Branding Tips for Small Businesses

Branding Tips for Small Businesses

1. Treat your brand like a person.
2. Prioritize consistency.
3. Follow a brand strategy.
4. Don’t let inspiration turn into imitation.
5. Use branding to hire.

1. Treat your brand like a person.

To best wrap your head around the branding process, think of your brand as a person. Your brand should have an identity (who it is), personality (how it behaves), and experience (how it’s remembered).

Ask yourself these questions about your brand:

• How would your brand introduce itself?
• If it had to describe its appearance, how would it do so?
• How would your brand talk about your products or services? Would it be serious and professional, or would it be humorous and edgy?
• What would someone say about your brand after “meeting” it for the first time? What are a few sentences they’d use to describe it?

The purpose of branding is to create relationships with your customers. The easiest way to do this is to treat your brand as a person and understand that you want your customers to do the same.

Testing it out

I imagined the social media marketing platform brand as a person:

• She would introduce herself as a helpful, savvy friend who’s excited to help small businesses grow using the power of social media.
• She would describe her appearance as modern, bright, and approachable, with a friendly smile.
• She would talk about the platform enthusiastically, emphasizing how it makes social media marketing easy and helps form authentic customer connections. Her tone would be warm and encouraging.
• After “meeting” her, someone would describe her as knowledgeable, supportive, and genuinely invested in their success. They’d say she made social media marketing feel accessible and even fun.

Envisioning the brand as a person helps create a cohesive, relatable brand identity to build customer relationships.

2. Prioritize consistency.

Consistency is essential for branding because it builds trust and shows customers that your values are authentic. Without it, you could accidentally undermine your brand and confuse your customers.

Recognizable, valuable brands focus on consistency — and they reap the benefits.

So, make your brand a unified presence across mediums and platforms. This makes it easy for your customers to get familiar with, recognize, and come to prefer your brand over time. Brand guidelines can help with this initiative.

Take a look at this post for consistent brand examples and ideas.

Testing it out

To ensure consistency for the social media marketing platform brand, I:

• Created detailed brand guidelines outlining the mission, values, voice, and visual elements. Distributed this to all team members.
• Set up templates for marketing materials, social media posts, and sales docs to make it easy to maintain visual consistency.
• Scheduled regular brand audits to check that all branded assets are aligned and make updates as needed.
• Appointed a brand manager to oversee all branded content and communications.

3. Build and follow a brand strategy.

A brand strategy is more than your brand guidelines. It’s a plan with specific, long-term goals that your team can achieve as your brand evolves. These goals typically revolve around your brand’s purpose, emotion, flexibility, competitive awareness, and employee involvement.

Remember how I said that branding is a continuous process? There’s a lot that goes into it. A brand strategy can help you turn that process into a well-oiled practice that keeps your brand moving toward success and recognition.

Testing it out

I developed a brand strategy for the social media marketing platform that includes:

• Purpose: Empower small businesses to authentically connect with customers and grow using social media.
• Emotion: Supportive, empowering, approachable.
• Flexibility: Adapt voice and visuals for different social platforms while maintaining core brand elements.
• Competitive awareness: Regularly monitor competitor branding and identify opportunities to differentiate.
• Employee involvement: Engage employees in branding through training, encouraging brand advocacy, and reinforcing brand values.

4. Don’t let inspiration turn into imitation.

Competitive analysis is important. Not only does it educate you on where your competition stands and how they are excelling, but it can also give you ideas on how you can improve or further set apart your brand.

But be careful to not fall into an imitation trap. Keep your competitive research limited and focus on what your organization brings to the table.

Just because a competitor (or two) has branded their company in a certain way doesn’t mean that you have to follow suit. New, unique, provocative brands are memorable brands.

Testing it out

While researching competitors in the social media marketing space, I noticed a lot of similarities — tech-focused language, muted color palettes, generic stock photos. Rather than imitate these trends, I saw an opportunity to set our brand apart with:

• Vibrant, eye-catching brand colors.
• Authentic lifestyle photography showing real small business owners.
• Approachable, jargon-free voice.
• Emphasis on building genuine customer relationships, not just metrics.

5. Use branding to hire.

Strong branding makes your employees proud. I know I’m proud to be part of HubSpot. Leverage your branding to attract talented people. If hiring is a strong initiative for your organization, dedicate some of your resources to employer branding.

Employer branding is how you market your company to job seekers and current employees. If you’re publicly proud of your organization, others will be, too.

Testing it out

To attract top talent to the social media marketing platform team, I:

• Updated our careers page with compelling branded content about our mission, values, and culture.
• Developed a social media campaign featuring employee stories and behind-the-scenes glimpses of life at the company.
• Created branded welcome kits for new hires, including swag with our logo and colors.
• Encouraged employees to share their experiences on social media and Glassdoor.

Ready, Set, Brand

Branding is your organization’s name, logo, color palette, voice, and imagery. It’s also more. It’s that intangible feeling your customers have when they interact with your brand. You know, that experience we talked about in the beginning.

That’s how powerhouse brands deviate from all the others. The tangible components contribute to this — a gorgeous logo, a clever tagline, an authentic manifesto, and a clear brand voice — but truly strong brands thrive when they focus on the big picture of their brand.