A Few Tips For Small Business Branding
A common mistake small business owners make is confusing marketing and branding as the same thing. This article will help you understand the differences between marketing and branding and develop a strategy you can implement in your own business.
As a small business, you need to maximize all your time and efforts to make sure you’re getting the best return on investment. Part of this means having a clear direction and understanding of what you need to be doing to brand your business.
Branding vs. Marketing
Marketing is what brings customers to your front doors to buy your products or services. Branding will help the customer determine if you’ll be the only business they’ll buy that specific product or service from for the rest of their life. If you’d like to learn more about branding and developing a brand strategy, check out this article by Entrepreneur.
The primary goal of branding is to increase your customer loyalty. You want your customers to stay with you as long as your doors are open for business. Effective branding can also significantly increase your profit margins.
There are dozens of ways to brand your business and the methods you choose will be dependent on what industry you’re in, your budget, and how much time and effort you can dedicate to growing your brand.
How To Brand Your Business
A key component to your branding is that your image and presentation needs to be consistent throughout all forms of marketing and advertising channels.
That means your business cards, brochures, and even invoices need to have a consistent style and tone. The more consistent you are with your your tone and style in your branding, the more trust you will build with your customers.
For example, if you’re in need of a plumber, you’ll do a search on Yelp and find a local plumber. You see that their logo is a hummingbird and their theme colors are red, black, and white.
But once you click over to their website, you see a brown, black, and red theme website and instead of a hummingbird, they now have an eagle as their logo.
This is confusing and inconsistent and it certainly does not establish trust in the customer’s mind.
You don’t want your customers thinking about your colors and why your logo is different. That will add unnecessary friction to the buying process and you can potentially lose out on a customer.
You want your customers to have the exact same experience with your business at every interaction.
Maintain Your Quality Brand
You want to make sure you’re conveying the same message and personality, whether you’re making a TV commercial, buying ads in the newspaper, running an advertising campaign online, or simply handing out brochures.
Even though you may have a few subtle changes within your business, it can potentially add up to customers passing on your products or services simply because your branding is not consistent.
Branding Checklist
Here is a checklist you can go through to make sure all your branding efforts are consistent:
[su_list icon=”icon: check” icon_color=”#22770b”]
- Do your business cards, flyers, and brochures follow the same theme and branding tone?
- Do your social media accounts like Facebook, and Google+ have the same descriptions, logos, and themes?
- Do all your visuals like banners and photos have the same tone and style?
- Do your public listings like Yelp and Angie’s List contain the same information and logos?
[/su_list]
If you need a company to handle all your print media such as brochures, flyers, or business cards, contact one of the friendly print experts at Lone Star Quick Print. Contact us today at 281-440-1935 or contact us online to learn how we can help your business.