The Art Of Transformation: 3 Ways To Turn Your Small Business Into A Brand

If the hurdles involved in setting up your own business, getting it established and getting a reliably constant stream of income and customers wasn’t enough, the next step on the road to success can seem equally as daunting.

According to stats compiled by a leading customer engagement firm, almost a quarter of people say they will always consider the brand when buying a product and over 26% will subsequently recommend a brand to others (such as friends or family) – only 2% never consider brands when buying. This guest post, put together by branded product supplier The Pen Warehouse, looks at three key ways which can go a long way to helping to establish a brand.

1. Utilise Social Media – Properly & Creatively

It’s really surprising how many SMEs have a stunning website, creative staff, a great sales team and some truly brilliant USPs but a paltry number of Facebook ‘Likes’ or Twitter followers. There’s no real secret universal formula to social success, but it needs to be utilised as a genuinely viable (and free!) marketing platform.

Establish yourself; create content your target audience will want to share; insight discussion or even debate; take a stance on contentious industry issues; interact with your customers – the list is almost in the ways in which you can generate activity on your social media platforms. Activity equals engagement, which in turn generates a following, leading to brand establishment.

An example is using Twitter as an extension of your customer services – do not rely on people emailing and phoning. Research carried out by comms agency Fishburn Hedges (which you can read here) found that 36% of UK adults had taken to some form of social media to directly contact and publically complain about a company. The swift, immediate and public-facing response to complaints, concerns or general enquiries

2. Examine Your Current Marketing Strategy

If the success of your start-up business seems to have plateaued then you need to look at what you’re doing right, identify what you’re doing wrong and put in place for how you need to be doing things differently. When examining your strategy, ask yourself some key questions:

• Are people aware of your USPs?
• Are you focussing enough on the buyer, not yourself?
• Are your calls to action overly vague and not clear?
• Don’t market without substance to your campaigns – have you done your research?
• Do not neglect any possible marketing format – is there a form you’re not using?

The last one is particularly important – if there’s a form of marketing or a particular platform that you’re not utilising, you could be missing out on a potentially large untapped audience. For example, is your industry particularly technical? Let’s say you’re running an IT/computing start-up company, selling computers and components – what better way to promote your brand and establish trust than by creating concise yet informative ‘how to’ video guides on YouTube?

There’s no cost to this platform, the potential for an audience and a following is massive, and you can earn advertising revenue off original content once your videos garner enough views.

3. Place Yourself In The Minds Of Your Target Audience

Don’t assume that your target audience will find you just because you offer what they’re looking for – go out and look for them, and do it physically! We mean that, even if your operation is online, you need to go out there and meet the people, whether it’s the general public or for B2B trade. Attend industry trade show (whether they’re consumer focussed or not) and promote your brand using physical things that potential customers or clients can take away and read, engage with or even use – whatever you can do to put yourself at the forefront of potential customer’s minds when they think of your industry is massively beneficial.

From informative, genuinely useful and broadly non-promotional print media (think posters, leaflets, magazines) to simple physical items like pens, USB sticks, glassware, other office accessories, shirts – the list goes on. According to data compiled by the Advertising Specialty Institute, for every ‘marketing dollar’ that’s spent on, say, branded promotional pens the company receives 500 brand impressions – even something simple and low cost like this is going a long way to promoting awareness of your brand, it’s USPs and creating an image of a well-established firm.