Here Are 8 Effective Branding Tips For Small Businesses
To compete in business and stand out from the crowd you must build a brand so here are 8 top branding tips for small businesses.
Hi Trish Davies here, Australia’s top business coach and personal branding expert. I understand the importance of brand identity to create awareness within the consumer and business to business marketplaces. All of my businesses are built on the foundation of establishing authority through branding.
Therefore, I want to focus on what it takes to create a reputable brand in today’s competitive economy. Now you may be at the point of starting your new business venture or have an existing business. Either way these branding tips for small businesses will help you to become recognised as the go to person.
Branding is important on many fronts for your business so that you can have a positive impact on your customers. Your businesses message will outline the commitments you have to your audience and will define your purpose.
I came across this quote from the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. He quotes “Branding for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn recognition by trying to do hard things well”!
That is a very powerful statement and is what you want your audience to feel about you and your business. What I am going to share with you today will help you live up to that statement. The tips I will share will be invaluable to you and help you establish your position within your industry. I will help you further by sharing a resource that I have created which systemises the process of branding your business. More on that shortly.
My Branding Tips For Small Businesses Starts With Transparency
Great brands are built on transparency, so people know who you are and what you do. Your story is one of the biggest things that you can leverage when starting your business and your brand.
I like to refer to it as being authentic and with that comes no grey areas. When you position yourself in your niche you want to tell the world everything about you. Tell it as it is and don’t leave any skeletons in the cupboard.
Believe me it is so much easier just being you instead of trying to create a fake persona. Your audience is full of very savvy and intelligent people. They will research you to see if you are the real deal. That research is made a lot easier through technology, so they simply need to go online.
When they find out you are real, raw, and authentic then you will earn their trust. Trust is hard to earn but easy to break so don’t try and pull the wool over their eyes. If you do then it will come back to haunt you and there is no going back.
Define Your Audience
Your audience is where your customers will come from. That audience will be made up of people who are similar in many ways. In many respects your audience will be a representation of you so put yourself at the forefront.
Then what you can do is focus on that one person. In effect your audience of many will be just one person. When you drill down this deep you will find your target audience. It doesn’t matter if people on the fringes don’t buy your products and services so don’t let that worry you.
When you know who your ideal customer is then you can craft your brand message to that person. The result will be that you attract the people you want because they are aligned with your brand.
Establish Your Authority
Your authority stems from your experience and expertise. What you know and how you can help people with their problems. That authority is within you which just needs fine tuning to help you stand out.
Authority is also status and the best example is that when you want to find out something your “Google” it. Google is the biggest search engine in the world, but they started out very small. Through the service they have provided they have earnt the right to be positioned at number one. They are trusted to deliver what their uses expect, and this is what you must establish.
To help you do this you must develop an online presence. It is no good telling people how good you are if they can’t find you online. The first thing you must do is establish an authority website which teel people who you are, what you do and how you can help them.
Fill that website with as much value as you can. You do this through the content you create through your formal pages and articles that you publish. Those articles are refereed to as blog posts.
When you publish blog posts they must be in long form. Meaning that the days are long gone when you could just throw up a few hundred words. Google and the other search engines expect to see blog posts of around 1200 – 1500 words.
The reason is that they are delivering a service to their users of providing the best quality information possible. When they see your posts are long, in-depth, and full of high-quality information they will reward you. The reward is being listed within their search results because they recognise your expertise and see you as an authority.
Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
One important thing to point out when it comes to your authority website is to make sure it’s mobile friendly. Mobile, or cell, phones are highly sophisticated pieces of kit and most people use them for browsing. Therefore, your website must look the part when they land on it through their phone. If it doesn’t then they will click off and go to your competitors.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is one of the biggest things to impact people’s lives over the last 20 years. What started out as a platform for people to socially connect has now become a marketing goldmine for business owners.
I have mentioned that authority stems from presence online so you must leverage social media. The temptation would be to go and create profiles on every platform under the sun. You can do that but to get the most benefit out of social media you must be strategic.
Your audience will hang out more on certain platforms so you must establish which ones. Then create your profiles and start linking everything together. There will be opportunities to have social buttons on your authority website linking to your profiles.
On your profiles you will have links to your website so after time you will create a network of profiles. This helps people find you but also builds your brands identity on many platforms.
Convert Your Audience Into Subscribers
Having a social media following is great and it is something that you must build up. You must leverage your profiles to build databases that you control. Relying on social media platforms for your marketing is a dangerous strategy. You must look at social media to make people aware of who you are and what you can do for them.
Then you want to engage with them to convert them into subscribers. At this point you have got their trust, so they commit to giving you their contact details. As soon as this happens, they have given you permission to contact them on a regular basis.
You must do this to keep them engaged with you. To achieve this, you send them value through your emails which further establishes your authority and develops your brand identity within them.
You can send them a monthly newsletter, your latest blog posts, or videos on YouTube. The point is not to forget about them after all the hard work you have put in to get them in the first place.
Branding Tips For Small Business Requires Marketing Investment
Up to now I have spoken about how to establish you authority though your authenticity. I have also covered important elements on how to attract your ideal audience.
For you to get serious traction with building your brand identity you must invest in marketing. There are two ways you can do this, either through free or paid marketing strategies.
The best way to do free marketing is through blogging and creating value driven videos on YouTube. You can also use social media to publish updates about your business. Although this is free in monetary terms it stills requires investment in your time.
The quickest way to build your brand identity is through investing money in advertising and marketing. You can do this in numerous ways.
All social media platforms offer paid marketing services. You must learn the processes on how to use them otherwise it will be an expensive learning curve. The search engines also offer the same services and there are many other platforms that you can use.
The benefit of this is that you will get far more people to see your content. Therefore, your brand identity will gain more exposure.
How I Can Help You Build Your Brand
At the start of this post I promised to talk about a process that I have created to help you build your brand. For the best part of a year now I have been creating a personal branding training program.
It is called Build Your AU and concentrates on authenticity, authority, and audience. I will extract from you all the information you need to build these three pillars. These three pillars are the foundation to creating your own world class brand.
By the end of the process you will position yourself as the expert in your field and attract people looking for your solutions. The best way for you to see how it can help you is by registering for a complimentary video series.
The video series is a compilation of previous mastermind recordings which shows my members building their brands. To learn more about this process please click on the image below.
I hope that you have taken value from the branding tips for small businesses that I have shared with you today. They all help to establish your brand and my Build Your AU training program will piece everything together for you.
Helping you build your authenticity, authority and audience.
Trish Davies
Build Your AU
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