How to brand your small business in a field where branding isn’t commonplace
Facts are facts. Branding your small business is extremely important and also very tricky depending on what kind of business you are operating. For example, if you have an eCommerce business selling vintage clothing, your brand concept would depend on what niche you are trying to serve, the style of the clothing, your marketing budget, long term goals and more. But once you have a clear definition of that then your branding strategy can be relatively straightforward. Same goes for a restaurant, what clientele are you attempting to pull in, what kind of food are you serving, quality, etc. But what if you are running a small business where branding can be looked at as not necessary in that industry sector? Accountants, auto shops, lawyers, tutors, psychological and sociological care – these are the kinds of business where branding can be quite tricky, and even frowned upon by your peers/competition. Here’s how to navigate that and create a brand anyway.
Define your approach
What approach do you want to take in branding your business? Whether it’s an all business/serious brand, humor bases, service oriented, innovative and bold, aggressive, etc., you have to consider your target audience and ensure you are touching the nerve of their psyche to grab the necessary attention. But if you are running a small accounting firm, for example, there could be various elements making it difficult to create that image. You have to be able to utilize your understanding of the industry you operate in, the clientele you are trying to serve and the product you are offering in order to build value in it and then portray that value to the potential customer.
Get to the point
One of the keys to approaching branding your small business is defining the reasons for the brand and how you are going to use it. A company selling specialty items for cameras, for example, can develop the brand around the need for the product and the personality of the marketing approach. Perhaps a humor focused campaign with a catchy slogan or an approach that shows the strength of a clip that holds the camera on your waistband. But a psychiatrist may experience problems branding around the ‘need’ for their services. Certainly a humor bases approached is likely to fall on its head. Instead the brand needs to be ever so gently positioned to get the attention of possible clients to use the service.
Using the Social Medias to position your brand
For small business owners such as lawyers, freelance educators, accountants there may be no better place than the social medias to appropriately develop and enhance the outreach of the brand. That’s because social medias like Facebook pound users with data everyday and owners of these kinds of business can capitalize on trial and error without effecting their brand much. A branding effort can go up one day and be pulled down the next with very little retention of that information being retained by potential customers. Using micro segmenting the business can cater each branding effort to the clientele type they are trying to reach and make real time changes on the fly. It’s not like you have to reprint marketing collateral or throw away all those business cards you just purchased.
Watch the trends and adapt
In a modern Social Media based approach it is key to watch the trends as it relates to your industry and be flexible enough to make key changes. Those tied into Internet trending realize how volatile the trends are and understand that being on the forefront of that can help you beat your competitors to the punch of branding your business. For example, if you follow the viral news charts and pages like Reddit you develop ear for what is coming down the pike from current internet users and eventually can begin predicting which ones are going to blow up. Using all the information out there being provided by the trending data to your advantage allows you to pinpoint the style of your approach you need to take. A small law firm can capitalize on a niche market by identifying the needs that are most current and then branding to that need.
Consult the pros
Don’t be afraid to outsource some help on what it takes to create brand that brings in the clicks. Because it is all about the clicks, and if you are engulfed in your small business you may not be keeping up with how to maximize that click. Hiring a professional that knows how to identify the raw numbers, adjust the marketing plan and increase the click through rate can help you theorize a brand concept that fits into that model.
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