Posted on December 29, 2016 by Adrian
Professional branding and branding for a small business should never be underestimated – it builds trust and credibility and it’s essential for securing you business. Customers are far more likely to use you over a competitor if you have a defined brand strategy, coupled with strong and functional branding.
1. Create Your Brand’s Voice
This is really important – your voice needs to be consistent and reflect your business personality. It will be applied on everything from your logo to your social media channels to how you write your web content, so it’s important you’re happy with it and that it’s right for you. Are you corporate? Are you fun? Friendly? Educational? However you decide to be, your voice influences everything from your colour pallet and your style guide to your logo.
Your voice will bring energy and passion and vision and will be probably more important than the actual content. It will influence how your audience views you and how they engage with you.
2. Know Your Audience
This fits in alongside defining your brand. It’s important that you know exactly who you are targeting, why you are, and how you are targeting them. By conducting target audience research, you will be able to create a strategy that will be completely focused in the right area, meaning you have an accurate and effective marketing budget.
Knowing your audience should be the backbone of your branding strategy – this will have a huge impact on both the branding and design of your business.
3. Understand the Power of a Great Logo
Your logo is a symbol of you and your business, it is the face of who you are and what you do and so needs to be simple and memorable, setting you apart from your competitors. It’s vital that you have a professional to help with this, because your logo should be and will be everywhere.
4. Set up Brand Templates
Once you have defined your brand and conducted your audience research, setting up brand templates will help to ensure your marketing materials are consistent and professional looking.
5. Create Client Packs for Meetings
Once you have designed your brand templates, get them printed so that when you are with clients and customers you have samples of your work, your offers – a portfolio of works. Great design deserves to be showed off and what better way than by something tangible – from business cards to flyers to business packs of information?
If you’ve got questions about branding and design or about printing for small businesses, at Colin Cross Printers we are able to help and advise. Please contact us for a chat or for a quote.