding tips and apply them to your business?
Throughout the last three articles, we have given you some easily actionable tricks and tips to help you create your brand and also, to strengthen it as it grows.
Branding your business goes beyond simply creating a name and logo for your company. It even goes beyond each aspect of developing a voice, personality, and image for your brand. All these steps culminate in creating an experience that your potential customers can aspire to, become familiar with, and hopefully seek out over time.
The strongest brands have all of this – the rememberable logo, the clever tagline, a clear brand voice, the humour (and the humanity). But they also use this to send out messages that resonate with their audience, stick in people’s memories, and touch their customers’ hearts and minds.
It takes time to achieve all of this, and none of it can be done without careful planning, a clear strategy, and defined goals. If you need any help with a bespoke solution for your branding, digital marketing, or design needs, contact EWM Swiss today to discuss how we can help you.