As a smaller business, you may believe branding should be left to the larger corporations. But the truth is, no matter the size of your company, if you’re in business, you need to think about branding.
To demystify branding, you could always hire an external marketing service. But a lot of small or new businesses don’t have the budget to do so. Branding budgets are a lot bigger for larger corporations, however, despite popular opinion, you don’t need to break the bank to start from scratch with an effective branding strategy.
Starting a small business can be confusing, it’s hard to know which branding activities will make an impact unless you run with them. This can be laborious, as branding is such an abstract concept. Thankfully, you can do many things to make your small business noticeable, get people interested, and leave an impact on the audience you want to reach, all without spending too much money.
You just need to know what to do and when to do it.
Learn how to define your brand identity, story, style guide, and social media on a budget in this guide. Read on to get started!
Establish Your Brand Identity
Brand identity refers to how you present your company to customers. If you think of your brand as a person, your brand identity would be its appearance and personality. Brand identity refers to distinct imagery and verbiage that will then influence the rest of your marketing.
Before you create a brand identity, you should conduct extensive research on your target audience’s interests. You should have a firm understanding of the associations your clients have with your business and what they appreciate about it.
If your company is new and doesn’t yet have a strong online presence, try social listening on your competitors. Examine the posts and mentions of your competitors to see how customers react to different language and visual choices.
Once you have an understanding of how your customers view your company, you can choose which parts you want them to continue associating with, or which ones you want to change.
Define your brand story
Your brand’s values, goals, and strategies to achieve said goals are what your brand story explains. As the name entails, these ideas are presented as a story to assist in relating your brand to your customers.
To create a compelling brand story, consider the following questions:
- What issue does my brand hope to address with its product or service?
- Why does my company want to address this problem? Is there something personal on the line?
- What are you doing right now to assist in resolving this issue?
- What practices do you intend to carry out in the future to continue working on the solution?
Bring all of your responses together on your website to tell the history and future of the brand and use this story throughout all your marketing.
Determine Your Brand’s Visuals
The visual elements of your brand identity consist of typography, logo, color design, and any imagery that will portray your company, such as company photos, stock images, or product photography.
Choose the fonts, logos, and colors that will represent your brand and keep them all in a file-sharing app for ease of access.
When choosing imagery for your organization, a lot of experts advise against using stock images as they are so widely used and have more likely been seen by customers before. Hiring a professional photographer to shoot your product photography or company imagery will increase customers’ respect and trust in your brand. Although it is a tiny bit more costly than finding low-cost or free stock images, it will help you create a visual identity and differentiate yourself from competitors.
Brand Your Social Media Presence
Posting consistent content and coming up with refreshing content ideas can be quite laborious. But establishing your small business’s social media branding can help. When you limit the kind of posts and language to use, creating material will be simpler and quicker.
This process entails packaging the branding elements you’ve established thus far for each of your social media platforms. Because each platform has its own set of best practices for content, scheduling, and format, you should keep track of how to relate your brand to each one.
To polish your brand you should have a social media style guide as it not only serves as a quick reference for anyone who manages your posts but also assists you in staying on top of your social media goals and processes.
Here is an example of a couple of points that should be included in your brand’s social media style guide:
- Post format for each platform: Do you use a separate line break for the lead-in and link? What size paragraphs are you going to use for longer-form platforms such as Instagram?
- Image and Video Usage: Are you using templates for multi-media posts? Are you using stock images or the more beneficial curated original images? Is there a pattern to the media you’re uploading?
- Your brand’s tone or voice in two lines: Explain what tone or voice your brand will be emitting when posting. If you’re using a different tone on individual platforms you should mention that as well.
- Language and Grammar rules: Mention what language and grammar rules you’d like to stick to in your posts and ask yourself questions such as are you using inclusive language? And if so, what kind? Are you using the oxford comma?
- Hashtag and emoji usage in posts per platform: Are you going to avoid emojis or hashtags altogether? If not, choose where and how you would want to use emojis and hashtags in your posts on each platform.
All the elements mentioned in this style guide are small on their own. But when you add them all together they create a distinct brand.
Final Thoughts
As a small business branding for the first time can seem very confusing—and expensive. But you really don’t need to break the bank to set up an effective brand. All you need is time, creativity, and the right guidance to help understand the complexity of branding.
Now you have an insight into how to effectively and inexpensively brand your small business, all you need to do is get out there and start branding.
