Small Business Branding: How To Build Brand

No mat­ter how large or small your busi­ness is, prop­er brand­ing should be an essen­tial part of your mar­ket­ing and busi­ness strat­e­gy. Ask any sea­soned brand­ing con­sul­tant, and they will tell you that brand­ing is prob­a­bly the sin­gle most impor­tant thing when it comes to how peo­ple think about and iden­ti­fy your company. 

Brand­ing is essen­tial­ly the iden­ti­ty of your busi­ness. It’s your logo, sym­bol, design, name, busi­ness vision, mis­sion state­ment, and the val­ue that you offer.

With the help of a reli­able brand­ing agency, you can take your small busi­ness brand­ing to the next lev­el to build a more sta­ble business.

In this arti­cle, we will be giv­ing brand­ing advice for small com­pa­nies who are seek­ing to strength­en their pres­ence both online and offline.

Branding Advice for Small Companies

Just because you are focus­ing on serv­ing your local com­mu­ni­ty, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on your brand­ing efforts. Your brand is the face of your busi­ness and one of the most valu­able tools that help you build your rep­u­ta­tion. In a local set­ting, busi­ness­es can imple­ment the fol­low­ing brand­ing tips to cre­ate a pos­i­tive presence.

Define The Identity of Your Brand

When it comes to brand­ing, small com­pa­nies must ask the same ques­tions from them­selves as large enter­pris­es: Who am I as a com­pa­ny? Who am I help­ing, and how? Good brand­ing isn’t mere­ly pick­ing out visu­als and col­or schemes. Good brand­ing advice will always high­light that you must cre­ate a com­pa­ny mis­sion and vision that com­mu­ni­cate your goals and values. 

What makes your busi­ness stand out? How do you aim to change the mar­ket with your prod­ucts and ser­vices? Good brand­ing tips always men­tion the impor­tance of cre­at­ing a sol­id iden­ti­ty that clear­ly com­mu­ni­cates your company’s pri­ma­ry goals, your tar­get audi­ence, and values.

Know Who You Are Marketing/Selling To

Brand­ing advice num­ber two: always know how to iden­ti­fy the ide­al cus­tomer for your brand. Know­ing who your company’s tar­get audi­ence is can help you mar­ket your prod­ucts and ser­vices the right way and help you forge a bet­ter brand identity.

To help you iden­ti­fy your ide­al cus­tomers, just think about your own busi­ness val­ues and goals. 

When it comes to tar­get audi­ences, in the case of small busi­ness­es, we’re most­ly talk­ing about peo­ple who live near­by. In these cas­es, brand­ing tips usu­al­ly revolve around encour­ag­ing that prox­im­i­ty and every­thing it encap­su­lates. Chances are, there are gen­er­al com­mu­ni­ty val­ues that every­one cher­ish­es in the neigh­bor­hood – start with those and work from there.

Once you’ve man­aged to define your tar­get audi­ence, you can then cre­ate more pecu­liar brand mes­sag­ing and con­tent to appeal to them even more. 

Build Your Brand

Cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing mate­r­i­al and stun­ning visu­als is cru­cial for small busi­ness brand­ing. The visu­al iden­ti­ty of your brand is an essen­tial com­po­nent of how peo­ple per­ceive you. As such, brand­ing advice usu­al­ly revolves around cre­at­ing eye-catch­ing visu­als which are easy to rec­og­nize and show­case your brand vision and mis­sion clearly. 

Small busi­ness brand­ing should be tak­en seri­ous­ly from this aspect. Every com­pa­ny should focus on brand­ing con­sis­ten­cy, and SMBs are no excep­tion. For instance, if you are run­ning a pres­ti­gious local restau­rant, you sim­ply can’t afford to have a poor­ly designed web­site with a col­or scheme that’s dif­fer­ent from the dom­i­nant col­ors on your premises. 

As a mat­ter of fact, brand­ing advice extends to over­all col­or schemes and designs and logo design, fonts, busi­ness cards, pho­tog­ra­phy, social media con­tent, and more.

Don’t Forget About Brand Guidelines

Small busi­ness brand­ing should also include your very own Brand­ing Bible 

– a doc­u­ment where you have every­thing that can come in handy with your brand­ing efforts. This can also help you keep your over­all iden­ti­ty more consistent.

On the oth­er hand, hav­ing every­thing brand­ing-relat­ed in one place can help you a great deal when you hire a new employ­ee or start work­ing togeth­er with a con­tent cre­ator agency or a mar­ket­ing firm. With these guide­lines, your new part­ners can help you cre­ate unique, valu­able con­tent that aligns with your val­ues and goals perfectly. 

A good Brand Bible should contain:

• Your company’s values
• Brand vision and mis­sion statement
• Logos
• Brand typog­ra­phy
• Brand sto­ry
• Imagery and photos
• Audi­ence personas
• Brand voice

With­out a doubt, such a doc­u­ment takes some time to cre­ate, but it’s vital for success.

Differentiate Yourself from Your Competition

Small busi­ness brand­ing should also focus on dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. In order to make an impact on your poten­tial and exist­ing cus­tomers, you need to show them why you stand out from the rest. Fig­ure out what makes your brand dif­fer­ent from the rest and use that to cre­ate a unique approach.

Design is a promi­nent area where you can imple­ment that. How­ev­er, you should also focus on find­ing things that make you stand out in terms of prod­uct and/or ser­vice qual­i­ty, pro­duc­tion, offer­ing, and so on. Is your brand per­son­al­i­ty dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers? If yes, use that to your advantage. 

Find some­thing that sets you apart and imple­ment it in your strat­e­gy and high­light it in your mar­ket­ing efforts when­ev­er you can.

Small Business Branding Is Important

These brand­ing tips may seem a bit over­whelm­ing at first. How­ev­er, with the help of an expe­ri­enced agency, imple­ment­ing these steps isn’t complicated.

As a mat­ter of fact, get­ting help from a rep­utable dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing agency that has already helped quite a few estab­lished busi­ness­es is one of those things small busi­ness­es should gen­er­al­ly con­sid­er when approach­ing the aspect of branding.

Why? These agen­cies have the expe­ri­ence and the knowl­edge to help small com­pa­nies come up with the cor­rect brand­ing iden­ti­ties, visu­al con­cepts, and buy­er per­sonas that will enable them to estab­lish them­selves in the local community. 

Fur­ther­more, an agency can also help imple­ment all of these steps into a strat­e­gy, cre­at­ing a seam­less process while the busi­ness own­er can focus on the thing they know best: serv­ing their customers.

As such, if you need help with brand­ing, feel free to reach out to us.