5 Ways to Build a Strong Online Brand for your Small Business

Branding is a way of defining your business to yourself, your team and your external stakeholders. The benefits of a strategically-defined brand are big and include loyalty, advocacy and huge competitive advantages.

Many small business owners understand that branding is essential to their business, yet they are not sure why. They recognize that most successful companies built solid branding foundations which enabled their steady growth and name recognition. They understand that branding is not just a logo or a nice business card. Few however realize that successful brands have placed branding at the heart of their business, so much so that in many ways, they could substitute the word brand for business.

Here are five tips on how to successfully implement branding for your business:

1. Clearly define your brand: Your brand is your promise to deliver a specific product or service in the best possible way. Defining your brand means uncovering the intrinsic value it offers your clients and digging deep into the core of why you are in business.
2. Analyze what is driving your business: What makes you successful? What differentiates you from your competitors? Why are you getting up every morning to go to work? Answer to such questions will help establish your core and plant the seeds for growth.
3. Communicate with consistency: Using a consistent look and feel, voice and tone makes you memorable and easily recognizable in the sea of similar products or services. It also builds trust allowing the true benefits of your service to shine with honesty and authenticity.
4. Don't copy what big brands are doing: Every brand is meant to be unique. Your unique brand characteristics are what will make you noticeable. Be creative or hire creative minds to craft the critical components that represent the essence of why you are in business.
5. Be innovative and bold: Big brands are encumbered by layers of bureaucratic processes that slow them down and prevent them from quickly reacting to changing trends. As a small business, you have an advantage of being able to adjust quickly.

Successful brand building is fluid and engaging. It is organized and focused. It follows old-school guidelines that have been tested over time. Take the time to properly build the foundation of the essence of why you are in business. Carefully craft intrinsic values that make you stand out, and strategically communicate them to the world using the right medium, and you may have the recipe for long-lasting success.

Catherine

#branding #brand #sales #growth #brandrecognition