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A key strength for most small businesses is the ability to differentiate yourself from your competitors. How you choose to represent your brand makes the difference between a memorable customer experience and a forgettable one. With the fierce competition small business owners face every day, it’s absolutely critical to see your brand experience through your customer’s eyes.
What Is Branding?
When most people think of branding, common things like logos and colors come to mind. Your brand is much more than design: it’s a promise. Those design elements should be informed by your branding. It represents your business’s personality and values, and it’s core to creating memorable experiences for your visitors. Your brand should be evident through your website, social media, email campaigns, and customer service interactions. When you onboard new employees, make gaining familiarity with your brand a top priority in training. Every employee should know the customer-facing promises your brand represents to give your team a common goal.
The Impact Of Proper Branding
The memorability of your branding has a direct impact on sales and influences the demographics of customers differently as well. The moment you infuse your business with personality, you are going to polarize visitors. Customers are attracted or repelled by the particulars of how brands represent themselves. Take the example of Wendy’s, which has abandoned the generic and sanitized tone of most corporate social media accounts. It’s certainly not what you would expect from a giant fast-food chain restaurant, but it’s exactly what propelled an otherwise overlooked Twitter account to infamy.
Years ago, the team met with the owner of a t-shirt printing company and got to talking about branding. His brand was very political and someone asked if he was concerned about alienating potential customers. He said, “Brand is about choosing your customers, and by targeting some you will almost always alienate others. But I’m going after the customers I want, and they love us for it.” In other words, the goal of branding should be to inspire those most likely to appreciate your brand to become ambassadors for your business. There’s a valuable upside to creating fervent brand advocates, versus appealing as broadly as possible with nothing memorable about the experience. Unless you sell incredibly unique or in-demand items and services, posting product photos and prices to Instagram probably generally won’t generate a great return. Humans crave that personal connection, and small businesses are perfectly positioned to infuse their personality into the buying experience.
How To Create An Impact For Your Business
Finding your brand voice and being consistent are the keys to branding memorability. When thinking about your branding opportunities, consider your unique selling propositions (what you believe you do better than your competitors). What do you want customers to remember months after getting their order from you? To get this right, you have to really listen to your customers and go beyond the sale and handling order issues. Strive to deliver on that brand promise every time. Go beyond the 5-star transactional rating and find out why their experience was excellent, then invest in marketing to your strengths. Got a bad review? Fight the urge to go on defense and see if your brand promise fell through for that customer. After all, if a sale is merely a transaction to your business, you may be missing out on a lasting impression that will keep customers coming back for more.
Ready to begin building a better brand and continue to boost your business? Give us a call at 678-402-6378 or email info@eystudios.com and schedule a free consultation today!