We've all grown up with branding surrounding us; this is
because large successful corporations have been using it to their benefit for
generations now. You see it on storefronts when you're out shopping, on their
shopping bags when you walk out the store with the merchandise you purchased
and in their advertisements for their products on the Internet, television,
magazines, newspapers.
Finally small business owners and managers are starting to
catch on to the branding concept, they're discovering that even though they're
small they can still reap the benefits that come from branding and use it to
improve their businesses. So then just what can it you do for your business and
how can you get started creating and promoting your own brand?
The first thing that branding can do for your business is
give it a personality, before you chuckle here, keep on reading because this is
important and once you understand it you'll see how important it is. The fact
is you've been dealing with companies and corporations personalities for years
now without even knowing it. An example of this is; if you have a security
company it would be beneficial if people equated your company with “being
tough” and vigilant. So the last thing you would need is a logo and personality
that depicted perhaps a lamb grazing in a pasture or a small child playing with
a skipping rope. You want your company to have the tough personality, you want
people think of your company as vigilant, so your brand should depict that and
broadcast that tough message.
You've been watching political candidates do it for years
with slogans. While one candidate spends and hours and hours discussing issues
and giving speeches, the other candidate will communicate all that by way of a
slogan connected to their branding, they do this because it has been proven to
work.
Another way it can improve your business is to use the
branding to connect yourself to positive things in your community. Look around
you because environmentalism is huge now, so you may want people to think of
your business as being environmentally friendly. Or another example is if you
are operating in a resort community where fishing or maybe winter sports like
skiing are big money makers you can use branding to connect your business to
these other business sectors and reap the benefits from that.
A whole new area you may not have even considered is the use
of search engines on the Internet. By branding you can incorporate words and
key phrases in your advertising campaigns to reap financial benefits that you
otherwise wouldn't be able to. Take a portable outhouse operator as a fine
example, if you go ahead and do keyword research and you'll probably find that
not very many people are looking for portable outhouses these days. However if
that outhouse company incorporated a popular, relevant keyword into their
company brand and then used that and other popular related keywords to promote
their brand on the Internet it can be a huge game changer.
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