8 Tips to Brand Your Small Business Like a Pro
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:
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- 1. Brainstorm Your Brand From A to Z
- 2. Determine Your Target Audience
- 3. Time to Get Real and Brand Your Image
- 4. Create Core Branding Assets and Keep Them Consistent
- 5. Social Media Branded Images
- 6. Make a Website to Land Potential Customers
- 7. Create a Dashing Business Card Design
- 8. Mockups Are Very Helpful for Your Small Business Branding Too
- Important Considerations
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“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.
Give yourself a time schedule and stick to it, with deadlines and everything. Being 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, and 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.
🌱 Not sure which business idea you should tap into? Take a peek at how to start a landscaping business and explore a thriving career!
2. Determine Your Target Audience
You should be perfectly clear about 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.
🪴 Check out our 10 Landscaping Advertising Ideas Every Business Should Try!
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:
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Font Based Logo
Logos like IBM are only fonts, which means the whole logotype is made out of their typeface.
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Illustrative Logos
Illustrative logos basically display what the company does in its own design.
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Finally Abstract Logos
Logos like Nike’s swoosh are completely abstract and can be identified (after long exposure to their brand) only by the design that represents their business.
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 benefits, 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.
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
Look at this tutorial on how to make your business logo to watch the whole process closely and 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!
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 displaying 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-catching, it brings a plus to your logo, and 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 into 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!
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 of 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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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 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 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, and 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, and a good portfolio, and reach out to them to get started with SEO, and 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!
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 customer’s 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!
You can also think about flyers, posters, online banners, etc. Any visual asset that helps you to spread the message clean and clear!
Small Business Branding Checklist
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.
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, and inform yourself of 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.
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 be 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.