Are You Doing Enough to Brand Your Small Business?

A guest post by Ryan Currie

So you’ve launched a small business and it’s doing well. People come in your store or you’ve got some return visitors to the website! Maybe you haven’t been actively marketing your small business (or maybe you have) but the real question is, have you been doing enough to brand your small business?
What’s the difference between branding and marketing?

Marketing is easy to define. It’s all wrapped up in impressions, traditional advertisements, and a very specific budget that someone puts in place. Branding is a little more fluid and it’s far more difficult to do. Branding your business means you’re creating an identity for the company based on an intangible asset you offer, not just buying radio airtime. Maybe you’re the “down to earth” choice or perhaps you’re the fast-turnaround supplier. It’s really difficult to market a business if you don’t have a brand to promote.

How do you know if you’re branding your business?

First and foremost, you and the rest of the company need to have a branding brainstorm session. It’s smart to sit down with some current and potential customers beforehand and talk to them about your business…do they recognize your logo? What’s the first thing they think of when they hear your company name? Your “brand” is tied up in people’s emotional response to your business, not your sales figures. If people have no emotional response to your brand, you don’t really have one yet.

What can you do to get started building your brand?

Building a brand is all about “voice.” You need to define your brand voice in-house before you ever promote it to the public and never, ever deviate from that particular voice. Your voice should address how you deal with clients, how your website comes across (witty? Informational?) and of course, how you market your products. If you don’t define your brand voice, your customers will do it for you and you may not like the results.

How do you reinforce your brand messaging?

The key to branding is consistency. You need to have a very specific branded-voice in place every time your ‘company’ interacts with customers. That means social media, your advertisements, and even your printed marketing materials like shopping bags and calendars need to all be consistent. When someone reads a tagline or sees a particular color scheme without your company name attached, they should be able to connect that to your brand. That’s the end goal.

And how do you know that branding efforts are working?

Branding and marketing are both about data. Branding is the first step in any successful marketing campaign but knowing whether the two are working together requires gathering data. Do some focus groups, pass out some surveys, and even hire a digital marketing consultant to look into data from your website and social sites. You’ll be surprised how much cold, hard numbers can tell you.

Branding isn’t a one-time activity. If you have a small business you need to constantly be branding, both locally and on a larger scale. If you’re not working to build your own brand you can bet some other competitor is doing it for you, and you’re far better off telling customers how to associate your business than leaving it up to someone else.


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Ryan Currie is a product manager at BizShark.com, with 5 years experience in online marketing and product development. In addition to web related businesses, he also enjoys the latest news and information on emerging technologies and open source projects.

Image credit: google