8 Tips to Brand Your Small Business Like a Pro

branding your small business

Becoming your own boss is a big thrill! However, it can be very overwhelming too, all the planning, all the responsibility is yours, and you probably want to see fast profit from all the time spent and all your efforts. Tag along to learn the basics of branding your small business like the pros.

Here’s What You’ll Find:

 

“Look like an expert right from the start”

If you already have a great idea to start a small business, first of all, take your time to thoroughly choose your niche. This will affect every bit of your product or service characteristics from its image to the pricing.

Mock Up Pet Shop Small Business

Give yourself a time schedule and stick to it, with deadlines and everything. Being on your own boss sometimes is twice as overwhelming as working an office schedule. So don’t get lazy, you need to work harder to make your small business launch!

Pro Tip: online businesses require less capital investment

So let’s get started…

1. Brainstorm Your Brand From A to Z

Define your brand’s goal as a company, for your customers, and for you. Don’t just consider your logo, think about your brand as a whole. Get inspired by other super companies you look up to. Look at their products, their services, their image, their strategies, you don’t have to be a genius to notice that Starbucks always calls their customers by their names so that they feel like they’re part of the brand. Take your time to really observe everything about your A) Future competitors and B) The kind of business you would like to own.

Branding Pet Shop Business Mockup

2. Determine Your Target Audience

You should be perfectly clear of your average customer’s age, gender, town, interests, dreams, their whole “persona”. This information is gold in order to adapt your small business branding to fit their needs and catch their attention. In this step, you should determine your competitive advantage.

Bakery Shop Logo Business Branding

3. Time to Get Real and Brand Your Image

Your logo stands to represent everything your brand means. Scout your competition’s logos and identify which are more eye-catching and which are more forgettable so that you can establish a pattern and make an informed decision on your logo design. This will help you design the best logo for your brand. There are three kinds of logos you can choose:

  • Font Based Logo

Logos like IBM are only fonts, which means the whole logotype is made out of their typeface.

2000px Ibm Logo.svg

  • Illustrative Logos

Illustrative logos basically display what the company does in its own design.

Branding Logo For Small Business Paint

  • Finally Abstract Logos

Logos like Nike’s swoosh are completely abstract and can be identified (after long exposure of their brand) only by that design that represents their business.

Nike Swoosh Logo Black

Keep it clean and functional, even though Placeit’s logo maker does this for you, it is important that you have in mind that your logo is supposed to look clean and clear if you decide to design with other tools or software. Your logo should look good on a business card, banners, on your website, anywhere! Also, you might want to make the negative version too, this means having a design that looks good both over light or dark backgrounds or having a light version and a dark version to contrast in either situation.

Use your logo to suggest to your customers some benefit, for example, if you open a laundry service and you want to state that it is the fastest in the market, then you can use a time-like graphic like lightning or a tornado. For an architecture firm, you might gravitate towards houses or abstract shapes. Be creative! Get inspired and more tips from these logos for different types of businesses.

A logo should attempt to be timeless, so don’t get too much into trendy fashions. With time, you will be able to make little adjustments and new versions, but your logo essence should always be the same.

Mcd Logo History

How to Make a Business Logo

Want to make your logo yourself? Save time and money and try an online logo maker. No two companies are the same, that’s why Placeit created custom logo templates for many business niches. With Placeit you can create a restaurant logo, a travel logo, a bar logo, an automotive logo, a band logo, and many many others we have available for you like in the service area, a photography logo. Feel free to try several out and find the one that best suits your brand.

Pro Tip: you can also make a logo animation video

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Look at this tutorial on how to make your business logo to watch the whole process closely how it’s done!

Define Your Brand’s Personality

Define your brand’s personality in order to decide what type of assets you are going to make (with light colors, soft fonts, bold fonts, etc.) This is very helpful when keeping consistency between all your visual assets. Don’t miss this blog post about the 8 essentials to branding your business online!

Small Business Logo Maker2

Take It Further with a Logo Animation Video

This is a great idea to make your presentation and logo reveal way more exciting than just display your brand new business logo as a static image.

Is it really necessary? People get more attracted to animated content compared to traditional logos. It’s just eye-catchy, it brings a plus to your logo, it’s fun and cheerful. Remember your logo plays an important role in your brand’s awareness so it just good sense to increase its level to get a more interested audience.

You can use it everywhere, on your social media, your brand’s presentation, a video, anything!

4. Create Core Branding Assets and Keep Them Consistent

Every single visual material has to be consistent with your brand, think of your logo, the fonts you use, and your color palettes. Like I’ve said before, the difference between a successful brand and other less known ones has a lot to do with their branding consistency and their marketing efforts. So, the elements you use in your logo should also be present in your flyer designs, business cards, etc. They should also be incorporated in your product designs no matter what you sell. Placeit can help you create everything from beer labels to merch designs that incorporate your brand’s elements in no time!

Color Palette Branding Copy

It takes a huge amount of marketing efforts and really good luck for a customer to even remember you over all the options in the market, you don’t want to make the mistake of giving him a piece a visual that doesn’t involve your brand’s identity.  Imagine what would happen to Coca-Cola if it suddenly decided to change its color to blue!

Tumblr Nalsd71wr31rsyukao1 1280

5. Social Media Branded Images

Choose at least two social media networks to work with. Which two? That depends on your business. If your work is very visual your best bet is to try a platform like Instagram, instead of a text-based one like Twitter.

Business Branding

Every social media platform offers different benefits. Get informed about each of these before deciding which ones are worth it to engage with your audience and which ones are just not.

Business Branding Copy

To post, and basically make it as your own community manager, make a schedule on any platform or program you want, and do some research on the peak hours to post. For example, let’s see how it works on Pinterest:

Peak Hour To Post

 

Schedule weeks in advance using your social media image designs along with great copy, hashtags, locations anything that each post needs, and make a calendar. This way you are ensuring that you post consistently. I recommend you use a scheduling platform like Hootsuite to do this. Another thing to keep in mind is the size of the images you post. If you use the same exact image for all of your social platforms, you risk having images get cut off or simply look off. Avoid this by creating images at the ideal size for each social media site. Making social media images that fit your brand isn’t hard either, you just need the right tools.

Facebook Mockup

6. Make a Website to Land Potential Customers

Create a website and/or social media pages. I recommend Squarespace or Wix. Get to know these platforms to start building your online page. On the other hand, you might want to choose the best web hosting services and build a website on any other platform. If you are not sure what you would even put in there, then be practical: make a landing page where you can say what you sell, show examples of it, your contact information, and your social media.

Squarespace

Squarespace Small Business Branding
A landing page on Squarespace.

This platform is fairly simple to use to build striking sites, especially if you go for their templates, these are simply beautiful and offer more room for customization compared to the other sites. it supports multiple access levels: you can add multiple contributors including Administrators, Content Editors, Comment Moderators and other user types. It also allows the option to Import/export. Also, the top squarespace templates are eligible for you to choose and edit, depending on your niche.

A great Squarespace feature is that it lets you to play with your code. It gives you access to the code version of your website so you can completely rebuild it in a professional way, keeping your site’s architecture clean, on the downside, it offers fewer app integrations.

WIX

Wix Small Business Branding
A landing page on Wix

Wix is super easy to use, the control panel of Wix is divided into Dashboard and Editor. The Dashboard lets you easily manage your sites’ settings, and the Editor gives you a total website creation experience, Wix is perhaps the most user-friendly platform for building a website.

If your goal is to build a website without writing any codes, then Wix might be right for you. It offers enough tools to build a variety of websites: blogs, corporate websites, eCommerce sites, and more. The flipside of the incredible ease-of-use of Wix is the inability to access your site’s source code. There’s no way to check and clean up your code. Users can’t even re-write auto-generated URLs that aren’t human-readable, but they can easily set up 301-redirects into custom URLs to those pages.

Wix offers a great collection of templates but once you choose and make your website, you can’t change it, so keep this in mind when choosing a site builder.

Finding a trustworthy company or the perfect template to design your website is the first step, then promoting it follows soon after. The one mistake people make is thinking that their website will bring them in traffic by “just being there”. That’s simply not the case. Find a digital marketing agency that has great reviews, a good portfolio and reach out to them to get started with SEO, social media marketing, or to learn more information.

Whatever option you choose, keep in mind that great, high-quality images are a must. To create interesting images of your products, use print mockups that will highlight the quality of your work.

Looking for a Cool Banner?

You can also design amazing ad banners to put on your website for seasonal promotions, special offers, and more!

ONLINE BANNER BRANDING

7. Create a Dashing Business Card Design

Promote your new small business with personalized business cards. Giving your contact information by mail is very impersonal, there is a certain charm to having your own custom business cards. They are a great direct marketing strategy, it’s your customers first look at your brand and it shows that you are prepared.

Placeit’s Business Card maker is super easy to use and gives you an instant high-quality image to download that will crush it on print too!

Branding Logo Mockups For Small Business

 

You can also think about flyers, posters, online banners, etc. Any visual asset that helps you to spread the message clean and clear!

Business Flyer Maker Copy

 

Small Business Branding Checklist

Branding Cheklist

8. Mockups Are Very Helpful for Your Small Business Branding Too

Always consider your brand in every communication opportunity with your customer. Currently, there are a total of 33.2 million small businesses, accounting for 99.9% of all private establishments . Now, when starting a small business, you will have a tight budget, so at least for now, don’t spend a fortune on things that are not essential. For example, you don’t need to actually print branded packaging, you could simply make a mockup instead to have a branded package image to share online. Images online should have great quality and be professional, if you don’t have these and you can’t hire a photographer just yet, think about using mockups. It’s a great way to save money.

Bag Mockup Business Branding

Important Considerations

How quickly do you need money? This is a biggie, and something you can’t overlook. Products and services can take a while to be profitable so if you need a faster income, you might want to think about other income options in the meantime, freelancing, even a job while you get your own business going. As a freelancer, you’ll also have to develop your brand. For example, if you’re a writer you’ll need a writer persona, logo, etc.

Your pricing is a big deal too, research similar product price ranges, inform yourself on the pricing options you have, for example, if you’re offering a service, then two options are to charge by the hour or have a fixed salary. Also, think of what your customers can afford, but remember customers go out of their way to pay for the best.

Branding Mockup Of Small Business

Sometimes it’s hard to understand priorities when starting a small business, so here are some tools you need to keep track of everything. Every task is actually very important and it takes time to develop something great! Don’t feel overwhelmed, get your checklist and go one step at a time. Branding your small business helps you connect with your targeted audience and being identified by them too, so yes, it’s worth it.

“Any big brand that you’ve ever heard of could not have made it so big in absence of a well-thought-out branding strategy. Your brand could be the next, so what are you waiting for?”

Forbes

 

Placeit’s logo maker has several templates for many kinds of industries. If you are interested in the electrical industry, you can try our Light Up Your Business with These Electrician Logos to get more insight on a logo design for contractor industries.


Brand Your Small Business with Placeit

Start your small business branding with this 10 easy steps to follow up! Placeit's design tools are very useful to help you brand your assets with a low-budget and no need to hire someone else.


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4 CommentsClose Comments

4 Comments

  • Ezequiel
    Posted at 4:17 am 0Likes

    Have you ever considered creating an ebook or guest authoring on other
    websites? I have a blog centered on the same subjects you discuss and
    would love to have you share some stories/information. I know my readers would
    enjoy your work. If you are even remotely interested, feel free to
    shoot me an email.

  • Savannah
    Posted at 11:45 pm 0Likes

    I was suggested this blog by my cousin. I’m not sure
    whether this post is written by him as nobody else know
    such detailed about my trouble. You are incredible!
    Thanks!

  • Inga
    Posted at 9:39 pm 0Likes

    The point is, there is a ton of information about your industry that your customers want and need to know. And if you can add value and answer their questions through your content, you’ll build trust with those customers—and that trust will translate into business.

  • Tobey
    Posted at 12:27 pm 0Likes

    Depending on your business, you might need additional branding assets (like product packaging or corporate letterhead ), but the most important thing to keep in mind? No matter where a customer encounters your brand—whether it’s by seeing your logo or visiting your website or checking out one of your products in store—the look, feel, and design should be consistent. If you’re not consistent when branding your business, you risk confusing your customers—and, if they’re confused, you could lose them to the competition.

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