Branding
A brand is more than your logo. It represents the totality of your business – what you do, but more importantly, who you are. Your brand is a guarantee of sorts, reassuring your customer that not only will you deliver as promised, but that the experience of doing business with you conforms to their lifestyle. In short, your brand identity should reflect the values, concerns, and pleasures of its client base with every aspect of its external message.Here is a major advantage that small businesses have over large corporations – no large company can possibly get to know their customers on the personal level that most small business owners can. Establishing trust and building relationships is what strong branding is all about.
Unfortunately, most small businesses usually cede ground to big business because they have poorly formed self-conceptions, whereas corporations have teams of professionals whose sole responsibility is crafting an image that conforms to an ideal. Most small businesses are usually experts in their field, but pay little to no attention to their outer persona, and often end up appearing anywhere from mom-and-pop to substandard. Occasionally a long-term business can get away with a thirty year-old marketing campaign because they’ve become such staples of the community, but it an exception that proves the rule.
Be engaging. Tell a story – your story. And like every good storyteller, you need to set the mood (your aesthetics), put forth a plot (problem and solution) and most importantly, have a theme. Your theme, simply put, should be a reflection of the spirit of your business: your values, your quality, and your promise to your to customers. After all, brands are promises between businesses and their clients. Solidify your brand identity, and you’ll solidify your brand loyalty.
Niche Markets
In the past it was more difficult for smaller entities to cater to odd tastes or discerning predilections and remain sustainable, or even get noticed. Factors from storage space to advertising required many businesses to cater to the lowest common denominator, just to turn a profit. Splashy local ads or loud announcers were methods to stand out among the flood of commercials just trying to get noticed. It left little room for subtlety or authenticity.
Today the opposite is true. Thanks to the nature of the internet, niche markets not only prosper, they proliferate. Search engines like Google are enormous databases of intentions – that is, people are intently and actively searching for specific products and services. The task of the small business marketer is to be at the right place online, so that it can be discovered – and the easiest way to do that is to stand out.
Brand Aesthetics
After creating a brand, you’ll need a look that complements it. The aesthetics of your brand include your company colors, logo, storefront, website, business cards, and brochures. Make sure that all your marketing pieces have inherent consistency and reflect your brand.