The marketing goals for all businesses is ultimately to continue to thrive, sustain, and grow. This may be the development of sales lists to a sales team, or inviting a select number of people who want to learn about their financial retirement planning. It may also reinforce the existing relationships with customers or communicate to your customers and prospects what steps the company is taking to thrive thru the Covid-19 pandemic. In all cases, the business wants to communicate, at all times, how the business wants its public to view them. Regardless of what the message is within the campaign, the general theme for that business is what’s remembered over time. This is the brand. And building brand, over time, is a crucial piece to a success thriving business.
Building Brand for Small Businesses Makes a Lasting Impression
It’s foolish for small business owners to assume that their general public puts as much consideration into their marketing message as they do. Let’s face it, you only have a small portion of your customers attention at any given time. So, making a lasting impression takes careful thought and consideration.
Essentially, if you can, you want to consistently repeat the same message in different ways. Maybe you reinforce this message across a different medium, or while promoting a new product you want to remind the prospect/customer of your brand message that emphasizes speedy customer service.
Defining Your Brand
At the onset of defining your brand, you want to consider the competition. What are they saying, or not saying? Is there brand well defined and consistently communicated? Your brand message will ideally separate your business, and products and services, from the rest. Many businesses find opportunities to connect with a neglected segment of the population. Other businesses will see that one business captures the “lion share” of the market with emphasizing they are the low-cost leader. Consider the competition, how effective their branding is and if your can learn something to define yours.
Ask yourself, what differentiating value does your business bring to the marketplace?
BB Direct’s message to the masses is never really spelled out, but we attempt to communicate our brand thru our actions. If we were to put it into words, it would be, “Among the many businesses that provide marketing data, BB Direct strives to exceed customer expectations by continually listening to our customers, and seeking additional ways to help them”. Communicating this message within our advertising message is tricky, but we try to say what we do, and then have our actions follow our words.
Consider what’s driving your business. Aim to build long-term relationships with your customers if you have repeat customers. Sometimes less said is more. Simplifying your message to you can say it clearly. Most importantly, you must live up to your brand message. Brand loyalty comes from delivering upon your promises, every time.
Your customers are the driving force behind how you position your business and brand among the competition. Understanding your customers is key retaining them and finding more. While it’s really difficult to be all things to all people, you really must become an understudy in learning who your customers are, how many potential customers are out there, and then meeting those prospects with the same good products and services that other customers found.
One of the best ways to better understanding your customers starts with building your own customer database. You should be collecting more than just names and addresses, but also phone, email, and any transactional data you can find on those people. But even with simply collecting the names and addresses, you can append demographic data to those individuals. BB Direct can help you with that. Also call database enhancement, taking a list of names and addresses and appending elements of data to those individuals will help you create a profile of what your customers look like.
Using your transactional data, you should be able to learn what patterns may exist among your existing customers. Let’s say you have 20 products and the names and addresses who’ve purchased those products over the last 6 months. You can segment your customers into product 1 buyers, product 2 buyers, and so forth. You can then look at the demographic profile among all products. Is the demographic profile of one product different than another product? Do you find that people buying product 1 are older or more affluent than product buyer 2? The data append process is very helpful in understanding your customers, and then finding more that look just like them.
Based on a better understanding of your customers, you should have a much clearer understanding of not only what your branding message should be, but also how to say it. You may want to speak to segments of your customers a bit differently.
Branding should be consistent across all mediums, i.e., print, video, logo, signage, social media, business cards, website, and customer service. It’s the consistent message that you can communicate thru all the clutter. It’s vital that you invest the time into developing your brand message to your various audience segments, but also as it relates to your competitors. Once established, delivering this brand message each time becomes much easier and more effective.
Because all businesses are different, we’ve listed below a number of helpful suggestions to building brand. They are:
- Establish yourself as the subject matter expert with the right content
- Look for partnership opportunities since people like to do businesses with brands they can trust. Finding businesses with similar but non-competitive audience with which to partner.
- Evoke emotion in your audience. Triggering an emotional response can affect the way we remember things.
- One voice might be more nostalgic while another might cater to amusement, so align the website, visuals, message all together for a cohesive message.
- Build your social media presence since social media is all about connecting with the person, not what tribe they belong to. Consider your audience age for the platform you use and use similar visual, color, language that matches your brand's voice in every post or caption.