Creating A Brand Strategy To Grow Your Small Business
Do you own a small business? No matter the size of your organization, owners need to think about branding their business. While larger companies like Google or Apple have an endless budget to spend on branding, small businesses can utilize their budgets as well. There are several things you can do to help your business stand out, grab your customers’ attention and make your business last without blowing your budget. Here, Treebird Branding discusses a few branding strategies that will help you take your small business to the next level.
Define Your Brand Identity
Branding is more than just an image or logo, it is who you are as a company. It is your values, your mission; it’s the way you treat your customers. To begin your brand strategy it’s vital to figure out who you are as a business. If you already have a clear idea of who you are as a brand, then you are a step ahead—but if you don’t, then take the time to figure that out. When you’re defining your brand identity, ask questions like:
Describe my company in three words.
What do I want to be known for?
What are my company’s core missions and values?
What kind of difference do I want to make in my industry?
The better idea you get of who you are as a company, the more you can use that identity in your branding.
Figure out your target Market
Small businesses can get caught up in their own image that they completely neglect to figure out to who they’re trying to sell those products or services. This can be detrimental to their overall growth and branding strategy.
Spend time figuring out your ideal customer base. Find out who they are and what it is they truly want from your business or product. When you know who your target market is, you can use it to guide your branding strategy. Once these two things align you will be a brand and business that truly connects with the customers you want to appeal to the most.
What Works In Your Industry
It is important to stand out and be different. But if you want to have an effective branding strategy, you also need to know what’s working or not within your industry. Take some time to research your competitors and what they’re doing. Do you notice anything that stands out? While putting together information about your competitor it’s also important that you don’t rip off their branding. Notice their strategy and get an understanding of the industry trends that are connecting with your market. Once you understand and learn that, you can build out your brand identity accordingly.
Designing Your Brand
Once you’ve figured out your brand identity, it’s time to start actually designing your brand. This step is crucial for branding your small business. Below are a few things you’ll need to create the look and feel of your brand:
Logo - Your logo is the first thing customers will see when they encounter your brand. It’s the visual asset that will be most closely tied with your business. Your logo should be the first thing you design, as it will act as the jumping-off point for all of your other visuals.
Business Cards - Every small business needs a business card. The design should match your logo and stand out.
Website - Your website is very important to your brand. For many customers, it can be the make or break of doing business.
Effective branding comes with consistency. No matter where a customer encounters your brand, the look, feel, and design should be consistent. If you’re not consistent when branding your business, you risk confusing customers. With confusion comes the loss of business to a potential competitor.
Utilize Content Marketing
You don’t need to spend a ton of money to get your business in front of the right people. There’s a better, easier and more affordable way to get your name out there; it’s through content marketing.
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to a well-defined target audience. This gives you a tailored identity, connects your business to customers directly, maintains a strong visible presence, and all of this adds value to your business.
Additionally, content marketing is so effective for small businesses because It’s affordable. As a small business, if you’re working on a tight budget, you can make content work for you.
The key to success in using content as a marketing strategy is to create valuable content. Do some research to figure out what kinds of questions your customers are asking. Take this information and create content that answers those questions.
Partnership Opportunities
People tend to do business with brands they trust. As a developing small business, establishing that trust can be time-consuming. To expedite this process, look for partnership opportunities with other brands your customers already believe in.
The key to this strategy is finding a business with similar audiences that’s not a competitor. collaborative building with these companies helps you reach a wider audience, in turn growing your business.
Reputation & Customer Service
Your company’s branding is about more than your logo, marketing strategies or how you grab customers’ attention. It’s about what you do after you’ve connected with potential customers. Building a reputation as a trustworthy business can help you grow to the next level. It’s crucial that you make customer service your top priority.
Think about it. What better to be known for than providing the highest level of service to your customers? If your customers have a positive experience every time they interact with your brand, they’re going to keep coming back. You need to provide a consistently positive experience for your customers no matter how, when, and why they interact with your brand.
Look for opportunities to improve the customer experience within your business. The point is, that the better you can make your customer experience, the more you’ll be known as a company that cares about its customers. When people feel like a priority they tend to share your business with others which helps you grow.
Need Help With Your Brand Strategy? Call Us Today
You don’t need a million-dollar budget to effectively brand your business. All you need is a little creativity and hard work. Still confused and need some assistance? Give our branding team a call to learn more about our branding strategies.
When you choose Treebird Branding as your branding agency, you get the focused design that captures what’s unique about your business and speaks honestly and evocatively to your target audience. Give us a call today!
