Small business branding: making your business iconic
/
Source: davisuko on Unsplash.
Branding is often considered a bit of a luxury expense, something for rich businesses with large coffers to indulge in. In reality, branding is a critical marketing component and indispensable if you want to catch your audience’s eye. Every business needs it, regardless of size. Furthermore, it doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive.
Here, we cover everything you need to know about small business branding, including what it is, why it’s important, how it’s communicated, and how to do it.
Understanding Brand, Brand Identity, and Branding
If you dispense with the marketing speak, your brand is, at its core, the essence or personality of your business. It’s not just your attributes and value proposition, but also how you operate, how you treat your customers, and what you stand for. It’s the difference between McDonald's and Burger King: Both brands make burgers, but they do it in their own inimitable way, in line with their unique values, style, and culture.
Brand, brand identity, and branding are three terms that are often used interchangeably. These terms have distinct meanings though, says Antevenio.
The brand is your business’ personality: Your business brand, as mentioned previously, is your business’ personality. It evokes a distinct emotional response in your audience, much like different people might in you.
Branding is the act of creating your brand: Branding is essentially crystallizing your brand’s personality to make it communicable to others. Essentially, it’s defining what your business stands for and then packaging it for your audience through visual and other means.
Your brand identity is the tangible elements of your brand: When you communicate your brand, you do it through tangible elements like logos, imagery, colors, words, positioning, interactivity, and even smell and taste. These elements work together to form your brand’s identity.
Why Do You Need to Brand?
Branding is critical primarily because it makes you memorable. It’s your hallmark or unique signature. With the right strategy, you position your business to be the next Apple, Mercedes, Amazon, or another iconic brand. If that doesn’t convince you, here are some other reasons you should consider branding:
Your Brand Makes Your Business Personable and Trustworthy
In business, trust is everything and is often engendered by your market reputation. With branding, you can make a powerful impression on everyone you come into contact with. It makes you look professional and put together. Through the brand’s conveyed meaning, it can be easier for people to identify with you and what you stand for, which is especially important in this day and age.
It Makes You Easier to Understand
With so many competing businesses offering similar services, it can be hard for potential customers to understand what makes you different – and why they should care. Branding allows you to better communicate what you stand for and what your unique value is, which in turn makes it easier to establish relationships with potential clients and customers.
It Gives You Pride
Branding can give your employees an image to hold on to, and bolster their sense of belonging. To give you an analogy, in the old days, noble houses used a coat of arms to distinguish their houses (and soldiers in battle). These symbols carried many meanings, were uniquely beautiful, and often inspired fierce devotion in their charges. It was a way for the people to identify with and relate to the noble house in question. With branding, you can mimic some of the effects.
It’s possible to get by without branding, but that’s what you’ll essentially be doing – getting by. People may still discover you by themselves, and they may not. Branding is the calling card that boosts your profile and cements your reputation.
The Brand Can Be Communicated at Every Touchstone
Even though a business’ brand is intangible, it can be communicated clearly at every touchstone or interaction you share with someone. This includes potential clients and customers and existing ones, starting from lead generation and ending at after-sales support. Brands are delivered consistently in two ways: visually (or tangibly) and personally.
Visually, your brand is communicated through your physical presence, marketing material, and other ways. This includes, but isn’t limited to, your marketing campaigns, website, email signature, company letterhead, business cards, envelopes, folders, and stationery.
In the personal sense, your brand also comes across in how you and your company interact with and do business with your customers. If your brand, for example, is all about premium customer service, your employees can embody that by being helpful and polite.
Formulating Your Brand: The Branding Process
Branding is a process that includes more than simply designing a brand logo, although that’s a part of it. It involves market research, setting up infrastructure, design, planning, implementation, and refinement. Every process is different but is meant to achieve the same thing – getting your brand across to everyone who interacts with it.
If this is your first time with branding, here’s how you can get started.
Do the Market Research
You’ll need to research your business, your competition, and the market. You have to know who your business is, what your goals are, and what you wish to achieve and stand for. You should also involve your employees and stakeholders here. Next, you need to have a strong grasp of your audience, what their motivations are, and how you can connect with them. Finally, you align with what works in the market.
Meet Some Basic Requirements
You need to have a basic foundation in place. This includes having a business, a website, a strong brand name, social media accounts, business listings, and optionally some design software. You will need resources to both create your brand identity and then communicate it.
Create Assets for the Brand Identity
Next, it’s time to create basic assets. This includes logos, color palettes, imagery, photos, taglines, and even interactive animations and other elements. The goal of the assets is to convey your brand identity with the three C’s of branding: clarity, consistency, and character.
Implement
Finally, there’s the implementation stage. Many brands do this officially, after careful consideration and planning, through press releases, meetings with stakeholders, full-fledged marketing campaigns, and other means. The branding should, with time, appear at every touchpoint, and also become a part of how you and your employees operate.
If you’re on a shoestring budget, look for free tools online that help you market your business and build your brand. For example, an online brochure design tool lets you use premade templates to create a customized brochure detailing your products and services. Simply choose from a variety of templates and edit in your copy and any graphic elements you need.
The branding process is never-ending. You will have to rinse, repeat, measure your brand’s reception (aka brand listening or social listening), and refine as you go. You can hire a professional or an agency to help you, as it can be a long-term, time-consuming endeavor.
Is DIY Branding an Option?
Branding can be expensive for small businesses. Is it possible for you to attempt the branding yourself? Although experts always add value and can offer great insight and knowledge, you should be able to handle the basics with enough time and research. At the very least, you will be able to do the design identity bit yourself. Many successful businesses, according to Spruce R.D., only reach out to upgrade their brand visually after they’ve been around for a while.
Get Some Freelance Help As Needed
If you don’t have time to figure out and research branding from scratch, you can opt for branding services on an as-needed basis. You can find freelance branding professionals on job boards, and they can provide you with a basic branding kit for a reasonable fee. For customized or advanced work, you can filter and hire professionals by reviews, delivery time, and cost.
Brands aren’t static but are a work in progress. The best ones adapt to changing market conditions and stay relevant. When engaged in branding, it’s important to take the long-term view and plan for the future. Your brand may be relatively unknown now, but that may not always be the case. Imagine your future and let your brand help you get there.
