Branding Your Business

As a small business, you are most likely competing against big brands with loyal customers and sky-high marketing budgets. You may be wondering if you need to increase your advertising spend to keep up. It’s important to find ways to set yourself apart from the pack in today’s over-saturated commercial space.

According to a Nielsen survey, 59% of consumers prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them. Basically, people don’t trust messages from a brand they haven’t been exposed to before. Even if you are spending a lot of money on advertising, if your customers don’t know of you, they won’t trust you. Building brand credibility is essential to the success of your company. So how do you get started? Start with these 5 steps to build your brand.

Finding your brand tone isn’t as difficult as it seems. Think about the core purpose of your business, the message you want to send to consumers and the goals for the future you have. Some helpful questions to ask yourself might be:

These questions will help you formulate the core ideas surrounding your brand.

It’s also important to write out your company's mission and purpose statement consisting of your company's core values, purpose, and long term goals. The mission statement serves as an inspirational narrative for your team to find purpose in as well as a starting point for your marketing strategy.

In order to efficiently reach your customers, you need to find out as much as you can about your existing customers and potential customers who are visiting your website or store. The more you know about your customers, the easier it will be for you to create a marketing strategy that speaks and appeals directly to your market segment.

Once you have a firm grasp of who your customers are, begin to find out what motivates them and how to best tailor your products or services to their needs. A Harvard study found that 64% of people name “shared values” as the main reason they engage with a brand.

Values-driven marketing helps build loyalty which not only leads to repeat sales but also increases word-of-mouth referrals to your company. Creating a deep and meaningful customer experience directly strengthens your brand value with every customer.

Here are a few ideas to get you started researching what your customers’ needs and values could be:

• Go right to the source with surveys

• Analyze your competition with the SWOT approach

• Focus groups

• Creating buyer personas

• Social media listening (Hootsuite can help you listen to all your social channels)

• Keyword research Creating buyer personas

That’s how to create a growth cycle through branding and values. More people recognize your brand because you’re visible. Your brand becomes more visible when Google sees that people like your brand.

Take into account each element of your promotional strategy and see where there is an opportunity to unify your branding. If customers can easily recognize your brand consistently on all of your marketing, they are more likely to trust you. You will see the growth in your revenue as customer loyalty and referrals increase.

• Creating and maintaining a blog

• SEO optimizing your website

• Testing for website responsiveness

• Ensuring that your branding materials have a unified color scheme and your logo is present

• Posting company updates to social media

• Adding CTAs to your website, emails and social media messaging

• Create an advertising and promotional plan

Now that you have all the tools to create a killer branding guide, it’s time to implement it! Going above and beyond by taking the time to brand your business is important if you want to be remembered by your customers. Using personalized promotional products shows you know more about your clients than your competitors, and you care more, too.

Your use of custom promotional items allows customers to remember and recognize your unique brand instantaneously. This is one of the key reasons you should always consider distributing promotional items as part of your overall branding strategy. Thoughtful branding can have a huge impact on how your clients perceive you and the image of your business.

Sources:

1. Darwin, C., Darwin, C., Development, C., Charles, & Charles. (2019, December 3). 5 Reasons Why Promotional Products Are Crucial for Any Business. Retrieved from https://www.designhill.com/design-blog/reasons-why-promotional-products-are-crucial-for-any-business/

2. Jonathan Z. Berman, Alixandra Barasch, Emma E. Levine, Deborah A. Small. Impediments to Effective Altruism: The Role of Subjective Preferences in Charitable Giving. Psychological Science, 2018; 29 (5): 834

3. McDaniel, S., & Beger, S. (2016, January 7). Research on the $16.9 Billion Promo Products Industry: Why T-Shirts & Pens Can Outdo TV & Internet. Retrieved from https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/why-tshirts-pens-can-outdo

4. Promotional Research. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ppai.org/members/research/

5. S. A. G. E. (2019, May 20). 25 Insane (But True) Facts About Promotional Products. Retrieved from https://www.sageworld.com/blog/index.php/2015/04/30/25-insane-but-true-facts-about-promotional-products/