The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Branding in 2022

Branding for small businesses can seem complex, and maybe even daunting, especially if you’ve just begun or are trying to build a new business. You can think of small business branding as a comprehensive representation of your business that is uniform across all customer touchpoints.

Why listen to us? Splurge Media was recently voted in the Top 3 Branding Companies in New Jersey by DesignRush.

It’s important to know why branding is important for business owners, what small business branding services are available to you, and whether or not you need a small business brand design at all.

To summarize, if you’re a small business doing any of your business in any virtual realm (on your webpage, through social media, through email campaigns, and even paid advertising) you probably need at least basic branding for small businesses.

If you’ve not yet gone digital with your marketing and communications efforts, you’re running out of time to catch up with the modern business world. Even still, branding can help unify your internal communications, client and vendor relationships, mailer marketing and other print materials, and even the voice that represents you in those radio ads you’re running. 

In this article, we’re bringing it all to you. From branding's role in the rest of the business, to small business brand design elements, to the many aspects of building a successful small business brand, we've got you covered. Here are our branding tips for small businesses and everything else you need to know about the branding process. If you are in the beginning stages of forming your new business, explore this article on how to start a small business from home.

Why branding is important for small business

Branding for small businesses is so important because it helps you get recognized, organized, and consistent within a globalized economy that billions of consumers (and other businesses) have access to from their smartphones. So if you’re wondering why brand guidelines are important, it’s because without cohesive branding, it’s easy for a small business to lose consistency, leads, visibility, and credibility in an increasingly virtual world.

Small business branding services often cover the elements of brand identity guidelines, including branding style guidelines, brand voice guidelines, your small business web design services, and a logo.

While these are some of the creative products of small business branding, they don’t explain much about what they mean for the business, or why they’re so important.

Strong brands help streamline the user experience for your potential clients, making interacting with your business easier, more accessible, more consistent, and more trustworthy. In the grand scheme of things, branding is the representation of your brand’s personality and company values, and acts as your liaison in delivering a positive experience for your target audience, current clients, leads, and network. 

Which small businesses need branding, and why?

So, how do you know if you need branding for your small business? The short answer is, virtually every small business can benefit hugely from small business branding. At the very least, branding helps make you more accessible and recognizable  to more potential clients, no matter how big or small your online presence. 

Even small businesses that are committed to existing as analog, brick and mortar locations can still benefit hugely from small business branding. These businesses still use stationary, paper marketing materials, and might have signage, vehicles, or uniforms that help lend credibility and cohesiveness to the business. 

For the record, though, we recommend at least a basic website for your business, no matter how big or small. In building your website, you’ll need to consider the look, voice, and user experience for that site, which all require branding. The good news is, small business branding packages often cover everything you need to get started, including a website build. 

Small business brand design

Small business brand design is an umbrella term that refers to the way marketers bring the personality, values, and voice of your business to life for digital and live audiences. Representing your business with the language, visual elements, and other design elements that embody your small business’ personality is important for connecting with the right audience at the right time.

All of that begins with an exploration and discovery period during which your marketing team can help you decide what your brand identity looks and sounds like, and the experience your online presence should create for the consumer. In essence, small business brand design encompasses the elements that define who you are in a crowded marketplace.

Defining a brand identity that accurately represents your business and helps it stand out to the clients you’re hoping to reach includes several design aspects. These include:

1. Logo design
2. Brand guidelines, including brand voice guidelines
3. Defining brand design elements including imagery, iconography, color palette, etc.

If you think you’re ready to hire a marketing team to rebrand, establish your brand, or get a handle on your digital marketing plan, consider how you want to represent your small business. Having a good idea of your values, mission, origin story (or your “why”) and hopes/vision for your business is a great starting point in creating your brand identity through brand design. 

Understanding brand identity

Your brand identity is the combination of visual and linguistic design elements that best represent your brand values online and offline. There are a number of components of a brand’s identity, including personalized brand design elements, which we’ll discuss below.

In understanding your brand identity, you and your marketing team need to understand several things about the business first. When you decided to build your business, you probably had some ideals in mind, including what solution you’re offering to your customers, what values you want to uphold in interacting with clients and vendors, and what special quality would make you stand out in your industry.

These are some of the roots of your brand identity. When you work with a digital marketing agency, they will likely spend time trying to understand your brand identity before proposing brand design elements that they think will best represent you in the marketplace. 

Some key elements of your business that you’ll need to define before trying to construct your small business branding strategy are:

1. Your business and work culture, including the values you care most about and what you want your business to uphold.
2. Your voice, including your tone, personality elements (like professional, trustworthy, or light-hearted, adventurous, high-energy, etc.)
3. Your customers now, and the ideal customer group you’d like to attract (target market)
4. The tangible impact of your brand
5. How your potential customer should feel interacting with your brand
6. And your X-factor, or what makes you stand out from your competitors

Personalized brand design elements for small business web design and more

Once you’ve established your brand identity, next you or your design team should create the branding guidelines. These guidelines will help establish best practice and consistency in applying your brand elements across all marketing and internal communications. This includes your website, social media presence, letterheads, product packaging, and other marketing material.

Your brand guidelines are a set of guidelines that govern how your design elements will be used across all platforms and mediums. They will explain how and when to use your logo, including different digital, greyscale, and dynamic versions of it, across multiple digital platforms and physical mediums. That way, the logo you print on your employee uniforms will look as great as the digital version on your website and internal communications templates. 

Your brand guidelines also encompass the abstract aspects of your brand design, explaining the emotional effects of different design styles and choices, how they represent your business, and when and where they should be used. These guidelines will also explain typography and Imagery usage, and provide schematics for your brand’s unique color palette.

Here’s a great example of what brand guidelines might look like. This example is very well-developed, as these are the current brand guidelines for media and literature platform Medium. Other relatively well known brands offer up their design guidelines on the same page. 

If you hire a design team, even for just a logo and web design, you should receive your brand guidelines as a digital product that you’ll always have. That way, you can refer back to them (or refer your designers back to them) any time you develop your brand in a new space, change your website, print merchandise, or any number of tasks that require branding. 

Small business logo design

Logos are a place where small business owners frequently get caught up. Does my logo need to have my business name? How much should I pay for a logo? We’ve heard them all as a small business marketing agency.

But the reality of the logo is this: your logo is your identifier. The face of your business that people use to identify you vs. a competitor. What that means is that your logo is not your brand, it’s just a symbol that represents your brand.

So what makes a great small business logo? Our answer is simple:

1. Simple
2. Memorable
3. Appropriate
4. Flexible

Simple

A simple logo means just that - nothing overly complex. A logo should be something that “pops” off the surface and makes an immediate impression on your potential customers. Whether or not they understand your logo (they probably won’t, and that’s fine), they should be able to quickly recognize your logo, because it is simple, and memorable.

Memorable

It might be the number one rule of small business logo design: do not make your logo look like other logos. That’s hard, in a world where everyone is trying to stand out and be different when it comes to logo design. But that’s your task: creating a logo that is meaningful, simple, and that stands out enough to be memorable. 

Appropriate

Does the logo fit your brand and business? It’s as simple as that. If your brand is soft and cuddly, the logo should be soft and cuddly as well. Your logo should not only complement your brand attributes and core values, but actually supplement them and bring them further to light.

Flexible

How does your logo set your brand up for design extension? Meaning, when you go to create a background for an image on your website, a brochure, etc., how will your logo inform that dynamic design language?

Here’s an example of a brand that builds a design based on the logo. Notice how much of the design examples are different uses of the curves inside the logo?

This is a common strategy in 2022 because even when there isn’t a clear connection between logo and design, it will make sense immediately to the end user. If your logo is memorable, having flexibility also sets up your design language to stand out from competitors.

Branding tips for small business

Here are a few business branding tips to get started brainstorming and building your small business brand 

1. Scribble down some notes about what your goals are for your business, why you started, and what you value in the businesses you work with. Think about the values that you want to represent to your clients first. 
2. Some designers find mood boards stimulating, organizational, and easier than explaining the intended user experience and branding ideas through words. Try looking at colors, tones, typography, and imagery you think represent your brand. 
3. Consider carefully who your audience is, and what audience you want to try to target with your branded marketing materials.
4. Keep future goals in mind. Your branding elements should be able to scale as you do and should be dynamic enough for multiple mediums. 
5. You can often find a small business branding package that will get you started with the basics, including business logo designing, web design for small business, and branded templates for internal and external communications, like letterheads and envelopes, for a relatively low initial investment. 

Though you can design your own brand guidelines and determine your brand identity on your own, we recommend leaving most of the work up to expert branding agencies. Designers can do amazing things to elevate and give life to your logo, and experienced web builders can focus more intentionality in the user experience in half the time it takes non-experts to build a mediocre site. Plus, they’ll be looking for lots of feedback from you, to get your vision just right.

There’s no rule saying you need a digital marketing company to create your brand identity and brand guidelines. But, the difference between inconsistent branding and consistent branding can make or break your business branding efforts.

If you’re ready to let our professional branding agency steer your small business branding project in the direction of growth and longevity, reach out to us today. Our graphic design team and content creators can help create a cohesive, consistent visual and phonetic experience that truly represents your business.