Your small business is critical to your future, and so marketing it is critical as well. When it comes to developing a brand for yourself in your community and online, you know there’s so much involved. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. You want it to be focused, but not too on-the-nose. You want it to be beautiful, but not cutesy. More than anything else, you know it needs to fit your company! How can you build a trusted brand, not just for now, but for the long term?
Show Your Brand’s True Self
In order to even begin considering building up your brand, you need to know what you’re branding. This includes not only knowing your products inside and out, but the sort of image that you want to project to the public. This often has basis in the individual company owner’s personality, which, after all, has already begun building this brand over time. Is it formal, or informal? Does your company joke benignly about itself or with others? Your brand’s true self will be the characterization of your brand which you show to the world. It’s important to know what you want the character of your business to be seen to be.
Learn How to Communicate
After you have an idea of how you want to be perceived as a brand/characterization of your business, next, you’ve got to do a deep dive to find out where your targeted demographic hangs out. If, for example, your market research shows that your purchases come mostly from teenage boys ages 16-20, and you’ve decided to market exclusively to sports bars where men 40-70 hang out, you’re not making wise communications decisions. Your marketing is determined by how and to whom you want to communicate, even online. Different individuals communicate in different forums of social media, and even at different times of the day, so your target needs to be communicated with by your brand in the places, and times, they hang out.
Put Together a Team of Driven Employees
Once you know more about your brand, and then about your target demographic, this leads you to who needs to be on your team. However, do not narrow yourself down too far. For example, just because your buying demographic in the past has been mostly Caucasian women 20-40, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have both a diversity specialist and team members who understand the needs of women of color as well. Your team’s personalities, however, will support or detract from your overall brand image. You want those who are trustworthy, who do good work, and who are approachable to those to whom you intend to sell.
Secure Your Business
Small and medium-sized businesses are the most vulnerable to IT breaches. There are multiple ways to secure your small business platform, and doing so from the start is the best practice. After all, you do NOT want to gain a reputation as that place the credit card information was stolen from, or that one place that got hacked last year! Do your due diligence now to protect customers later.
Logo
Modern logos need to fit a lot in a small package. They need to be instantly identifiable to the business, individual and unique. Moreover, they need to be simple enough to use in a social media bubble smaller than a dime, and yet link into the meaning of the brand itself! Minimalist designs, although trendy for a while, are actually less effective than you would think for marketing and brand recognition.
Honesty is Best
More than any other thing, the one thing which will cause your brand to be both recognizable and breed trust and loyalty is to have a good product and honest team members. Whether this means delivering products when you say you will, or whether it means providing the best quality products and materials, honorability is crucial. This includes fixing mistakes, which all businesses make from time to time, as quickly as possible. Utilizing tools like bots to begin customer service requests on your webpage, and having the ability to have a contact email on weekends (even if you don’t check it on weekends) can go a long way with customers who want the ability to constantly contact if there’s an issue. Knowing that you will take care of both delivering to your clients and any issues that might arise will give you excellent word of mouth in the marketplace, as honesty does.
Your business is growing, and you want to make sure that its start in the marketplace is a good one, which leads to many years of loyal repeat customers. Making sure to know your target demographic, and therefore your intended brand characterization, matters. This leads you to knowing where you want to communicate, and what logo you need!
Check out this article on ways to increase your interaction on social media!
