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

What is your business card doing for you? Is it a plain piece of card stock with your logo and contact information printed on it? This is okay for most companies, but for a startup, your business card is one of the easiest ways to spread word of your brand.

You could take Ji Lee‘s simple–albeit a bit risky–approach:

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What does every business have in common? A brand. It might not be the same for everyone, but it is a strategy they all have to employ at some point. Essentially, it will represent every positive, or potentially negative, thought a customer will have about your company.

Of course no business would want their brand to give people a negative impression. But, what do they want it to say? That’s a question that you need to ask yourself. The actual answer will depend on you.

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Brands often feel like that best friend you had in kindergarten that you kept in touch with through college and beyond… you’ve grown up with them… remember the awesome adventures you had together, trouble you got in together… and those things they did that you thought you’d never forgive. Even if it was something as silly as taking the last red lollipop, knowing it was your favorite. But you made it through… until they made friends with your mortal enemy… but sure, after a week of not talking, somehow you worked things out and are friends again.

Silly isn’t it? But i often see brands and my relationships with them like friendships or acquaintances. Each one has a personality of it own… is constantly evolving… and sometimes totally rubs me the wrong way. But the most important thing is ~ there is no real constant. If the brand is too stagnant, i may outgrow it or get bored and move in. If it moves to fast, i may hate it for one phase, but love it again as it comes closer to my tastes.

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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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Several times a year I get asked the same basic question about how to choose a brand name for your business or a product. The question (or some variation of it) is:

“Is it better to choose a descriptive name, or is it better to make up some unique word that never existed before?”

There are different schools of thought on this question. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each side.

DESCRIPTIVE NAME

A descriptive name is something like “Mary’s Bakery” or “Toledo Plumbing.” Names like these have several advantages:

• Inexpensive to convey what business you are in — You don’t have to spend a lot of money on advertising to establish a brand identity that the public will come to know and recognize for the line of business you are in. With a name like “Smith’s Towing,” for instance, people will know exactly what your company does based on the name alone.

• Easy to think up — You don’t typically need to go through the expense of hiring a brand naming consultant. For a small business on a tight budget, a naming consultant may be out of reach, and the task of thinking up a unique name on your own too daunting. No wonder so many small businesses opt for simplicity, choosing something like “Sally’s Candies” or a similar descriptive name.

• Easier to get found in the search engines – If your business name is Toledo Plumbing, you already have a natural advantage for getting found when someone searches for Toledo plumbing companies.

But of course you have to weigh these advantages against the negatives of using a descriptive name — and there are indeed some downsides.

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