As a small business owner, developing your brand is essential for growing your customer base, boosting sales, and more. If you want to make sure your brand is working in your favor, here is what you need to know about branding.
What Is Branding?
Before digging into any branding strategies, it’s crucial to understand what branding involves. Branding isn’t just about aesthetics. While picking a color palette, creating a logo, designing cohesive packaging across product lines, and similar things do play a role, it’s only part of the picture.
Similarly, branding is about more than choosing a memorable company name. While you do need a name that aligns with your products or service and is easy to recall, that alone won’t fully establish your brand.
Instead, branding involves creating a full identity for your company. Along with a memorable name and strong aesthetics, you need to define its personality. With a holistic approach, you create a sense of consistency and familiarity. Customers know what to expect when they engage with your company, leading to a type of reputation, one that can set you apart from competitors.
How Branding Impacts the Customer Experience
When you approach branding the right way, you create an emotional connection between your company and customers. If you cultivate the relationship properly, it’ll ultimately boost loyalty.
That’s why the customer experience matters. How a customer perceives your company influences how they feel. Additionally, it impacts how they talk about your business with others, causing it to affect prospective customers, too.
Often, customers tend to favor companies that feel familiar. When you create a consistent experience, customers feel confident that you’ll continue to meet their expectations. As a result, loyalty grows.
Branding Strategies to Reaching Your Target Market
If you want to boost your brand, your first step is to define your target market. By identifying your ideal customer, you can dig deeper. You’ll get a chance to learn about their preferences, pain points, and other areas that you can address, creating a level of alignment between what they’re looking for and what you offer.
Once you know who you’re targeting, it’s time to align your branding. Typically, there are a few critical components, including:
Company Name
Visual Identity
After you have those aspects settled, focus on cohesion. Make sure that your domain name features your company name. Update your website to match your visual identity and brand voice. Adjust your social media profiles and posts to fit that personality.
By aligning every aspect of your company, you establish your brand. Then, as you continue acting consistently, your brand strengthens, creating a consistent experience that’ll boost your reputation and customer loyalty.
Branding Projects: DIY vs. Hiring Pros
When you’re choosing branding projects, you’ll need to figure out whether a DIY approach is an option or if it’s better to hire professionals. In some cases, you’ll think that hiring a pro is your only option when that isn’t the case.
For example, you might assume that you’d need to hire a graphic designer to create a logo. However, by simply searching for a “logo creator online free,” you can find a tool to actually handle it yourself. Simply choose a style, select an icon, then add your text. After that, you’ll get a bunch of logos to explore. Plus, you can adjust the fonts and colors, allowing you to customize the final look. For those of you who already have a Constant Contact account, you can use their logo maker to jumpstart your brand!
However, there are other situations where going with pros is best. For instance, partnering with a marketing services company is an intelligent decision. You can get expert help with your social media strategy and email marketing management, ensuring your efforts produce great results. Explore ZingPop Social Media’s services today.
Tracey Lee Davis, founder of ZingPop Social Media, turns busy small business owners into online marketing rockstars! A social media expert and Certified Solution Provider for Constant Contact, she coaches entrepreneurs in how to grow their business using social media and provides total management for their email marketing campaigns. Tracey Lee is also a feat
ured speaker for associations and business groups. She is Alignable's 2021 Local Business Person of the Year for San Jose, a Certified Content Marketing Strategist, and the Co-Owner and Vice President of the Women’s Networking Alliance. She also really, really loves cheese.