No matter the size or type of business you run, building a brand is an important part of creating relationships with your existing and potential customers.
After all, your brand influences many sales-driving factors, including determining how your business is perceived, creating recognizability, and building trust.
But for many solopreneurs and small business owners, branding isn’t a priority–probably because it feels like a big, daunting, and expensive undertaking.
Luckily, it doesn’t have to be. Here are five branding tips you can use to make your small business stand out from the crowd.
1. Know Your Customers and Your Competition
To create great branding that will connect with your customers, it’s important to understand what resonates with them.
Understand what they like and dislike, their hobbies, and their values. Consider their personalities and ways of life. And think about the types of challenges that they face that your business can help solve.
All of these factors will influence your branding.
2. Create Visual Branding
The first basic step in your branding process is to focus on your visual branding.
This includes:
- Your logo
- Your brand fonts
- Your brand colors
Once you’ve outlined these top-level parameters, the next step is to incorporate them into all of your internal and external mediums, including:
- Business cards
- Your website
- Your social media channels
- Any internal and external communications materials
- Your private office space, if possible
It’s important that you’re consistent with your visual branding. It should feel seamless no matter where your customers encounter it or engage with it. Everything from your website to your social channels and beyond should have the exact same look and vibe. Canva is a great tool for creating visuals for your brand, particularly for social media.
3. Define Your Brand Identity
Equally important as your visual branding is your brand identity. Whereas your visual branding pertains to how your business looks, your brand identity focuses on how your brand makes people feel.
This can include:
- Mission, Vision, and Values: In his book Start With Why, Simon Sinek explains that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. So, it’s important to create a mission and vision statement as well as a set of company values that convey not only what you do and for whom you do it but also why you do it–your higher purpose.
- Personality: While you might not think your business has a personality, it does–and if it doesn’t, it should. Your brand personality helps build connections with people. It makes it relatable in a deeper way than just a company selling people something. For example, your personality could be light-hearted and jovial. It could be sincere, kind, and thoughtful. It could be rugged and tough. It could be educational and formal. It all depends on what you’re selling, who your customers are, and what will resonate with them.
- Tone and voice: Your company’s tone and voice should align with its personality. This means thinking about how you convey your personality in all of your communications. It can include things like how you speak or write–conversationally or formally, for example–and it can even consider specific types of words you do or don’t use.
- Value proposition: Another important aspect of your brand is understanding what your company’s true value proposition is. What do you offer and for whom? Why is it the best choice? Why should your customers do business with you? Understanding this will help inform your personality, what you say, and how you say it.
- Story: Having a brand story is critical. Remember, people buy why you do what you do. Your story needs to explain the fist-on-table moment that led to you starting the company. You need to explain the opportunity you saw to better serve your customers. And as much as it’s your story, you should try to make it about your customers. People love being the main character in a story.
The same way your visual branding needs to be consistent, so too does your brand identity. Creating a brand guidelines document that outlines all of these key points will help keep both yourself as well as any current or existing staff on the same page.
4. Build Credibility
Once your branding is in place, you have a great opportunity to solidify that brand through building credibility and positioning yourself as an expert.
Doing so helps to show that there’s substance behind your claims and, in turn, builds trust with your customers.
You can do this by creating value-driven content for your members–whether it’s on your blog, through an email list, social media, or on forums. All content you create should be rooted in what matters to your members and delivered in a way that aligns with your brand guidelines.
Make sure to be proactive in engaging with people and sharing your content. Building a community is incredibly powerful in reinforcing your brand and encouraging people to connect with it.
5. Embody Your Brand
Last but not least, it’s imperative that you live your brand, every day. Your brand is like your reputation: it takes a long time and a ton of effort to build, but can be destroyed in a matter of minutes.
Always deliver on your promises. Always go above and beyond for your customers. And always live your company’s values in every customer interaction.
Whether you’re a sole proprietor, a small business, or an established organization, your brand is the lifeblood of your business. So, craft it carefully, uphold it meticulously, and always be consistent in delivering it to your customers.
If you’d like to join a community of like-minded professionals working independently together to achieve their goals, get in touch with us today. Our team is available to speak with you.