Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Your brand identity should be the basis for all your communication with your current and potential customers. When you have developed a strong brand identity, you will find it is much easier to stand apart from your competitors and win the hearts and minds of your customers.

There are three key areas that you need to think about when you are developing your brand identity. These are:

1. Who are your Competitors?

Every brand has competitors and you want your key customers to buy your brand over theirs. Therefore, when you are developing your brand strategy you need to have a very good understanding of your competitors and their activities.

Collect information about them including their website content, products, services and promotional literature. This will help you understand their strengths, weaknesses, who they are targeting and importantly what is their key point of difference. Also have a look at their logos, the colors, font and images as this will give you further insight.

2. Who are your Customers?

At the centre of your brand strategy and identity is the need to understand your key customers, how they think, feel and behave. The important word in the last sentence is “feel”, because your customers are people and you need to tap into their emotions to truly develop a connection between your brand and their needs, wants and desires.

There are many ways to do this and one of the easiest is to talk with them, listening and observing how they communicate; what they look like; what words they use; how they express their needs, desires and their likes and dislikes.

3. Your Key Point of Difference

Once you have gained a better understanding of your competitors and customers you are now in a position to determine your key point of difference. Your key point of difference is what makes you stand out from your competitors and contains the most important benefit from your customers’ point of view.

You also need to determine you brand’s personality as this brings your brand to life.

When you are thinking about your brand’s personality, as a starting point think of comparisons with other things such as animals, cars, trees, drinks. Compare your competitors, also. For example you might describe your brand as a Labrador; friendly and faithful, whereas your competitor could be a German Shepherd; direct and fearless.

Ultimately if you can have your brand convey the emotional connection with your customers, then it is much more difficult for your competitors to steal them from you.

When you have established your brand identity it is then time to work out the elements you will use to communicate visually with your customers, such as logo, its colours, fonts etc. Here are a few tips you may want to consider:

• If at all possible work with a designer who has experience in this area. We did this when we developed our image with Oliver Goodfellow from a green orange and we achieved a better result than if we had developed it ourselves.

• A logo is a combination of elements that must all work together and help bring your identity to life. If you can it is a good idea when you have a few designs to obtain feedback from your customers or potential customers.

• Colours can say so much and when you are choosing colours try and get a sense of the emotion you wish to portray such as red = passion, dark blue = responsible.

• There are so many fonts to choose from, so as a suggestion choose one that is simple, clean and can be easily read whether in colour or black and white and different sizes.

• Ensure your logo is used consistently across all communication with your customers, such as your business cards, letterhead, website and promotional material.

• If you can get someone to smile when they see your image then your brand can appear to be more engaging. Examples for me include Google and Twitter.

• If you are going to use a device or image (think of the Nike tick) ensure that it is relevant, compatible with the other elements of the brand image and actually can be easily understood by your key customers. If in doubt do not use one.

One example of a brand that I believe conveys their brand identity well is FlyingSolo, a small business community from Australia, where I’m from. To me the brand is all about approachability, friendliness, and being straight forward. This is communicated with the colours, style and font of the logo through to the look and feel of the website.

Although developing a brand strategy and identity takes time, it will help you build and strengthen your key customer relationships.

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Susan Oakes is a director and cofounder of Marketing for Business Success Pty Ltd., which developed M4B Marketing Software.  She blogs at M4B Marketing Blog.