Sunday, July 22, 2012

5 Branding Tips For Small Businesses – GEC Business Review


By Jess Lee

We should re-consider the fact that branding is only for big companies, not for small companies. Proper branding is critical to any (sized) company’s long term success. Branding isn’t as simple as developing beautiful logo. In reality, branding is managing the emotions, feelings as well as thoughts of your customers to ensure that your brand is what they desire of. What if your desired brand image isn’t what’s in the minds of your target audience, you should immediately figure out where the gaps are and how to address them.

Here are 5 easy branding tips for small companies to grow brand and customers.

1. Get a Professional Website
Having a website isn’t enough, however, the website should be able to reflect your brand image.
For instance, if you were a media and advertising agency, and your website design isn’t fancy and creative enough, it wouldn’t reflect well on your passion and creativity.

2. Let’s Blogging
Blogs are good stuff, and blogs help your business on multiple levels. For instance, your valuable blog content on a consistent basis will make you look like an expert. Look, people are looking for experts, not apprentices.

3. Participate in Local Business Events
Participating by just showing up your face at events isn’t enough as you’ll be just a face in the crowd. Let’s volunteer yourself as part of the committees. Believe it or not, those NGOs and charitable groups are constantly looking for volunteer help. Isn’t this a great way to elevate your status and visibility among the entire social networks?

4. Build Your Social Networking
Social networking is a great way to build your brand, most importantly, it’s totally FREE. As far as social networking goes, I thought that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are good stuff. These networks are widely accepted by the business world, and are easy to set up a profile, probably within fewer clicks. LinkedIn has remained the most profession all of these more common and mainstream social networks. To help build your brand, you should open up a profile and start connecting with colleagues you know from previous work experiences.

5. Be Niche
One last thing, this is a fact that you cannot be everything for everybody on earth! If you intend to please everybody, you’re likely to attract just fewer customers than you actually can.  Simply because you can’t be an expert in everything, right? So, be specific niche that you want to focus on and stand for one single thing.

Lastly, branding is about how people perceive who you are, not just the way you think who you are. If your current brand image is not what you’d like it to be, you need to find out where are the gaps and create a strategy to fix it immediately.

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