Why do we need to bother with branding small businesses? Common question.
Branding is just as important for small businesses as it is for big companies, because it helps to build trust and loyalty with your audience, essential to long-term success, and it makes you stand out from the competition.
Here are some simple steps to help you develop your own brand's identity, either from scratch if you're just starting out with a new business venture, or as an exercise to help you gain more clarity on your position in the market.
These steps will help you create a stronger, clearer identity for your business that will help you build awareness of your brand and better relationships with your audience for longer-term success.
Who are we targeting?
It's the first step of any marketing planning: look at the data available to you and understand who your audience is. Use customer data, Google Analytics, plus other free Google tools, social media insights, and anything else available to you to help build this picture. All information is valid, use it to help understand who you are appealing to with your product.
Perhaps you can identify two or three different groups of people within your whole audience. Split them out, then look at supporting data on the internet to help you understand the interests and behaviours of those customers types, so you can target them more accurately. Perhaps you can build a picture of that typical customer, otherwise known as a customer persona.
What do we want to stand for?
The purpose of building a brand rather than just a generic business with little in the way of identifiers, is to give your business personality. People can feel about brands the way they feel about people; they can value them, trust them, relate to them. Over time, they feel they can become loyal to a brand they trust. It's about becoming memorable.
'A brand needs the consumer to know that it exists and to think two or three things about it'
Mark Ritson
So how do you want your target customers to think about your business?
Your values, what's important to you as a business, and how your brand speaks, are all key ways to develop you brand's personality and resonate with your audience. All these things influence and strengthen your customer's perception of your business.
Take a moment to write down what your values are, and what's important to you. You may want your values to be around customer service, and making that a priority above all else. Perhaps ethics are at the heart of what you do; how you look after your staff, and how doing the right thing and being honest is most important to you. Or perhaps you strive to be a sustainable business and this forms the basis of all your core brand values. Once you've established two or three brand values, be loyal to these, tell your team about them, and ensure they feature in everything you do.
Lush Cosmetics share six brand values, check them out here for inspiration.
Understand your position in the market
Consider your competitors. How do they present themselves, how do they talk? What are their values and who are their customers? How do you differ from them, how do you stand out? Do they have the type of customers you want more of?
Once you understand your position in the market, it's easier to develop your brand identity and stand out from those around you. Chances are, although you sell the same product or service, you are less alike than you appear at face value.
You probably have a rough idea of at least two or three key competitors for your business. Our technique for this stage of your research is to build a simple table and note down each company's USP, their brand values, their target audience if known, and their price point for one similar product or service. This is a simple and easy way to build a clear picture of how you and your competitors really compare. You may be surprised by what you find, and you may discover other competitors along the way.
When you've completed this, try plotting your business and competitors in a simple perceptual positioning map. Typical metrics are price versus quality, but we've also worked with price versus sustainability - you can try a few depending on your brand values and whatever helps you find your ideal, and hopefully niche, place in the market.
Once you feel confident of your position in the market, you can come up with a positioning statement; a summary of your products or services and how they fill the specific needs of your target audience.
Here's an example, this is the positioning statement for Lush Cosmetics:
"LUSH offers fresh, organic and handmade cosmetics for people who are conscious about the products they use on their skin. From inventing bath bombs and creating new, innovative products to ethical campaigning and fighting animal testing, LUSH has come a long way since its humble beginnings.
Rolling out your new brand identity
If these steps have given you some clarity on who you are as a business and how you want to present yourself, you can begin to bring your new brand identity into everything you do. You may want to put together some simple brand guidelines (instructions on tone of voice, typography, logo use etc.) that will help you and your team ensure everyone understands the brand and everyone is presenting it in the same way.
How to measure brand awareness?
What is a sign that awareness of your brand is growing?
It's finding that more people are talking about your business, more people are searching for it by name. Perhaps more people are engaging with you on social media. These are all signs that awareness of your brand is growing, so try to measure these behaviours to see how your activities are helping your brand to grow.
Here are some simple brand awareness KPIs you could use to measure organic increases in brand awareness. Don't forget to measure these things now, so you can see how your brand awareness develops over time.
Sentiment - reviews, opinions, feedback - is it positive, negative, or neutral? Take an overview and see how things improve.
Social media - are your followers growing? Are more people talking about your brand? Are more people sharing your posts? Are people tagging their friends in your posts?
Bounce rate/ time on site - If your bounce rate is reducing in Google Analytics, this is a sign that you are reaching more of the right kind of audience. They are also likely to browse for longer if they are genuinely interested in your brand.
Conversion rates - See if these are improving on your site using Google Analytics. Conversions or goals may be represented by enquiry forms being completed, phone numbers being clicked, or sales through the website.
Brand search volume - use Google Trends to find out how many people are searching your business by name, a strong indicator of brand recall, or track keyword searches in Google Analytics or Google Console (all free) to see if people are searching for you by name.
Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash