One of the biggest challenges when starting a new small business is building your brand. Having a strong brand identity will give you the best chance of competing with bigger companies by defining your business and showing your target audience what you’re all about.
Building your brand won’t be easy, but it is important that you persevere if you want to make it in the business world. Here are some very simple things you can do to start building your brand right now.
Define Your Brand
Before you can build your brand, you need to define it. You need to work out exactly where your company fits in the market and you need to conduct market research to find out what kind of branding is likely to appeal to your target market and grow your customer base.
Make it Emotive
Brands should provoke an emotional response in people. They should be able to look at your website or your marketing materials and immediately get a feel for what you’re about. For this to happen, you need to give your brand an identity and inject lots of character into your content. It might be a good idea to hire a professional creative copywriter to help you with this.
Look After Your Customers
If you want to successfully build your brand, you need to focus on keeping your customers happy so that they will stick with you over the long-term. This means that you should never promise anything you can’t deliver and you should absolutely not make claims about your brand, its identity and its ethics that are untrue.
Be Consistent
You can only achieve a recognizable brand if you are consistent in everything you do. The ads on your website should be in the same tone and style as the ads on your mobile billboards, and the tone of your brand’s voice should be the same across the board. Obviously, you don’t want to be doing the same thing over and other again, so remember it’s the tone, the color and the feel of your stuff that has to be the same, not the content.
Do Your Own Thing
It can be tempting as a small business to copy the competition in order to get a foot in, but this is a really bad idea. After all, you’re not going to be able to compete with the big boys like Apple and Coca-Cola, and you shouldn’t try. You should develop your own unique style and aim at selling to people who value independent businesses. If you try to mimic the competition, you’re portraying that you have no real identity of your own.
Don’t Overdo It
Instead of going all out trying to get your brand everywhere and plastering it on everything you can, try to create some mystery about your brand. Avoid doing the obvious thing, and you will find that more people are intrigued by your efforts, and therefore are much more likely to engage with your company in a meaningful way.
kingteeuhh says
I definitely think this is a solid list of tips. Takes a lot of hard work though!