Branding Tips for Small Businesses

Introduction

Branding is your company’s logo, colours, name, and imagery. It’s purpose is to provide an experience for your customers to remember and associate your brand with. If you’re struggling to wrap your head around how branding works, we’ve got your back!

Key Aspects of Branding

Treat Your Brand as a Person
Be Consistent
Competitive Analysis… The Right Way
Utilize Branding When You’re Hiring

Treat Your Brand as a Person

Thinking of your brand as a person can really help you understand the branding process. Your brand should have an identity to describe who it is, a personality to determine behaviour, and an experience to be remembered by.

The purpose to branding is to create relationships with your audience, whomever that may be. When attempting to relate your brand to a person, here are some questions to ask yourself.

If your brand were a person…how would it introduce itself?
If your brand were to discuss products and services, how would it go about this? Would it be humorous, professional, personable?
What would the first impression be like after meeting your brand? How would you look back on the experience?

Be Consistent

Inconsistency to your brand will confuse your customers, and it will greatly impact how they remember you. The simple answer is… they won’t. Prioritizing consistency and recognizable patterns is what will help you reap the benefits.

The repetition of a certain unique persona is what makes the experience more memorable, and when you begin to change that persona across different platforms customers will tend to gravitate to brands that build trust and a recognizable bond, like a person!

Competitive Analysis… The Right Way

Competitive analysis helps give you ideas on how you can set your brand apart from others. As important as it is, it needs to be done right. The number one rule is…

INSPIRATION… NOT IMITATION!

Just because another company has branded themselves in a certain way, you do not necessarily need to follow suit. In fact, educate yourself on where your competition is excelling and let it inspire you to discover a new way to excel your brand in another way!

Utilize Branding When You’re Hiring

Being publicly proud of your organization makes it easier for others to follow suit, namely your employees. This also makes it better for job seekers with a clear vision of what they would be apart of and how they should represent themselves.