Business
8 Helpful Branding Tips for Your Small Business
Branding Tips
What do the sayings “have it your way” and “what’s in your wallet” have in common? If you answered Burger King and Capital One, you would be correct.
These are famous branding taglines that most people will recognize right away. If your business is starting out, it will be a while before you become as notorious as Capital One or a fast-food restaurant.
That doesn’t mean you should put off coming up with your own unique tagline and business logo. We have a few branding tips that will help you establish your company identity. Check out this guide to learn more.
What Is Company Branding?
Business branding is the practice of using visual elements to help a company stick out in the minds of its customers. These visual elements may include colors, a unique logo, shapes, and promotional language.
Of course, a company’s brand image is more than a colorful cartoon logo. It’s their entire identity.
1. Understand Your Identity
It will be difficult for you to build a brand if you don’t even know what your identity is. That’s step one.
Take a minute to think about your company. Who are you and what do you do? What does your business mean?
What are your values and goals? Do you have a particular mission statement in mind?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start crafting a business personality around them. Don’t forget to include them when telling others about your story.
2. Research Your Target Audience
Once you’ve established your identity, it’s time to start researching your target audience. If you reach out to the wrong demographic with your business marketing, you won’t see a lot of brand recognition or sales.
Many companies create an imaginary customer during this step to give them a visual reference. Think about where your ideal client lives. What do they do for a living and what’s their age?
Think about what their values are along with their dislikes and hobbies. After you’ve built your customer, consider how your products or services can help them.
At the end of the day, that’s pretty much all they are about. If you can cater to your client’s needs and prove yourself to be a trustworthy company, everything else will fall into place from there.
3. Be Consistent
It doesn’t matter how you decide to establish your company, you need to be consistent. Your website and logo should match up with your business’s mission statement and values. Creativeo a Storybrand Agency can help you with this.
Your employees are the voice of your business. If they don’t carry your company values in everything that they do, it will reflect badly on you. Make sure everyone is on board with how they should conduct themselves on and off the clock so they can provide consistent customer service.
4. Be Unique
Depending on your industry, you most likely have a lot of competition. If your logo doesn’t stand out, your target audience may get your company confused with another one.
You also have to make sure you’re offering something that nobody else is. To do this, you’ll have to research your competition. Find out what you’re doing differently than them and lean into it with your branding.
5. Decide on Your Voice
Now it’s time to think about how you want to sound when engaging with your customers.
If you want to come across as more casual and friendly, for example, you may have no issue using contractions in your company marketing. On the flip side of this, if you want to appear more formal, you should avoid using them too much.
You even have to consider your sentence structure. Short choppy sentences will create a different tone than long flowy prose.
6. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
A large part of establishing your brand and getting your name out there involves competitor research. While it’s okay to take inspiration from other businesses like yours, you should never copy them.
The idea is to make yourself stand out from them. Not become them. If you try too hard to be like them, you’ll fade into obscurity.
It can be difficult to look at a competitor and compare their successes to yours, but it’s something that you’ll have to do if you want to find your own voice.
7. Get Your Employees Involved
As stated above, your employees are the voice of your company. Whatever they say or post on social media will reflect upon you.
That means you should get them involved with promoting your brand. Ask them what they think your brand means. If they have no idea, chances are your customers don’t either.
Find out why they would or wouldn’t shop from your company, and don’t be afraid to ask them for marketing advice.
8. Polish Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing will be your best friend when it comes to establishing your brand. As you post relevant content on your site, you’ll become a source of trustworthy information.
This will bring more potential customers to your site and help you build brand recognition organically.
Branding Tips to Take to Heart
Branding is something that many new businesses struggle with. It can be difficult to come up with a unique strategy that will help you stand out from your competition.
It involves a lot of competitor research. You’ll also have to discover your company’s voice and take some time to find your target audience.
For more branding tips that will help you stand out, visit the Business section of our blog.
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