As a small business owner or manager, you may have wondered about investing in branding or have already taken steps toward enhancing your brand presence.

Or, you might be wondering why you should bother spending time branding your business, product, or service.

Many businesses often think branding is about making your marketing and promotional materials look nice, or creating a logo to slap on your social media profile.

Yes, visual elements do help in establishing your brand, but that’s a very small part of the branding process.

Let’s break down the role of branding for your small business and how investing in branding can help drive your growth.

BENEFITS OF BRANDING

If you think about your own experience as a client, customer, or consumer, you may feel strongly about a certain brand of product, service, or company.

What do you like about them? The packaging, the ingredients, the effectiveness, customer service? Those are all things that branding communicates to you.

When you invest time and resources into establishing your brand, you communicate the value that you provide.

Awareness and Recognition

Some brands’ visual elements or taglines are so insidious that you’d know them anywhere. But you don’t need a giant marketing budget for your target market to know you.

Adding branding into your marketing mix helps create recognition and awareness so that when someone sees your business, they remember who you are and what you do.

Having strong visual elements that are consistently and cohesively represented across your business’ mediums – websites, social profiles, printed literature, etc. – creates greater visibility among your audiences.

Competitor Differentiation

Think about your main competitors. Can you visualize their brand, website, social profiles, building signage, or other things about them? If the answer is yes, those are all elements of their brand.

Establishing your brand presence provides you with an opportunity to stand out from your competitors with a look and feel that’s 100% uniquely you.

If a potential customer is looking for a product or service that you provide, branding helps them choose you over someone else.

Customer Trust and Loyalty

When done right, your brand tells your business’s story so that customers feel like they know you, and therefore can trust you.

And as you’ve probably experienced yourself, when you trust a brand you feel more loyalty to their products and services.

Branding communicates why you matter to your target market, driving loyalty and return customers.

Employee Engagement

A well-developed and thoughtful branding strategy should also be shared with your staff so they’re inspired to help drive your vision forward.

Just like customers, employees want to support businesses they feel good about, so make sure they know your story.

By communicating your brand’s mission and vision with your employees, you include them in the effort to be your brand ambassadors.

Developing your brand strategy

Creating a memorable brand helps clients and potential customers remember your business, but how do you get started building your brand strategy?

Our biggest tips to get started are:

  • Think about your customers and what matters to them first.
  • Brainstorm visual ways to show the value you provide.
  • Make a list of all the different ways that you can communicate with your audiences.

Branding can have a major impact on your business growth and revenue, so we recommend that you work with experts in marketing and communications who can help you assess and develop your brand strategy.

LET Us help tell your story

Whether you want to build a new brand or refresh your existing brand, our team will help create visual elements and messaging that illustrate your value.

We’re a team of experts assembled to fulfill your business needs however you want, wherever you want, and we have the knowledge and experience to grow your business through equal parts strategy and creativity.

Through our unique brand assessment process, we’ll help you evaluate your current brand assets (logos, colors, taglines, images) and identify how you can leverage your current brand or make changes to reach more customers.

We help clients like you expand your reach with a range of marketing services that include:

  • Marketing Strategy & Consultation
  • Brand Assessment & Development
  • Social Media Management
  • Digital Advertising
  • Writing & Content Generation
  • Marketing Project Management
  • Web Design & Development

Let our team of marketing and branding experts help you establish your brand.

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