When most people start their small business, they generally spend their time setting up documents, figuring out pricing, nailing down their products and services, then finding customers. Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much time and energy to focus on small business marketing and the small business branding. However, your brand may arguable be one of the most important things for your business to nail down.
So what’s the difference between a business and a brand you might be wondering? A business is the company that sells products/services. A brand is the vision and personality of a company. In a lot of scenarios, the business and the brand can overlap, and rightfully so since they are working cohesively together.
To read more about the difference between a business and a brand and why branding is so important head over to my previous blog HERE.
Ready to get your small business branding ball rolling (say that three times fast!)? Here are five things to consider when creating a strong brand image from a small business marketing expert:
1. VISUALLY UNIQUE – Your brand should visually evoke excitement and interest. Did you know that different colors conjure up different emotions? For example, the color blue symbolizes serenity and inspiration; purple symbolizes royalty and innovation; and yellow symbolizes optimism and friendship. Find a color that speaks to your business and run with it! You also want to stay away from a brand image that is similar to your competitors. Let your brand set you apart from the rest.
2. CONSISTENCY – Consistency is key when creating a strong brand. It’s important to nail down your color stories, font patterns and imagery and then use those assets across everything you do. The more consistent your brand is, the bigger, stronger and more trustworthy your business will appear to be.
3. GET SOCIAL – Social media has easily become one of the strongest marketing resources that businesses have. What does your social media feed look like? Like I stated above, it should implement all your brand consistency with images, fonts and colors. When looking at your feed it should look like one on-going story and not a hundred different thoughts merged together. An easy trick to doing this is finding one filter for all your images to give them the same look-and-feel.
4. MESSAGING – When you have a strong mission and overall brand, it helps you keep the messaging to your customers concise and simple. Think about advertisements you see on billboards and magazines, the ones that get the more attention are generally the simplest ones. Why? Because they’re not asking you to digest many messages, just one. Our eyes only look at those ads for two seconds, people will remember your brand, not your sales pitch.
5. FIND AN EXPERT – Not everyone has a visually minded brain and can see an overall look-and-feel of a business. That’s why there are many experts out there that can help you nail down your branding and make your business come to life. Small business marketing experts are out there and can analyze what steps you need to take to make the most out of your branding.
It’s never too late to implement a brand or re-brand your business. And if you need help along the way, STAK Marketing is here to help. Until then…
Keep STAKing,
Michelle Johnson
Owner/Founder STAK Marketing
Michelle Johnson is the owner, founder and Chief Marketing Guru at STAK Marketing. Our passion at STAK Marketing is to create beautiful STAKs of marketing strategies that help small businesses grow and reach their goals. STAK Marketing's expertise ranges from SEO to branding, e-mail marketing to social media management, PR to advertising and much more - making STAK Marketing a one-stop-shop for all your small business marketing needs .