Branding Tips for Small Businesses

It Starts with Your Brand Strategy

In the digital age, many small businesses are beginning to see the value of creating visual assets and identity through a brand, not just a business. Strong brand identity is an effective strategy to convey information about your small business to potential customers, even before your first client interaction. So what does branding strategy mean? What do successful brands include, and where does a small business begin in exploring its brand potential?

Do you want to know why branding is so important for small businesses today and where to get started? Here are our branding basics for small businesses and tips for creating and maintaining a successful, cohesive brand.

Table of Contents

Why is Branding Important in Small Business?

Because branding is the glue that unifies different elements of your business (the customer experience, the value to your audience, the consistency, and the reliability your existing clients need), it's especially important in the digital age. 

While much of our economic lives have migrated toward digital eCommerce, businesses that want to continue to grow in the digital age are doing the same. But in a sea of competitors accessible through a single mouse click, it's easy to get lost among local, national, and global competitors.

Branding helps by not only making a more identifiable and visible business in the virtual world but by unifying that brand association throughout the sea of webpages, digital advertising, and social media platforms. In short, branding makes your business easily recognizable, more trustworthy, more professional and provides a positive experience in a world that can be stressful and chaotic for the online consumer. 

Branding can also help you convey important aspects of your business without the lengthy dialogue you may never have with an online customer. Branding lets your audience know who you are, what you're about, and what you intend to deliver for them.

What is Branding in Business?

Beginning with the basics, what do marketers even mean when they talk about branding? 

When many small business owners think about branding, they might visualize a logo, other design elements, or even product packaging. While the logo, brand language, and other visual elements are an important part of branding, they're more of a cohesive, appealing package for what's inside. 

Branding begins with establishing clear brand values, goals, and purpose. Secondarily, it identifies the value that it offers to its target demographic or audience and creates an experience that helps its audience solve a problem and feel positive about the business they've chosen to interact with. In short, branding isn't just the design. It combines design elements, usability, voice, and presence across all customer touchpoints. 

Branding is the glue that ties together what your business hopes to achieve and delivers it to your intended client in a way that reinforces business values and identity. 

How to Build a Brand Online: Building the Brand 101

Okay, so you're sold on the idea of branding your small business. But where to begin?

There are a lot of elements that contribute to building a brand, and brand cohesion is important. If you can't clearly define your brand values, attributes, and what sets you apart from your competitors, the user experience will likely not be cohesive across all digital and physical spaces. That brings us to our first tip for branding your small business:

Tip #1: Know your business and what you're about.

The first important step in branding is building a brand identity that clearly defines you. Brand identity includes the brand values, the value proposition (what you're offering) and brand voice. 

Brand voice simply implies that you want your messaging to be unified, no matter where the message exists. This voice will be based on your brand's characteristics and which foot you want to put forward. Whether your strengths are nuanced, specialized expertise, or approachability and friendliness above all else, you can define that in your brand voice before you begin the branding process.

Take time to brainstorm ideas about your business characteristics, strengths, and how you want to be perceived by your intended audience. These characteristics can also help you define design language like logo, fonts, branding color schemes and layouts for your digital touchpoints. 

How to Create a Brand That Your Audience Values

Once you've figured out who you are and how best to portray your capabilities and offerings to your target audience, it's important to know who that target audience is.

That brings us to our next trip.

Tip #2 Know your audience and what appeals to them about your product or service.

Understanding your audience begins with building out your common client profiles. Who has responded most often to your business offerings in the past? What can we detail about that demographics' story, needs, and the way they use your product or service? What made you stand out to them, and how can your language reflect more of that value?

Knowing your audience means offering the best solution, to the best user, at the best time. It means that if your primary client base is using your product and service for a specific purpose, you should appeal to that purpose as a solution through your language and branding choices. For example, if your yoga studio's goal is to promote mindfulness and breath practice, but you know most clients are there for flexibility benefits, consider the payoff for marketing your business toward both goals. 

It might also mean understanding that your product or service appeals most often to a specific gender, socioeconomic class, marital status, or combination of several types of identifiers. If you know this to be true, you can adapt your branding, messaging, and voice to appeal most to that demographic. You can also leverage these insights to target other demographics in different ways.

Strong Branding for Small Businesses, Specifically

While creating a brand for your small business may seem like a daunting task, the initial investment will be worth the uniform user experience and help build your business online for years to come. Unifying messaging makes your brand appear more professional, reliable, and accessible. 

Creating a strong brand for your small business requires a bit of research and a strong understanding of your capabilities for today and tomorrow. That's why tip number three is so significant.

Tip #3: Know your competitors and your industry

This tip is important because you'll need to identify a reasonable and attainable trajectory for your business and understand what branding might mean for sales and revenue. A proper brand creation can generate huge amounts of traffic as compared to what a small business might receive without it. That's why it's important to know what you can offer, what your capacity is for today, and what your goals are tomorrow.

Researching your industry, especially locally and regionally for small businesses, can help you better understand your target audience's needs. It can also help you identify industry trends and prepare for the future. Most importantly, knowing your competitors and your industry today can help you identify what makes your business stand out from the crowd. Great branding can be built to highlight that important advantage and elevate you above your peers. 

Building the Brand For You: Business Branding Ideas 

After you've identified your business goals, values, industry and competitor trends, and your target audience, building your small business brand becomes a very personal experience. This is the step where you get to decide what you'll look and sound like to an online audience and what creative elements can help you convey the message you want to convey.

Building the brand that best suits the needs and goals of your small business will require a degree of creativity and abstract thought. This is why small businesses often hire design experts or a full-service digital marketing team to develop these concepts into a design language and voice. If you want help in that department, visit our small business branding solutions page:

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If you're feeling creative, well-read, and organized, there are a few ways to build out your branding ideas before you commit.

Tip #4 Take your time to brainstorm, create, and envision the brand application.

Many design teams begin by imagining different "stylescape" solutions for a brand based on the business' values, capabilities, and attributes. These stylescapes might identify different combinations of colors, fonts, images, icons, and language that can encompass the essence of a brand when combined.

"Mood boards" are great ways to build out concept ideas using colors, patterns, digital or physical textures, imagery, and font choice to see which suits your small business branding vision. Once you've identified a few stylescapes, ask yourself whether they will appeal to your target audience and current customer base, and why. Consider the type of experience, including emotional reaction and visual sensation/stimulation each of these design groups might provoke.

If this sounds like too much creative exploration for you or your schedule, branding experts can package these design elements for you and make branding decisions for your small business easy.

Good Branding Examples for Small Business

Whether you've designed it on your own or hired professionals to help develop your branding elements, check-in with the concepts before you commit. It's important to ask yourself first whether the branding suits your business and whether it has visual appeal to your audience. That brings us to our next tip:

Tip #5 Test branding concepts before you apply them.

Sometimes you don't know what will work best for your business until you try it, and if you've been an entrepreneur for very long, you know that. So to be safe, run any branding design concepts through a system of checks and balances. This begins with a series of questions:

1. Does this design language accurately convey my brand strengths, attributes, and the experience I want to provide to the online user?
2. Is this brand concept visually appealing to my audience? Is it cohesive, and does it promote uniformity in messaging and voice?
3. What types of imagery, characteristics, and instinctual reactions do I have to this group of design elements? Is my audience going to have the same response?

Understanding how your branding (including logo, design language, visual elements and user experience) will be perceived by your audience is an inexact science. So when you've created a design language you like, brainstorm with your team, colleagues, or even friends and family whose opinions you can trust. Ask yourself, what characteristics or messaging does this design language and logo invoke (or, what does it make you think of/feel?)

Do the answers match your business attributes and align with your goals? If yes, then great work! If you need more help, your marketing experts are here for that.

How to Build Brand Identity and Branding the Product

Once you've put the creative process behind you, settled on a logo, voice, and other design languages, you'll need to take a few more steps in the branding process to ensure brand visibility growth and appropriate branding applications.

Tip #6: Take the time to unify the customer experience across all digital platforms and physical touchpoints. 

While it might sound tedious, unifying the language and design across all social media and webpages, email marketing applications, and document templates will help create an easily recognizable brand and a positive brand experience. As a small business, your precious few seconds of interaction time with your intended audience need to count! Make sure your brand is easily recognizable no matter where potential clients interact with your business. 

Once your design concepts are applied, be mindful of the voice, language, and attributes you want to depict and adapt those to different digital spaces as needed. Building out a content calendar that refers back to these concepts during content creation helps keep a unified approach. You might also apply your logo to previous images and designs used across social media and web pages and continue to standardize both the brand application and language in the future. 

A highly visible brand will help grow your brand awareness quickly in an online ocean of small businesses. Make your brand recognizable and give your audience the same positive experience you'd provide them in person with a consistent visual appeal and reliable, recognizable online presence.