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

Large corporate businesses have one advantage over small businesses: they have more people and resources. Because they’re such vast collections of individuals, and it can be difficult for consumers to understand an organization that large,  branding has been developed to control how consumers feel about a company and its products and services.

A brand is a collections of symbols and mental associations connected with a company or product. When defining a company’s brand, marketers seek to develop and align the consumers’ expectations, creating the impression that a product has certain qualities that make it unique or special.

In a small business, your brand doesn’t have to be a collection of symbols because you, the small business entrepreneur, are the brand. What you do and say reflects on all aspects of your business. You humanize your business in a way that corporate brand marketers could only dream about.

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Half of all new product revenues come from the introduction and early stages of a product’s life cycle.   But what about brands?  Can you create a whole new life cycle by re-launching your brand online?

Sure you can.  In fact, brand managers have been working overtime on finding the best ways to keep their brands at your fingertips .  Here are some of the best online brand building tools and how you can use them to build a powerful brand presence online. As a small business, you have a lot of the same online marketing tools available to you as the big companies.

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(Image credit) Back in the late ’90s, I’d often be asked to give speeches to Very Large Businesses – the kind of companies that bring their top sales execs to a “Chairman’s Circle” retreat at a high-end resort. I’d fly in, eat dinner with the senior management, and in the morning I’d give a talk about the impact of the Internet on that particular business’s industry. And whether I was speaking to an insurance company or a media conglomerate, my message was always the same: The Web is going to change your business, forever, and you better focus on understanding this new technology.

Now, this was ten years ago, mind you. In the intervening decade, large businesses have not only learned the Web, they’ve embraced it. They realize that they live or die by how their brand is expressed online. 

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A blog can be a great tool for marketing your business and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. However, like anything you do to promote your business, it is important to make sure your blog is consistent with the brand you’ve built for your small business.

Here are some tips to keep in mind if you’ve decided to start a blog for your business:

1. Your domain is part of your brand: There are a lot of free blog-hosting options out there, such as Typepad, WordPress.com and Blogger. However, they tack their name on to your web address in exchange for the free hosting. So if you are Janey Smith, CPA and start a Blogger blog, your blog address becomes “janeysmithcpa.blogspot.com.” For just a few dollars a year, you can own your own domain — one that rolls off the tongue, sticks in the customer’s mind and looks great printed on a business card. Choose a domain you would still want when you have a loyal following and are interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

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I feel like i grew up online. My personal brand barely existed without being online in some form… perhaps email and IM were where it all started, moving quickly to free websites, to my own domains, to my own network of sites… my world – my brand – has nearly always been digital! NOTCOT the name itself came about because of a late night rhyming session to make a random email address between high school homework…. notcot@hotbot.com … So i suppose i can’t speak much to the transition from real world to internet….

BUT… this last week i went more offline than i have in years… all while still checking in on my sites and skimming emails about twice a day briefly for a whole week (sad, isn’t it? how that feels like not working at all?)… it’s certainly helped give me more perspective. Knowing this article was in the works made me more conscious of branding i encountered all around me in my day to day! Also being around older family members who were less techy than usual… seeing the ways they look for information and discuss brands was fascinating! (No, they don’t use maps or google on their phones… and many were just starting to try to make sense of their iPhones and looking things up on wikipedia was this slow and new thing that would come up during dinner conversations…)

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