Online Brand Building for Small Business Growth

As a small business owner, you have a lot to think about in regard to running your company and building your brand. An essential factor in your business plan is how you appeal to your target audience.

We’re talking about your brand’s image–and that’s where brand building for small business growth comes into play.

Not only does your branding communicate to potential clients why you are a trusted option—it's how you make your business stand out from the crowd.

But with the countless options available in an oversaturated market of choices, how do you ensure your brand actually does stand out from the crowd? Why should the consumer choose your business? What elements contribute to an effective brand image?

In the beginning, you'll undergo a ton of trial and error trying to figure out what works and what doesn't–that's totally normal. We’re simply here to help you calibrate your compass and find true north. So, are you ready to embark on a successful brand-building journey?

We believe you are! (and we believe in you!)

Along the way, we’ll offer 11 time-tested tips and a few nifty tricks. We’ll also share some branding principles to consider as you trudge toward the summit of your business branding expedition.

So grab your water bottle and a few snacks, and let's hit the trail!

What Is Online Branding for Small Businesses?

Brand building for small business is the process of creating your brand's image and voice through logos, marketing materials, color schemes, slogans, and other identifying factors.

11 Branding Tips for Small Business Expansion

Okay–so you know a little about online branding and why it's crucial to your company's growth. But how do you ensure success in your business branding journey?

Check out these eleven tips to successfully brand your business and reach higher peaks than your competition!

1. Develop a Memorable Business Name and Logo

An essential step in successfully branding your small business is to develop a notable name and memorable logo. Your brand name should be something personal to you and your product. At the same time, you don’t want your brand to be confused with other existing players in your targeted marketplace. Make it unique and hard to imitate.

Here are a few elements to consider:

1. Maintain Simplicity: A simple name and logo are easy to remember and recognize. Avoid complex designs or names that are difficult to pronounce or spell.
2. Keep It Relevant: Your brand name and logo should be relevant to your business and the products or services you offer. It should convey what your business is about clearly and concisely.
3. Make It Unique: Your brand name and logo should stand out from your competitors. Avoid generic names and designs that blend in with other businesses in your industry.
4. Use Colors Effectively: Colors can evoke emotions and create a mood for your brand. Choose colors that are consistent with your brand personality and convey the message you want to send.
5. Keep It Timeless: Your brand name and logo should be able to stand the test of time. Avoid using trends that will quickly become outdated.

By following these tactics, you can develop a memorable brand name and logo to help your business stand out and make a lasting impression on your customers.

Pro Tip: Using a service like Canva can help you maintain brand uniformity across multiple media channels and marketing efforts.

2. Develop a Catchy Slogan

Another crucial factor in brand building for small business is to create a catchy slogan. You want your slogan to be memorable and to roll off the tongue easily. You can create a solid mental impact on your customers and community by developing a short, catchy slogan. You may be surprised by the impact this has through word-of-mouth alone.

Here are some tactics for developing a memorable slogan for your business.

1. Keep It Short and Simple: A great slogan should be short and easy to remember. Aim for a few words that capture the essence of your brand and what sets it apart from others.
2. Highlight Your Unique Selling Proposition: Your slogan should communicate your unique selling proposition (USP) or what sets your business apart from others. Ensure it communicates why your business is different and why customers should choose your brand over others.
3. Use Humor: If appropriate for your brand and industry, using humor can help create a memorable slogan that resonates with customers.
4. Use Emotion: A great slogan should evoke an emotional response from customers. It should connect with them on a deeper level and make them feel something.
5. Make It Consistent: Your slogan should be consistent with your brand identity, values, and messaging. It should reflect the tone and voice of your brand and be aligned with your marketing strategy.

3. Determine Your Brand’s Target Audience

When determining how to market your brand most effectively, you’ll want to consider the ideal target audience for your products. To find these demographics, picture who you're trying to sell to. These could be middle-aged men interested in yard equipment or young women fascinated with art.

By targeting your audience, you present your brand to the exact types of people willing to buy your goods or services. This also helps you determine what is or isn't working for your company.

4. Examine Your Brand’s Closest Competitors

Remember that you will likely face a competitive marketplace when first brand building for your small business venture, so checking out the competition is crucial. Ask yourself a few simple questions.

1. How are they branding?
2. What does their company value?
3. What marketing tools are they implementing?

Learn from your competition, implement their skills, and put your own unique twist on them to create a better version of what others offer.

5. Establish Your Small Business’s Personality

Your small business's personality is a way to make people feel emotionally connected to your company. It personifies who you are as a company and influences the consumer's opinion of you. When you have a strong understanding of your small business’s personality, you can offer a consistent, unique, and authentic message across the board.

Does your small business’s personality reverberate in the consumer's mind? Consider the following questions:

1. Is your company transparent?
2. Are you identifiable or memorable?
3. Do you embrace authenticity in your business’s attitude?

*Stackia reports that 88% of consumers believe authenticity is an important factor when purchasing from a brand.

6. Cling To Steadfast Originality and Consistency

Brand building for small business boils down to consistency. Having a brand that is original, relatable, and consistent will bring you and your business to the forefront of your client’s minds. You want people to talk about your brand, as well as have new people continually hear about it. Good word of mouth, combined with a persistently positive reputation, leads to the consistency and growth of your business.

Here are a few other reasons why originality and consistency go such a long way.

1. You Will Build Trust: Consistency helps to build trust with customers. When your brand is consistent in its messaging, branding, and values, it creates a sense of reliability and credibility with your customers. When customers know what to expect from the brand–trust, and loyalty are almost always the result.
   
2. You Will Build Emotional Connection: Originality helps you build an emotional connection with your customers. When your brand is original, you can evoke an emotional response from your customers.
   
3. You Will Build Brand Equity: Consistency and originality help you build your brand equity. When your brand is consistent, it creates a strong and recognizable brand identity. This is essential for increasing the value of your brand over time.
   

7. Use Social Media, Email, and Blogging To Boost Reach

One key way to promote your small business is to set up your business's social media accounts. Doing this allows you to have multiple platforms to reach out to potential customers, as well as to promote any sales or specials.

Social Media Marketing

By leveraging the power and influence of social media, you can promote your business through targeted advertising. This tactic considers your audience's demographics and targets similar individuals with the same interests and information. You’ll directly focus your marketing efforts on them in order to increase sales and traffic.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is another highly effective and cost-efficient marketing tool that is particularly valuable for small businesses. By sending regular emails (better yet–capitalizing on automation as you scale), you can keep your customers informed about new products or services, promotions, and industry news.

You’ll also obtain measurable marketing results, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This essential data can help you refine your marketing strategies and improve your overall return on investment (ROI).

Blog Marketing

Blogging is a vital element of your small business marketing strategy if you want to drive organic traffic to your website. When you create valuable content for your audience (in conjunction with following the best SEO practices), search engines will be more likely to recommend your page over the competition.

Leveraging a company blog is one of the best methods you can use for developing your brand’s voice. You’ll showcase your expertise and knowledge in your industry by providing valuable insights and advice to your readers. This alone can begin establishing your brand as the trusted authority in your field.

If all that is not reason enough, your company blog provides valuable content to share in your email campaigns and social media. You’ll actively build your social media following and increase brand awareness as a result–three birds, one stone. Talk about efficiency!

8. Make Your Online Content Shareable

To piggyback on the aforementioned tactic, it’s smart to make your website and social media pages shareable. Posting consistent content (especially interactive posts) for your audience gives them the option to share your pages.

This simple practice promotes your business to more people and will indirectly widen your audience. Another bonus of using this tactic is that it lowers your marketing costs. People will share your content organically instead of you having to rely solely on paid advertising. It’s yet another win-win situation. The folks out there will benefit from your products or services, and you’ll reach these new audiences without having to spend as much on advertising.

9. Always Deliver Value

If you’ve ever flown through the airways, you might know a thing or two about less-than-stellar service. Where is your luggage anyway? Bottom line–don’t lose your customer’s luggage.

You want your brand to be known for its goods and services and their value. This makes customers want to come back or tell others about it. Maintaining the value of your products or services shows care–ultimately creating trust and brand loyalty.

Consider these benefits of always delivering value to your customers.

1. Build Customer Loyalty: When you consistently deliver value to your customers, it builds customer loyalty. Customers who feel they are getting value from your products or services are more likely to remain loyal to your brand and become repeat customers.
2. Increase Customer Satisfaction: Delivering value to your customers helps to increase their satisfaction with your brand. When customers are satisfied, they are more likely to recommend your brand to others and leave positive reviews, which can help attract new customers.
3. Increase Revenue: Delivering value to your customers can increase revenue. When customers perceive the value of your products or services to be high, they are more likely to pay a premium price for them. This can increase your revenue and profitability.

10. Embrace Open Communication

People love a good customer service experience–and they want to trust the brands they love. Remember that bit about the runaway luggage? And while you ultimately want to earn a decent living by converting sales, you likely have some level of passion for your business.

You want that to translate to your customers.

A great way to translate your passion and build trust is to maintain open lines of communication with your customers—whether that’s helping answer questions, resolving issues, or asking folks about their overall experience with your brand.

Open communication provides transparency, thereby creating a safe and secure environment for customers to feel heard and appreciated.

Here are a few other essential benefits of maintaining open communication with your customer base.

1. Identifies Issues and Resolves Problems: Open communication gives customers a platform to voice their concerns and provide feedback. This helps you identify any problems your customers may be experiencing, so you can work towards resolving them promptly. A proactive approach will prevent small issues from escalating into larger ones.
2. Provides Valuable Insights: Open communication can also give your business valuable insights into customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors. This information can help you improve your products, services, and marketing strategies.
3. Boosts Reputation: Embracing open customer communication can boost your business's reputation. Customers are more likely to recommend businesses they feel are open and honest with them, which can result in positive word-of-mouth marketing.
4. Increases Sales: When customers feel valued and satisfied, they are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the business to others. That sounds like a good deal, right?

11. Empower Your Clients & Customers

At the end of the day, you want to ensure that your customers feel empowered when they buy your goods or services. They should feel the value in what they spend and be proud to receive your product.

Creating a sense of fulfillment behind the purchase reinforces customers' desire to buy again. This is how we ultimately influence customer loyalty. Also, by creating sales or deals, customers can feel important and gain respect for the brand. We always aim to leave the consumer happy that they made the decision to go with us!

Principles To Consider

When Brand Building for Small Business Not only are visuals important when you’re brand building for small business but there are principles to outline for your audience. Incorporating principles into your brand shows consumers the behind-the-scenes values your company upholds.

Purpose

The purpose is important when considering a brand image or voice because it defines the reason for your brand's existence beyond making a profit. Purpose represents the core values and beliefs of your brand. It’s essential to create a brand image or voice that resonates with consumers. This will help you:

1. Differentiate your brand
2. Build brand loyalty
3. Guide consumer decision-making
4. Support social impact
5. Attract valuable employees

Wisdom & Background

Giving a backstory and the inspiration behind your brand gives customers a look into your life and mindset. It’s a great way to connect your customers to your cause. You can let people know where you came from, what made you decide to start a business, and what drove your idea.

When you demonstrate wisdom in your industry, you establish expertise and authority. Sharing valuable insights positions you and your brand as a thought leader and builds trust with your target audience.

Identity & Personality

Your brand's personality adds character and gives it a distinct voice and tone. When your brand has a well-defined personality, it establishes an emotional connection with consumers and makes the brand more memorable. One way to accomplish that is to make customers feel like they're part of a bigger cause. This is reaffirmed by the company's values or mission.

Your brand's identity communicates its values, mission, and positioning. When your brand has a strong identity, it can differentiate itself from competitors and attract customers with the same values. You can eventually cultivate a sense of community with those shared values, inspiring loyalty and repeat business.

Uniformity & Stability

Creating a uniform brand makes you identifiable to returning customers and eye-catching for new prospects. When brand building for small business, you want to strive to extend uniformity to all aspects of your company–using the same fonts, colors, and details to maintain your brand's vision.

Stability and uniformity can also support brand extensions. When your brand has a strong and consistent identity, it can more easily extend into new products, services, or markets. Plus, when your brand maintains consistent messaging and positioning, you can ensure your products and services meet the same high standards across the board.

Reliability & Integrity

A brand that demonstrates integrity is authentic and transparent in its messaging and actions. When your brand is honest and open about its values, mission, and practices, you establish credibility with your audience. Delivering quality products and services over time demonstrates ethical behavior, and it builds a positive reputation with your customers and stakeholders.

Reliable brands are also more likely to receive positive referrals and recommendations from satisfied customers. Word-of-mouth referrals are a powerful tool for building brand awareness and acquiring new customers.

Final Thoughts

Brand building for small business involves various well-thought-out elements, from developing a catchy slogan to using a blog to establish the brand as a thought leader in its industry. When it comes down to building your small business's brand, you want to ensure it’s unique to you and consistent across the board. As a small business owner, it’s ultimately up to you to attract a loyal customer base.

Good branding has many moving parts. All parts are equally important in establishing uniformity and trustworthiness.

Hopefully, your compass is now pointing true north. And remember–Always uphold your values, remain consistent, and keep up with your customers to ensure quality and loyalty.

At InspireMedia, we understand the importance of maintaining a consistent image–and that includes how we tell our story. Let us help tell yours! If you need to develop or reimagine your brand’s voice, we’re here to help! Reach out to get started today!