Your business can be just “another” car dealership, real estate agency, accounting office, insurance broker…
Try branding your business to inspire confidence, security, trust, even happiness! Developing a good business brand will make people WANT to do business with you. One of the first things you need to do when branding your business is establish your uniqueness.
What can you say about your business that will attract the attention of your potential customers?
Are your products unique? Are your prices better? Do you have additional or add-on services not found any other place? What is interesting about your business? Why would you buy from you?
Whatever way you choose to
Establish your image, express your image, advertise your image, maintain your image.
As a small business you can use your local status to beat out the major brands. But it is up to you to give your customers a good reason to come to you. What makes you different or better than your big box competitor are somethings to consider when making YOUR brand.
People like to save money, yes, but they still prefer to
How to Brand Your Business
Building your business website – make it nice.
Cheap, slow, non-responsive, and looking like your 12 year old nephew did it while playing on his XBox, won’t help you impress people with your brand. Websites really don’t have to cost that much to still look great. Let us know if you need one and I’ll be happy to fix you up.
A website needs to be: easy to navigate, nice to look at, and simple to find your contact information.
Business Logo – simple and adaptable
Your logo should incorporate your colours and be simple enough to be recognizable. If you are updating or modernizing an old logo make sure you use this as an opportunity to re-brand using several media sources.
Coming up with new logo ideas can include your customers and followers. For example you could have a contest to see who comes up with the best idea. Or use a service to have several professionally styled logos designed and then have your customers vote.
Branding Your Business Name
The first rule is to be consistent across all advertising and marketing channels.
Once you have agreed to that rule then you are ready to follow the steps necessary to carve out your unique business brand.
Step 1
Decide, and agree on, what is the purpose of your business? WHY are you in business? If it is just because you would rather not work for a dick boss? Although common among entrepreneurs, that probably isn’t enough to brand you. If it’s because you only want to work a couple of jobs a week and working for an employer was TOO MUCH work – then you are probably not reading this page anyway.
To help you come up with some branding ideas for your business, write out these questions and find the answers. You and your business partner and maybe even your employees can have a round-table discussion.
- 1. What do you do?
2. How is what or how you do what you do, different, unique, or better than your competitor?
3. Why are you in business, why do you exist?
4. What positive changes do you bring to your customers?
Step 2
What image do you want people to have when they think of you? When they hear your name on the radio what do you want them to think about?
This image needs to be solid. Whether it is your customer, a supplier, or a competitor, you want that each of them think of you the same way. Continuity goes a long way lending itself to TRUST! If everyone is getting the same message then people will
Step 3
Choose your words carefully.
Write out a list of characteristics you want your business to project.
Communicate this list to your sales and service representatives so they also project your brand and carry your image to the public. There is no point in telling people you are “friendly” when you employ have a rude receptionist.
If your employees aren’t projecting your desired branding image – get rid of them.
Step 4
Positioning. Now you need to do some intensive market research. Who are your competitors, what are they competing on, what are their big money makers, what are YOUR big money makers?
Here you need to come up with a good strategy to follow that will push your brand to the top.
Step 5
Making it happen.
You have made the decisions now it’s time to make the commitment and ACT! Putting your plan into action will require you start spending. Maybe you don’t have much to spend at the start but just get started on what you can.
The Cost of Branding Your Business Name
How much does it cost to brand your business?
That’s like asking “How much does it cost to take a trip?” It all depends on what you want, what you are starting with, and how big do you want to get?
If you have big goals then go for it. Maybe you don’t have the budget to do it ALL right away, but the more you do, the more you grow, the more money you will have to keep putting into your dreams.
You can
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*How big do you want to be?
*How large of a territory do you want to service?
*Will your business brand carry the weight even if you aren’t there?
Important things you need to build your brand are:
A well thought out advertising budget for online and offline. Test your ROI on each media outlet. Scattering your advertising like you were feeding corn to chickens MIGHT (likely not) be effective. Worse still, if the buckshot method DID bring results, you have no way to know what worked and what didn’t.
Your marketing also needs to be tiered and connected to capture your leads. The focus is to pull prospective customers into your sales funnel.
Website, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, Newspaper, Direct mail, email campaigns, Radio, Video – all of it – needs to be included for an EFFECTIVE business branding campaign.
Your budget is important when it comes to selecting “what next”. Often the front-end costs are most expensive. Setting up a new website, developing a new logo, creating effective ad-copy, establishing and testing marketing headlines, landing pages, pre-sell pages etc.
It is important to keep testing returns, but after the first few months a lot of the BIG expenses won’t need to be repeated.
Test and track everything. Put more into what is working and less into what isn’t.
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