Building Brand Recognition: A Guide For Small Business Owners

Building a recognisable brand is absolutely vital if you’re starting out as a small business. At this stage, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the competition, and to do this, you’ll need a strong, distinct brand. 

Branding is a little different if you’re running a small business. There’s a much bigger emphasis on making the most out of every penny. You can do this in lots of creative ways: print business cards online, negotiate discounts with your suppliers, etc. 

If you’re running your own business, there are loads of resources and free advice out there that can help with things like building brand recognition. As a smaller operation, it’s crucial to use everything available to you, especially if they’re free.

If you’re wondering how you can build brand recognition as a small business owner, look no further. In this article, we’ll go through four practical ways you can do just that. 

Perform Segmentation and Targeting

If you’ve attended any sort of introductory marketing class in the past, you’ll know that customer segmentation and targeting are central to any marketing activity, including branding. It’s important to build a brand that resonates with your audience, and to do that, you’ll first need to know who they are.

Market segmentation means dividing the market according to criteria relevant to your business. Factors you can use to do this include demographic characteristics like age, sexual orientation and ethnicity, behavioural characteristics like introversion or extroversion and geographic location. Choose one or more of these characteristics and start building a customer profile.

Once you have a good idea of who you want to sell to, it’s time to build a brand that sticks to them specifically. If you’re targeting young people, for instance, you might want to use brighter brand colours, a more playful logo and a lighter brand tone. On the other hand, if you’re targeting older professionals, you might want to use more subdued brand elements. 

Track Branding Costs

As a small business, it’s absolutely crucial that you spend every dollar as efficiently as possible. This means keeping costs low while getting maximum results. You’ll need an accurate way of measuring costs and returns. While this can be tricky when it comes to branding, this data is absolutely crucial to helping you make decisions. 

When measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns, one useful tool is the marketing funnel, which shows you your conversion rates across the board. For instance, you’ll see how many impressions turned into clicks, how many clicks turned into app downloads, etc. From this, you’ll be able to see where the bottlenecks are, which will help inform you where you can most effectively spend your money. 

Focus on Customer Service

The adage that ‘the customer is always right’ has been around for a long time, and it certainly isn’t a perfect rule, but it’s still useful. When trying to build brand recognition, you’ll want to be seen as a company that cares about its customers.

If you’re trying to be more customer centric, you’ll want to keep in mind that nothing you do from a business perspective happens in a vacuum. When writing a promotional email or creating copy for an ad, you’re writing for real people, and you’ll want to resonate with the people you’re trying to sell to.

This goes back to market segmentation and positioning. To connect with your customers, you’ll first need to know who they are and what sorts of communications they respond to. 

Maintain Consistency

It’s absolutely crucial for any business to maintain a consistent brand. Your brand is one of your most important assets, and you’ll want a common image to pop up in your customers’ minds when they think of you. 

As a smaller business, it can be easier to build and maintain a brand. You’re essentially building one from scratch, so you have a lot more creative power. You’ll also be putting out fewer promotional materials than large multinational companies, so it’ll be easier to control the consistency of your collateral. You’ll also probably have a smaller, more tight-knit marketing/branding team than these big companies, which means it’ll be easier to educate them about your brand.

There’s no shortage of practical things you can do, including maintaining a consistent voice in marketing emails and press releases, making sure your brand colours are exactly the same on all marketing collateral and treating your customers according to your brand values. 

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If you’re an emerging company, one of the first things you’ll need to think about is your brand. This will inform how the public sees you and, ultimately, whether or not they choose to buy from you. Your brand is also what sets you apart from everyone else in your sector and allows you to grab more market share. 

In this article, we’ve gone through a few tactics you can use to build brand recognition as a small business. Though you won’t have the budget of bigger companies, you also have several key advantages.

If you’ve been putting brand building on the backburner, it’s time for that to change. Incorporate these tips into your marketing today and grow your brand recognition.