When creating marketing pieces for your small business, every decision holds a lot of weight. Keeping your branding top-notch is one of the best ways to increase your visibility in your industry, and attract a larger consumer base. To help you create a branding identity and strategy that will allow your small business to soar, here are 10 easy small business branding ideas to get you started:
1. Keep Things Consistent
Once you’ve developed a knockout brand, you need to keep a consistent way of branding yourself. Never mix too many logos into the mix, and always make sure that your brand is easily recognizable anytime you are putting your company in the public sphere. Doing so will help build a strong image of your brand in the public mind.
2. Keep it Simple
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when drawing up logos and taglines is making it complicated. You want someone to understand the attitude and purpose of your brand at a glance if possible. The quicker someone can understand your company, and the more memorable something is, the better your brand will do in keeping its visibility up.
3. Create a Company Voice
If you want to run a successful small business, you need to have a unique voice in your industry. Whether you want to have a relaxed attitude about your brand, or a dead-serious one, you once again need to keep your voice consistent. Having a voice that actively defines your services is a great way to attract your ideal consumer base.
IFC’s current logo is a great example of this, and the professionals over at Inc.edu have broken down why. Check out their awesome list of 7 brand redesigns that worked to learn more about recent brand success stories. The inspiration could help you finally make that big breakthrough!
4. Keep it Scalable
Chances are you will need to use your logo and other advertising material for many different purposes over the years. Having a logo that looks great both large and small will help you repurpose your advertising for all kinds of important situations. Once again, keeping things simple can really benefit you at this stage.
5. Borrow from Your Industry
Many industries have a certain look to their branding and logo styles. Never copy a competitor, but looking at successful brands inside of your industry can provide great inspiration and help you find a starting point for designing your brand.
6. Make a Branding Bible
Whether you hire firms to design your brand content, or do it all in-house, having a guideline or design bible for your marketing content can be a godsend. Having defined purposes for design choices, as well as dos and don’ts will help save tons of time and money by helping you avoid costly redesigns.
7. Brand Your Customer Contact
Your logo and taglines are not the only important aspects of your small business’s branding. The chances are that when you run a small business, you will interact with consumers directly more often than large corporations. Due to this, it is important to brand daily communications like email and voicemail effectively. You want your brand’s voice, visibility, and purpose to constantly present itself when you are interacting with customers, so never neglect this important step.
8. Multiple Logos
While you should never have drastically different, or more than a handful of logos, having multiple logos can be useful in some cases. For example, if your business were based around doing kitchen and bathroom renovations, you could build a separate logo for each service. However, keep these brands consistent, only changing a small section of each design. Ultimately, you want to avoid confusing consumers about the state of your company at all costs. If they think your services are actually different companies, your brand’s strength will suffer.
9. Keep it Unique
Although taking inspiration from successful brands within your industry can be a great help, you want your brand to really stick out from the competition. Consider testing your brand out on a target audience before launching it to see how they react to it, and what they can identify about your brand from your branding alone. The more they can gather, and the better reaction they have to your marketing, the more likely your company is to do well within your industry.
10. Stick With It
Above all else, it is simply important that you keep pushing yourself to make excellent and informed branding choices. Never rush into a decision about your branding, as even seemingly innocent choices can have huge repercussions if gone about in the wrong way. Thankfully, by using the tips in this guide, you can avoid any practices that should cause you frustration in the future.
At WPamplify, we are dedicated to helping small businesses reach their potential. For more information on branding, as well as many other awesome small business centric topics, come check out our full blog and site!
