A Crash Course in Branding
As a small business owner, you probably have some kind of business brand: your logo, your business card, your website, your advertising. But your brand is more than your logo, or your website, or even your products and services.
Your brand is how the market perceives you. The primary way your brand is established is in the message that you “broadcast” to your market. This message is communicated in all of your marketing and advertising, and also the customer experience when they are doing business with you.
Your brand message encompasses all of these things:
» Your value proposition (what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for)
» Your Unique Selling Proposition (what makes you different)
» The tone and “voice” you use when communicating your message (serious, casual, funny, snappy, sarcastic, etc)
» Your purpose, mission, and values
» The fonts, colors, and style of your graphics
In essence, your brand is your business’s personality. To humanize it, it is how your business walks, talks, dresses, thinks, and goes about doing business.
Discovering Your Unique Brand
Now that you know what a brand is, you are either thinking “Yesss! I know my brand because my business has a distinct personality!” Or more likely, you’re thinking, “Dang. I’m all over the place. I’m not really sure what sets me apart, or what my purpose is, never mind my visual brand which is hodge podge of colors, fonts, and logos.”
If you’re the latter, don’t worry, we all have to start somewhere.
An important principle to keep in mind as you’re discovering your brand is to remember that the most successful brands are the most authentic brands. They represent the business owner’s values, purpose, interests, and even quirks and mannerisms.
The more authentic and transparent you are, the more attractive and distinct you will be from the crowd.
We’ve developed a worksheet with questions and exercises to help you develop a brand that truly represents who you are and what your business stands for.
We call it the World’s Easiest Branding Exercise because it’s short (4 pages), uncomplicated, and straightforward. The work itself may or may not be hard, but getting to a place of understanding where you can begin the work is NOT hard.