7 Fresh Ideas on How to Brand Your Business. Liz Papagni April 2, 2014. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 1. While a basic archetype doesn’t need to control your brand’s entire identity.

Many small businesses believe branding is only for BIG companies with BIG budgets.

1. By following a few simple rules, you can successfully brand your small business. As you plan, launch, and manage your branding program, remember and train others to remember these three branding rules: Your brand is a promise that must be reinforced every time people come in contact with any facet of your organization.
2. Britain’s first weeks outside of the EU have been mixed, as products from large companies mainly sailed through ports while many small businesses struggled with the new rules governing trade.

They’re missing a huge opportunity. Small business branding is a super power; it enables your firm to appear more strategic and larger than it is.

In the rush to open for business don’t skip branding. Instead, take the necessary time to develop your brand and it will reap benefits for your firm in the long run.

Small business branding: why you need it

Here are the 3 major reasons why small businesses must develop their brands.

Small business branding reason 1: maximizes resources.

Branding defines what’s needed when you create the components of your business. It streamlines decision making across a wide range of small business elements including:

• Marketing
• Communications
• Sales and customer service
• Signage
• Business or store interior
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Employee dress code
• Website
• Stationary and signature files.

(Here’s a 21 Point Small Business Brand Checklist.)

Small business branding reason 2: makes your business look professional,

Even if you’re a one person shop, having a unique branded look takes your presentation up a notch. Everything from your business cards to your email signatures should be consistent and polished supporting the quality image you want to present.

By being consistent, your small firm has a bigger impact because every piece of content or impression reinforces your message. People learn who you are. For example, Content Marketing Institute and Likeable Media both use orange as their brand color.

Small business branding reason 3: protects your business from being defined by your competitors and others.

Without a well defined brand, every piece of content and communications you issue can look different. As a result, your prospects, customers and fans don’t know who you are or what you stand for.

Even worse, your competitors can define your business in a less flattering light without you even being aware of it.

5 Small business branding guidelines

The biggest branding challenge most small businesses face is finding the time to define their brand and to develop a set of brand guidelines.

Here are 5 small business branding guidelines to help you think about your brand.

Small business branding guideline 1: State your business mission.

Go beyond monetary objectives. What do you want your business to accomplish that’s bigger than the work of the people involved? How do you want your organization to make a difference? This is important for millennials.

A business branding mission is a statement of the principles that motivate your operations and tie it to the larger aspirations of your audience.

It’s important that you share this vision with the creatives that are responsible for the look and feel of your company’s logo and other visual (and audio) communications.

7 Basic Branding Rules For Small Businesses Near Me

Small business branding guideline 2: Define your audience.

It can include prospects, customers, influencers, employees, and others.

Create a marketing persona to better understand your audience. Verify the details by surveys and interviews. What are their likes and dislikes? How do they feel towards your business? This has a significant impact on how easy or hard it’ll be to persuade them to purchase from you.

Don’t just think about the answers to these questions. Write them down to review and share them with your creative resource people.

Small business branding guideline 3: Study the competition.

Assess a wide range of competitors, online and offline. Include the top players in your category and shopping in general like Walmart, Amazon and eBay. Examine how they represent their brands across channels and platforms.

Put yourself in your prospects’ shoes when evaluating near substitutes. What tradeoffs will they make and for what reasons? For example, a consumer may take a book out of the library instead of buying a physical book or download.

Answer the question “Why should a customer buy from you and not your competitors?” If you’re stumped about how to respond, chances are so are your prospects.

Small business branding guideline 4: Define key context where you’re most relevant.

7 Basic Branding Rules For Small Businesses Use

By its very nature a small business can’t appeal to everyone. You need to find that sweet spot where you can build a community requiring your specialized expertise.

Before hiring a design shop, assess the elements you want to represent your business. They should have a deeper meaning for you and your audience since they’ll be core to your logo and other brand representations.

Not sure how to start? Then create a mood board to make the process more tactile. It provides insights into how you view your brand. Go through magazines and other content finding visual elements you like. What colors and shapes appeal to you and why?

Develop a brand and related logo that exemplifies the core essence of your business, appears professional, and resonates with your target customers. Keep it simple and easy-to-use. Take into account your 360° brand.

• Look and feel. What’s visitors’ first impression of your brand?
• Typography / font style. Is it legible for your core audience? Consider the size and spacing of the lettering.
• Color. How does your color palette set your business apart from your competitors? How does it render on different devices?
• Mascot/visual cues. Who or what represents your brand? Do you have a mascot or do your employees wear specific types of clothing?
• Voice. How does your brand sound? Are your communications informal? (Remember, they must sound like a real person!)
• Stories. What’s your business history or background? How’s this reflected in your branding?
• Platforms. Where does your brand appear? In terms of social media, this applies to the social networks where you are actively engaged.

Small business branding guideline 5: Choose your name and tagline with great care.

Your business name matters more than you might think. It is the handle that sets you apart and makes you findable and memorable.

Research the name you choose for your business to verify that:

• It’s not a trademark owned by someone else.
• It doesn’t translate into something bad in a major foreign language
• It’s available to register as a domain name and use in social media

Your tagline is the shortest embodiment of your business’ mission; your reason for existing.

You can apply Chris Brogan’s 3-word approach to craft your tagline. Choose three words that have meaning for your business and connect you to your audience. Words that signify your choice of actions in pursuit of your business mission.

Small business branding guideline conclusion

Developed your own small business branding guidelines for incorporating your branding elements into your business communications. Then document why and how they’ve been created and how to use these elements.

Consistency is very important in small business branding but there must also be enough flexibility in the guidelines for creative inventiveness and fun.

While branding documentation may seem time consuming in the short term, it reduces questions and redundant effort each time a communication or piece of content is created.

Further, it insures consistent representation of your business, eliminating wasted creation and promotion cost.

7 Basic Branding Rules For Small Businesses Business

Even better, your business appears professional and can look bigger than it actually is.

How did you develop your small business branding guidelines?

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

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Photo Credits:
https://pixabay.com/en/buy-me-a-coffee-sign-white-2035514/ CC zero

Note: This article was originally published on May 1, 2014. It has been extensively updated and revised.

Business ethics are essential component of any business strategy. Particularly, if we discuss the outbound communications like marketing and PR; ethics stand as even more vital element to be taken care of. The modern corporate code of conduct is depiction of professional ethics that an organization promises to follow and expects its staffers to abide by. Any violation of those promised values is considered an unacceptable professional behavior and might lead to server corporate ramifications for individuals as well as organization.

Having touched the importance of ethics in broader business context, let’s narrow this down to our topic of social media. Being a digital media professional, let’s understand the sensitive nature of ethics in social media. I’ll try to briefly cover the generally accepted ethics in digital media marketing, to facilitate fellow marketers and advertisers.

Motivation for This Topic:

The fundamental reason I picked up this topic was the general observation around the social networks. Particularly if we look at the geo-political events taking place in 2016, the topic turns even more important. Let me give you a couple of examples to make the case.

Recently, a leading cellular company of Pakistan (Ufone) accidentally retweeted and liked anti-government tweets, which led to a big outcry over social media. It was a big PR disaster for the company as its twitter managers failed to answer as to why they endorsed the tweets demanding PM’s resignation. Boycott Ufone was a top Twitter trend for almost 24 hours, which forced the company to not only clean up its twitter account but also formally issue a public apology with promise of due investigation.

Second example is from Britain, where people are expected to take part in a referendum to decide whether the United Kingdom should remain with European Union or leave it. Termed as “Brexit” referendum, it’s being considered a very strategic move that may change geo-political and economic stature of European Union. The campaign on social media in favour and against the idea (of leaving EU) are using many arguments and some hyper-nationalistic ideas in their favour.

This has led to some scary sentiments in expat entrepreneurs from all over the Europe who have business enterprises or interests in Britain. A young entrepreneur has shared his concerns in Huffington Post questioning the fundamental arguments being represented for the United Kingdom to leave EU.

So in the first example, it is corporate social media marketing and in second it is political social media that has led to a serious discussion over the ethics, SOP, usage, abuse, and disinformation on the social networks. Whether you are a business professional, a marketing enthusiast, a journalist, a political campaigner, or a PR agency that is handling media management for clients; you have to abide by certain informal but widely accepted rules.

Rules of the Game:

I believe that marketing of brand within social media is a positive step for the end users and public. However, we need a lot to do to make the vision perfect. Here are few recommendations to ensure your social media marketing remains ethical.

1. KYA – Know Your Audience:

Before embarking on any social marketing drive, make sure that you:

• Know about your audience, their preferences, interests and choices
• Have a complete demographic and psychographic overview

7 Basic Branding Rules For Small Businesses In America

This will help you refine your target audience and also facilitate in developing anti-spam mechanism. In addition, it will allow you to segment the audience and send over relevant messages that will drive engagement; the ultimate goal.

2. Stay Away from Biases:

Businesses and marketers need to stay away from (negative) political, religious, ethnic, or any cultural bias that could be termed as controversial. A slight mistake can lead to a big PR disaster and loss of your job (as marketer). We have seen that many top social media managers got fired for just one wrong tweet.

3. Never Compromise On Privacy:

Privacy is a very sensitive domain as it is top concern of the internet generation. If you are doing some marketing via social media, make sure you do not violate privacy rules. Some companies extract Facebook and LinkedIn data to build their email campaigns. This is a cutting-edge sword and requires attention to core concerns. Just a promise of not spamming might not be enough, you need to give unsubscribe option with every message you deliver. To read more about ethical email marketing, refer to my old piece at Business2Community.

4. Be Transparent:

If you are endorsing some product, idea or personality; you need to disclose why you are endorsing it. Mentioning your relationship with that particular product, non-profit entity, brand or political entity in your campaign, handle, or bio is essential.

5. Speak Truth:

If you have some interest or affiliation in something being discussed, you need to politely communicate your affiliation. It does not require that you explain your interests but tell as to why are you supporting a particular thing. Another important element here is to be true to yourself as well as the audience.

6. Think Before You Tweet:

Internet if flooded with unauthentic information pieces, which has made the marketer’s job more complicated. Therefore, always verify what you share before sending it out for prospects. Any factual error may lead to embarrassment and negative perception of the brand.

7. Imagine the Impact:

If you are sharing some information through your social channel which has been acquired from a third party source, give clear disclaimers to avoid suspicions of conflict of interest. Moreover; be very careful about your tweets and retweets. Public perception matters a lot. For instance, you might retweet something a politician has said in order to spread the news but some may view it as your support for that person. This can be very tricky for your brand.

Conclusion:

Finally, if you do the campaigns with a documented marketing strategy, it can save you from many troubles. Probably the best way to avoid any misconception is to map your content and have a content calendar. Moreover, a strict monitoring mechanism has to be installed to ensure compliance with the code of conduct.