Small business branding checklist

“Brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” …Seth Godin

Branding is an important part of every business, big enterprise or small store. Branding gives your business a personality and identity so your customers can easily identify you from the competitors.

The good news is you already have a brand.
Whether you know it or don’t, every person and every business, no matter how big or small, has a brand. It’s who you are, it’s your vision and mission, it’s how others see you, it’s your message, it’s your product, it’s your logo, your marketing, your content, basically everything…
It’s your choice to have control over it or let it flow by its way. Successful people and successful brands have control over the ways to show off their brand.
Brand building is a huge amount of work that goes way beyond your logo. Design is a huge part of how others see you, but there is so much more to think about and develop.
When you think of brands you think of Apple and Google and other huge companies…but they all started somewhere.
“ It’s all begins with an idea” The idea is the heart of your brand.
Yes, large companies have a huge budget when it comes to branding but you should start small and grow your brand over time.
So what you can do to start branding your small business without blowing your budget?

1. Brand positioning | Your Why

The clearer your brand’s position is – the easier to identify you for your customers. So what is brand positioning?

Define your brand. Start with answering these questions: What is the idea behind it? Who you are and who you want to be as a brand? What is your mission? Why you do what you do? Who are you? What your business is about? How does your business feel like? How customers will see you?
Clear positioning is the key to great branding. Think of companies like Apple or Google, Uber or Facebook, you’ll find that their brand positioning is clear and consistent, everyone knows what these companies do, what are they about.

2. Define your target audience | Create your customer persona

You might heart it a thousand times, but it only means that this step is super important.
The key to a successful brand – is to understand your customers.
Without this step, you will just be throwing away money on advertising and other things you think is more important. But please, stop and think about it.

How you can deliver your message to your customer if you don’t know who is he? Think of sending a letter, you must know who is your recipient. That is so simple analogy, but it’s so powerful.

After working on step one, your customer’s persona should be easy to identify. Just ask yourself these questions.
Who needs your products? Who are they? What age are they? What kind of income they have? What products are they looking for? What are they interested in? What matters to them? What are they struggle about?
Basically, create a person - your perfect customer, find out their problems, and offer a solution – your product.

3. Your Point Of Difference | POD

I’m sure someone has already done what you are going to do. Probably you are not the first-ever Coffee Shop or Fitness coach. Why you are different than others? What makes your company unique? This what makes your customers choose you over your competitors.
Here is where a lot of market research involves, you need to know what your competitors do, and what their point of difference to establish yours.
Then try to create a statement for your company that represents your difference:

The clearer it is the better your customer will understand it.

These three categories are super important for creating a brand. This is what you are translating to your customers with different methods.

When you opened this page you probably thought it will be all about logo design etc, but you see there is way more steps before start the actual logo design process. If we go into deep about the brand creation process there are way more steps than I’ve covered in this post before visuals.
I have created a complete step-by-step guide to brand your small business.

4. Visual Identity

We defined what your business is all about, and now it’s time to visualize that.
Your visual brand identity will determine what all your design elements look like, and how they are used and applied across all of your marketing channels and communication points.
It includes:
Logo in different variations (colorful, black and white, horizontal and vertical, greyscale), your brand colors, typography, patterns and illustrations, icons and images.
All of these elements should be represented in your brand style guide. It will cover how they look, how they’re used, and what not to do with them.
This guide becomes very helpful when later you will design all your marketing collateral or you can send it to any designer or design company to make sure your representation will be correct and in line with your brand.

5. Bring your brand to life

Nowadays there are plenty of ways to communicate with your customers. Having clear positioning, logo, brand guide and knowing your target audience will help establish your brand the way you wanted to from the beginning.
If you want to be founded you need to put yourself out there:
Build a website that reflects your business
Get on social media platforms
Create marketing collateral (business cards, pamphlets, flyers, etc.)
Create a digital and print advertisement (banners, posters, etc.)
Of course, there is much more to think about in terms of brand communication, marketing, video and audio representation, SEO, brand voice and so on... But this will be another topic.