Tips for Building a Powerful Brand Identity for your Small Business

Starting a business can be one of the most exciting and empowering moves you’ll ever make and absolutely doable, even in today’s highly competitive marketplace. It takes more than a great idea to sustain a business, though. To be successful, you’ll need to first focus on building a powerful brand identity. Here are some tips to guide you on your way.

Be Sure of Yourself.
It’s important to know what your brand stands for, what makes it special and its benefit. You also need to know who your target audience is and make that benefit clear and obvious to them

Create a Distinctive Identity.
Branding is about perception and the most powerful brands are built from the inside out on differentiation. Creating a distinctive logo and tagline that captures the essence of your brand can increase your visibility. A quality website can also help differentiate your business while also introducing you to online customers and boosting credibility.

Get Connected and Be Memorable.
Creating a brand voice and social media strategy is essential, so it’s important to create a profile for your business on select social media platforms where your customers congregate. Next, create compelling communications that emotionally connect with and motivate your customers to love your brand and buy from it! Powerful brands are great at listening so be sure to respond to online comments and questions

Be Consistent and Congruent.
Maintaining consistent, congruent messaging makes your business easier to remember and trust. Ask yourself: Does your website look like it belongs with your business card and your social media channels? Is your messaging consistent with your brand?

Deliver on your promises.
Strong brands possess credible, relevant and distinctive brand promises. That said, create a brand promise, deliver on it and provide an exceptional customer experience. You’ll end up creating brand advocates who will sing your praises and help build your brand.

Tips for Building a Powerful Brand Identity for your Small Business

Top Seven Digital Ways To Build Email List:

If your business has an online presence then the opportunity exists to build a very effective email marketing list. A targeted email list allows you to constantly nurture prospects by providing them with information and offers in order to eventually turn then into a revenue producing conversion.

If the thought of building a targeted email marketing list from the ground up seems to be a challenging task, then use the following tips to help you get started.

1. Subscription forms on Website:Have prominent “subscribe to email” links on every page of your website.

Give reason why they will benefit from the email. Examples: “Receive special deals via email” or “Latest news in your inbox” or “View hottest trends”.
Show them how the email will “look” like.
Always send a welcome email without fail.
Show your emails as archives on your website, this builds trust and lets people know what kind of content they will be receiving.

2. Other Websites:There are various websites that have registered readers. These websites have taken permission from the readers to send them interesting content. If your target audience is similar to the readers of such websites then you should consider keeping aside some budget to send your newsletter to such audience.Make sure you have good content for people to click the email like something free that they can instantly download. It can be a coupon, or a code or a contest or simple a whitepaper.When they visit your website make sure you ask them for their email in a form in return for the free stuff. This way slowly you will build your database of emails.

3. Business Contacts:During the course of your interactions in your business, you have been sending emails to hundreds of your business partners, associates, vendors, clients etc. Create a one off campaign to invite them to your email newsletters. Please do not include them automatically as doing that amounts to spamming. Please obtain their approval.Make sure your signature in your emails also has a tagline that invites users to register with your website.

4. Social Media:If you use Facebook Business Page you should consider having a subscription form on it. From time to time post links on your various social media sites asking people to sign-up for your newsletter.Other social media such as twitter and LinkedIn can give you a good list of potential readers, provided you seek their permission first.

5. Offline Tactics:If you have offline stores / shops consider asking every customer to fill out a form with their short details. Keep the form short and simple so that walk-in customers will not be daunted. Give something in return, like a lucky draw.If you participate in exhibitions, it is a good time to get people to sign up for your newsletters on your booth.

6. Customer Interaction:Every inbound and outbound call that your support team makes, make sure that they have a script which will help them get the email address of your prospective customers.In every invoice, receipt, and email, that you send out include a link to your newsletter sign up.

7. Refer a friend:Incentivize people to refer their friends. You can hold a lucky draw for all the referrers and announce it every week or give some similar incentive.Give special stuff, in the form of gifts, discounts to people on your email list. Reserve some special promotions for this channel.