When most people think of branding, they think of big companies with large marketing budgets investing in TV and magazine ads, expensive logo designs, and fancy viral marketing campaigns. Yet there is much more to branding than having a huge marketing budget. Small businesses can, and should, invest in building their brands too. Here are some tips to help you build your brand effectively and efficiently, without needing to blow your yearly budget.
1. Build a good social media presence
It doesn’t matter whether you run a bricks and mortar store, a personal training service, or a restaurant, you need a web presence, and that presence should consist of more than just a website. It is important to claim your brand name on as many different social networking sites as possible. At a minimum, you should control your brand’s names on:
Setting up accounts on those sites is free. If your brand name is not already taken, use it for each account. If it is taken, claim the closest variation that is still available. Start building up a presence on each site by following people interested in your niche and engaging in conversations with them.
You don’t have to spend several hours a day managing your social media accounts. Allocate a few minutes each morning and evening to logging into those accounts (or checking them via a social tool such as HootSuite). Every weekday, check your accounts, answer any questions and update your profile.
Once you have a decent number of followers, you can use these accounts for marketing. Do not flood your social media accounts with marketing messages though. Try to keep your marketing to conversational Tweets ratio to about 1:15 – so for every promotional message you send, make 15 posts where you aren’t selling something. The other social networks tend to be lower volume overall, so you can aim for a lower ratio on them, but the same message applies – do not spam!
2. Market yourself as an expert
As a small business owner, you are the face of your company. Take advantage of this and market yourself as an expert so that your company can get indirect exposure. Sign up for mailing lists such as HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and watch out for requests from journalists who are looking for comments on subjects that relate to your niche. HARO is a free service. The list is quite U.S. centric, but there are opportunities for people from other parts of the world to provide comments and case studies.
Each time you answer a journalist’s request, provide your name and your job title. This way, readers will see “Bob Jones from XYZ Company said…”. It is unlikely that a reader will instantly look up your company and buy from you, but that is not the goal of this marketing technique. All you want to do is make sure that people see your brand name appearing in several different publications. If someone remembers seeing your brand name in a newspaper or magazine, or hearing you speak on the radio, then they are more likely to trust you when they next see your advertising.
One extra tip to add: never call yourself an expert – it reeks of arrogance.
3. Use Press Releases as a Brand-Building Strategy
Arranging advertising in glossy magazines or on TV is a costly venture. Even getting ad space on high-profile websites creates a large hole in your advertising budget. It can be hard for smaller companies to justify the expense. The good news is that there are other ways to get big publications talking about your brand.
Let’s imagine that you sell training shoes, and the London Marathon is coming up. Run a survey of your social media followers asking them what sort of running gait they have. Once you have a decent number of results, put them into a press release. It would probably say something like “60% of runners may be wearing the wrong training shoe!”, and “The London Marathon is coming up soon, and a survey conducted by [YOUR BRAND] found that more than half of all recreational runners do not know what gait they have. These runners could be risking injury by running long distances in an ill-fitting shoe”.
Send out a press release and an infographic to bloggers and journalists. Some bloggers will simply post the infographic online, giving you free, instant advertising. Print journalists might contact you for comment, or turn the results of your survey into a short article. You will be more likely to get a good response if the press release you send out is topical and genuinely interesting, so don’t spam journalists with releases every time you add a new product to your catalogue.
4. Don’t obsess over “going viral”
When a brand decides to stage an accident, record people doing a silly dance, or arrange a prank in an attempt to make a cool viral video, things rarely work out the way they intend. Most web users are quite jaded. They have seen thousands of videos and they can tell when the “funny accidents” are staged. To an experienced viewer, your video is the online equivalent of a 40 year old uncle trying to use modern slang to look “hip” to his teenage nephew.
Instead of trying to make something that you think will go viral, make videos that matter. Dove’s recent sketches video, a part of their “real beauty” brand is a good example of this. The video isn’t funny, no-one gets hurt, and no-one does anything embarrassing. It’s just a story about an artist drawing some women based on their descriptions of how they think they look. This is a powerful video that reinforces the whole idea behind the Dove brand. Try to do something similar for your own brand.
5. Reward your early customers
The customers that take a chance on your business when it is still new and unknown are ones that you should treasure. Recognise them, and give them something as a thank-you gift. The gift does not have to be expensive; a free branded t-shirt or cap is something that many people will appreciate, and if they choose to wear it you get free advertising in return. Promotional clothing works out to be quite affordable when ordered in bulk, and can be handed out at trade shows or sent out as a little something extra on orders over a certain value.
6. Get involved with the local (or global) community
Try to arrange events, give out awards, or sponsor organisations in your local area. You don’t need a huge marketing budget to do this. If you run a sports shop, offer to help out with van hire or kits for a local sports team so that they can compete in national events. If you run a web design business, donate some of your old computer hardware to the local hackerspace, and offer some free web hosting as a prize for the next hack-a-thon that they hold. Give them some promotional t-shirts to hand out too. Even small donations build goodwill and create a lasting impression.
If the events that you sponsor are being held in your local area, try to attend them and use them as a networking opportunity. Who knows, your sports store may become the official uniform supplier for the team, or you could land a contract to build the next website for the hackerspace.
