Strong branding is essential for any business owner, regardless of size. When it comes to creating a great brand, you must first grasp what branding entails. It’s marketing jargon for your company’s logo, name, symbol, design, and other identifying elements. Branding is simply how people recognize your brand, whether through a beautiful logo, a phrase, a color, or an emotion.

Your brand is your company’s public face and can be one of your most significant assets in building your company’s image. Small businesses that rely on local customers can gain the most from a strong, favorable brand presence. Here are five small business branding tips.

1. Define your brand identity

When you think of your business and brand, what does it mean? Who are you as a company? Defining your brand is more than picking out colors and visuals. It’s about the core of your company. Think about your values and goals. Do you have an origin story or a product offering that is unique and helps you stand out? What is your brand mission? How do you want your customers to remember you? All of these elements make up your business’s personality – your brand

Having a strong brand identity is one of the most important factors in your marketing strategy. You can start defining your brand by doing exercises like:

• Picking out 3-5 words that describe your brand and define your brand’s voice
• Figuring out who your competitors are
• Follow a questionnaire like this.

2. Know your target audience

Can you identify your brand’s ideal customer? Knowing your target audience is a key component of your marketing strategy. You can’t market properly without understanding who you’re talking to. Think about what your business does, what benefit it has to your existing and potential customers, and how you’re different from other brands in the same industry.

To know how you’re different, it’s important to understand what’s common and effective in your industry. Looking at your competition may provide inspiration for promotional material, help you identify emerging trends, and can shed some light on what resonates with your ideal client or customer. 

If you are a local business, chances are your target audience and/or regular customers are those that live nearby. If that is your target customer base, consider Nextdoor – the neighborhood hub where local residents, businesses, and public agencies can connect with each other online in their respective neighborhoods. On Nextdoor, local businesses can build their brand presence for free and connect with verified residents that live close in proximity. Make it easy for locals to discover your brand by keeping your free Nextdoor Business Page updated and consistent.

Once you define your target audience, you can then create more specific content and brand messaging to better appeal to your ideal customer. And you can more successfully target potential customers who fit within your desired demographic.

3. Brand building: Create visuals and marketing materials

Your brand’s visual identity is vital when it comes to branding and marketing. It’s easily the most recognizable thing about your business and makes an impact on your reputation as well. Think about how many times you’ve visited a poorly designed website and left without making a purchase, or when you were less likely to walk into a restaurant on a street because of a shabby and unwelcoming exterior appearance.

Read Also: What are the Roles of Digital Marketing?

Your brand’s visual identity includes your logo design, fonts, photography, brand color palettes, visual style, website, social media content, and business cards. While you can certainly do all of this brand recognition work on your own, consider stepping away from Photoshop to hire a professional, especially when it comes to logo design. You don’t need to hire an expensive branding or digital marketing agency to experience the benefits of digital marketing -you can hire a great graphic designer or branding consultant that fits your budget. It can be worth the investment to have someone with branding experience develop your visual identity.

4. Make brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are basically your Brand Bible. This is a document that holds all the ins and outs of your business and can be a useful resource for maintaining brand consistency when it comes time for decision-making, employee training, and outside partnerships. If you’re hiring a new employee or partnering up with another business, vendor, or content marketing service, such guidelines will help them understand who your brand is. This is particularly important if you’re having an outside source create marketing content for you. The brand guidelines will help them understand your brand message when creating any marketing material.

Your brand guidelines should include:

• Brand mission statement and vision
• Values
• Brand story
• Logos
• Typography
• Photography or imagery
• Brand voice
• Sample copy
• Audience personas

While brand guidelines take time to create, it’s essential for success.

5. Differentiate your brand

Impactful branding will stand out to consumers. If all your competitors have blue logos, choose red. Figure out what makes your company different and use that in your branding strategy.

More importantly than design, is there a service you provide that your competitors don’t? Do you have a unique product offering? Does your customer service exceed all expectations? Or does your business have a brand personality that your competition doesn’t?

Whatever it is that sets you apart, include it in your brand strategy and use it in your marketing whenever possible.

How Important Is Branding For Small Businesses?

Many small firms fail to capitalize on the numerous opportunities that a good brand provides. You could believe that branding is only important for major firms with a global consumer base, such as Apple or Nike. But this is simply not true! Small business branding is just as crucial. A strong online brand presence may benefit any firm.

What is branding exactly? Contrary to what many think, it goes much further than just a logo. Your brand is the first interaction a person will have with your business. Branding should be a kind of summary of your brand experience. This includes things like tone of voice, content design and your customer service.

The logo is, however, extremely important and can help you determine some of the other pieces of your brand. When developing your small business’ brand, you must also consider color, font, the tone of speech, customer service, and any other aspect that is part of a customer’s experience. Branding should give consumers a look into your brand and what your business is all about without even having to ask questions.

Why is branding for small businesses so important?

1. Recognition

The most obvious reason is that branding makes your company more recognizable to the public. Having a consistent design throughout your brick and mortar store as well as online, and helps people become familiar with the business they are dealing with.

2. Trust/Legitimacy

Let’s say you encounter two business on social media. One business seems quite disorganized and all over the place. They don’t have a logo, and it seems like each post was created by a different person. The second has a logo and brand colors featured in each picture, while post style and tone of voice is kept consistent. Which business would you reach out to? The bottom line is, a strong brand elicits trust from consumers and makes your small business feel more legitimate.

While creating a brand voice encompasses a variety of marketing tactics, imagery is a highly important element that can make or break brand trust. One excellent way to remain consistent in creating and curating your brand imagery is to have an all-in-one design app like Instasize. Instasize allows you to quickly edit images on the go, add beautiful typography, create collages, and more!

3. New Customers

It may seem strange, but branding can actually help you get new customers! Take, for example , the new shirt you just bought. A friend compliments you and asks where you got it from. If there is no brand, how will you tell your friend where and how to get it? Word of mouth recommendations are only possible if a strong brand is in place.

4. Originality

There are small businesses with similar products at every corner, so what makes your business different? Your brand! Stand out from the competition and develop your brand further than just a logo. Call BusySeed today to determine which characteristics make your business stand out and how to highlight them in your social media strategy.

5. Emotional connection

An emotional connection with your consumers should be your business’ top priority. After all, “people don’t have relationships with products, they are loyal to brands” (Goodson, 2012). A strong brand loyalty will ensure that customers will always pick your product over another one. Branding helps create an emotional connection in that a brand reflects your company’s deepest values and guidelines. If a person connects with these values on a deeper level, your brand will serve as a constant reminder of this connection.

Wondering how this ties into social media marketing? Your brand should dictate every decision you make while running your business. At BusySeed, we use your brand to help develop the perfect social media marketing strategy that highlights your business’ strengths and attract new customers. After you have decided on your brand’s colors and fonts, they should be present in all of your social media posts, across all platforms. The tone of voice should be kept consistent in the text of your posts, ads, and in response to any comments or reviews on your different social media pages.

Over 90% of small-business owners say that having a distinct brand that distinguishes them from the competition is critical. More than half of them also say branding is important for gaining new customers. What secrets do powerful brands like Apple and Coca-Cola keep? And how might they be used as a source of inspiration for small business owners?

The following are four steps to creating a successful brand.

1. Define how you want to be perceived

When your customers have finished using your product or service, how do you want them to describe their experience? If you own a restaurant, for example, what do you want them to say?

• “Wow, this restaurant has the largest portions in town. It’s great!”
• “You really feel as though you’ve been invited for a traditional Italian family dinner. The dishes are simple but so delicious!”
• “The service is quick and the food is OK, but the price is unbeatable!”

See your brand as your promise to your customers – a promise that’s different from your competitors.

2. Organize your business based on this promise

Keeping the promise that sets you apart from your competitors implies that you’re doing something more than what they’re doing. The restaurant that wants to be recognized for its unbeatable prices, for example, will have to find a way to maximize the number of customers served per table in one evening. The margin per individual customer will be less, but the number of customers will make up for it.

In other words, your brand will greatly influence the winning formula that you’ll base your business on.

3. Communicate your promise

All of your marketing material – from the colours of your logo to your website text – must be developed as a function of this promise. What you say on Facebook or LinkedIn must be aligned with this message, as must the decoration of your premises.

It’s at this stage that your brand becomes central to your advertising campaigns. What’s more, your ads will be even more effective, since you’ll have a clear message to convey.

4. Be consistent

After defining how you want to be perceived, then organizing your business based on this perception and communicating this promise, you must be consistent. Apple, for example, is recognized for making products that are both elegant and innovative: it can’t afford to launch a new phone that’s unattractive or a new tablet that’s technologically behind, because that would mean breaking the promise it has made to its customers.

The idea here is to develop trust. Your customers must no longer see your brand as a promise but as a reality. Consistency is often the hardest part, but the one with the greatest rewards.

Over time, a well-managed brand stops becoming a company promise and increasingly becomes a customer expectation. There may be 10 Italian restaurants in the neighbourhood, but only one where customers expect to experience a traditional Italian family dinner. That restaurant’s brand is no longer its name or logo – it’s the expectation of its customers.

When applying such a strategy, your business will gradually be able to increase both its prices and its sales (that’s right, both at the same time!). Your brand will become one of your business’s most valuable assets and the one with the most impact on your bottom line.