So many budding female entrepreneurs ask me, “Melissa, why our small business is not getting customers or leads? Our products are excellent. What is the issue with us?”

My only question to them is, “Do your customers really know your business?”

Increasing brand awareness is truly important to secure a competitive spot in the market. With a robust brand strategy in place, you’ll be able to showcase your brand’s unique message in a better way and, over time, establish customer loyalty.

In this blog post, I’ll share the best brand-building strategies for small businesses like yours – many of which I’ve used with our clients.

Stake your claim

Make sure you are clear about your brand promise.

Here are my three favorite branding questions: Who are you being? What are you committed to? What can people count on you for?

Some examples that will get you started in answering these three powerful questions:

• Who I’m being is accessible.
• My customers can count on us to get their order delivered in less than 24 hours.
• I’m highly committed to giving my customers the time to do other things.

Given this example, you can create various customer service strategies, policies, and practices that bring your brand message to life.

Be a superhero for your customers

If you truly want to stand out in today’s hyper-competitive market, don’t just talk to the talk—you need to walk the walk, too.

The reputation you build—and what customers say behind your back—is the most crucial part of your branding.

That’s why if you want to succeed in the long term, you need to be a superhero for your customers—and make a living and breathing customer service your top priority.

Just think about it. What better to be popular than providing top-level customer service to your customers?

Giving a positive experience to your customers every time they interact with your brand will result in a higher customer retention rate—and they’re going to tell their friends, too.

Establish yourself as an SME with the right content

I firmly believe that every small business has experts, but few of them go on to become well-known and influential with their target client group.

You already have a billion-dollar idea and thinking out of the box to grow your business. So, why not be professionals, Visible Experts, and share your beautiful journey with the world?

By gradually developing one or more of these high-profile SMEs, your small business can dramatically increase the power of its brand.

In fact, in my research into these experts and purchasers of their services, 61.5% of respondents said that Subject Matter Expert strategy helps build their firms’ brands.

Still confused? Don’t worry.

Schedule a free consultation call with me, and let me help you build your brand!

I use powerful data to ensure my tactics are running how they’re supposed to. I believe in the power of repetition and know that the long-term strategy can include patience.

In fact, my 12-month marketing strategies are designed to be repeatable. The foundation of them stays consistent, but I constantly look for ways to improve them.

Don’t miss this opportunity. Let’s talk!

In my line of work as a business consultant, I’ve found that one of the hardest things for my clients to do is develop their branding.

Branding includes every way that you will market your business to the public, from logos, graphics, and color palettes to voice, tone, and messaging. It’s a lot and can be quite overwhelming – which is why, of course, they come to me to help take care of the complex parts for them.

Once we nail down their branding, however, we’re still not quite finished. There’s one more step that all business owners and entrepreneurs need to complete on their branding journey, one that’s going to help them maintain their brand identity for the long haul.

The step they need to take is to develop their brand guidelines.

What Are Brand Guidelines?

Brand guidelines are a set of rules and standards that you establish for your brand, to dictate how your brand presents itself at all times and across all mediums.

Let’s see how brand guidelines work using an example that everyone can relate to: Google.

When Google grants permission to other companies or entities to share any element of their branding, as for a product they’re working on together or an advertisement, they require those partners to stick to very specific brand guidelines.

For example, if they use the Google logo in any way, they must use the logo that Google has approved, with the colors that they specify. They also mustn’t add any additional elements to the logo.

These are just a few of the brand guidelines that Google has set up. They also created rules for the language their partners use to describe the relationship between them, their products, and Google, and instructed them not to use the same combination of colors in their branding as Google uses.

What Are The Benefits Of Having Brand Guidelines?

Brand guidelines may sound complicated, but it’s important to have them because they provide three important benefits.

1. They Create Branding Consistency

Consistency is a key element in branding. It makes your business look more professional and helps you communicate your message.

Brand guidelines help you create consistency on two levels.

On one level, they tell other companies who partner with you on a promotion or a product how they should represent your brand. This way, your branding remains the same, whether it’s you or someone else promoting it.

On the other, they keep all the members of your team on the same page. From graphic designers to marketers, everyone knows how your brand is supposed to look, sound, and feel to the public. That’s because you already set up rules for them to follow.

2. They Establish Rules For Your Marketing Team

Without brand guidelines, your marketing team will be like a ship lost at sea without a compass. They won’t know what logos to use, what color palette they have to work with, what kind of language they can use in their messaging. The result will be that no marketing gets done at all.

By developing brand guidelines before hiring on a marketer or a marketing team, you’ll eliminate a lot of unnecessary confusion and enable your marketers to churn out content much faster.

3. They Increase The Value Of Your Brand Content

Content that follows brand guidelines is always higher in value than content that’s just thrown together with no thought of consistency. It appears professional, well thought out, and cleaner.

In short, it’s more representative of your business, which is what you should always strive for with branding.

Conclusion

Are you ready to start building your brand guidelines? If you are, then Inspired Melissa is eager to help! Reach out to me here and let me guide you (no pun intended) through this process.