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Small business branding encompasses the many ways your business shows up in the world. That includes:
Your business name
Brand voice
Brand story
Marketing (email, social media, paid ads)
Tagline
Target customers
Visual identity (logo design, images, color palette, fonts)
Effective branding ultimately boils down to how a business makes its clients and customers feel. A great brand with a strong identity makes a memorable first impression on its target audience with its unique products, point of view, or personality.
Developing a brand that people love and keep coming back to takes time, thought, and a keen understanding of customers. From identifying your value to customers to establishing a brand personality, here are some key branding tips for small businesses.
1. Get to know your ideal customers
A deep understanding of your target market is the foundation of a successful brand. No matter what stage your business is in, think deeply about your existing customers and the ideal customer you’d want to attract to your business.
Identify common traits among existing and potential customers and group them into personas. Look at demographic information like age and location, but also think about personal features, like the value of your business to them and what other brands they probably like.
From there, you can identify the types of people your brand and marketing strategy should try to target. Identifying age groups and the other brands they support will also help you get a sense of the brand message that will catch their attention.
Learn how to identify your target audience
2. Identify the problem you solve for customers
Once you understand your target customers, get a clear understanding of what problem your business solves for them and why your unique brand is the best solution. On top of the practical solution you offer, think about the emotional element too. What kind of customer experience do you want people to have and how do you want your products or services to make them feel?
Brand messaging and mission statement
If you’re stuck on how to summarize your value to your customers, try writing a mission statement for your brand. A mission statement is usually just a few sentences and touches on your target customer, their problem, and your unique solution. That’s the message you want your brand design and marketing materials to get across.
Try plugging some ideas into this template to find a statement that feels accurate, then adjust it to your voice and style.
“[Brand name] is a [business type] dedicated to helping [type of customer] [solution you provide]. We believe everyone [emotional benefit of your solution].”
For example, an event planner handles the work of sourcing and managing a party. Emotionally, they take time commitments and stress off of your plate so you can focus on enjoying your celebration.
Their mission statement might be something like: “BRAND NAME is a boutique event planning service designed to help busy young professionals plan gatherings for their friends and family, worry-free. We handle every detail so you can focus on making memories.”
3. Build a strong brand identity
A brand identity is about setting guidelines for how your new brand communicates to customers. That includes everything from your tone of voice to brand assets like your typography. From your website and business cards to the language in your emails, present a consistent identity on every platform. This creates consistency for your brand and builds recognition and trust.
Brand personality
Start with defining your brand’s personality. For this exercise, think of your brand as if it were a person. Think through these questions to start brainstorming.
If your brand were a person:
How old would they be?
How would they talk? (Calm and soothing, professional, casual and friendly?)
Name three personality traits they’d have. (Trustworthy, bubbly, bold?)
What would their interests or hobbies be?
What would they value?
Build out this persona until you feel like you have a strong baseline to work from. Think of this personality like a set of brand guidelines. Being able to imagine a person with their own tone of voice and preferences will make it easier to write copy for your site or choose things like brand colors.
Get tips from one of our partners on branding yourself
Brand visuals
Your brand personality can help you make decisions about your brand visuals. Those visuals include decisions about:
Brand colors
Fonts
Types of images
Visuals and personality both influence how your brand makes customers feel whenever they interact with it. For example, a massage therapist may know their clients schedule appointments because they’re feeling tense, stressed, and overwhelmed. Since the massage therapist provides calm relaxation and relief, their brand would center around branding elements that are associated with peaceful feelings: muted colors, softer fonts, and gentler language.
4. Decide where and how your brand shows up
As a small business owner, you’re busy, so you may not have time to create and maintain a presence for your brand everywhere at once. Start with these three things.
A website with a store or booking page: Prioritize setting up your website so that there’s one source of truth for everything anyone needs to know about your brand and business.
Email marketing: Add a field to sign up for email updates from you on your homepage. Even if you don’t have emails ready, it’ll be helpful to start building a mailing list so you can share business updates when you have them.
One social media account: Choose the platform that makes the most sense for showing off your products or services and where your audience is most likely to spend its time.
Where your brand shows up is just one part of the equation. The work you’ve already done to design a personality and aesthetic for your brand will help you figure out how you want it to show up. Keep in mind that you might want to speak or share differently over email than you might on a social media platform.
This is also a place where your brand’s values can shine. Showing your support for your customers or certain causes and communities in alignment with your values also says something about your brand.
5. Use all-in-one tools to streamline your branding
Having this set of design standards for your brand removes the guesswork from your design process. And choosing the right tools to manage your business will save you time by making visual brand consistency simple.
If you start building your brand with an all-in-one website and ecommerce platform like Squarespace, you’ll have tools to easily mirror your brand style across different touchpoints. For example, you can design a website that fits your brand identity, then carry the same colors, fonts, and images into your customer emails.
Once you have a good description of your brand voice ready, you can use Squarespace AI to quickly draft website copy for new pages or sections.
Or you can create a Brand Kit in the Unfold app so you can quickly grab on-brand type and styling to apply to social media videos and feed posts.
The right set of tools will save you time that you can spend growing your business without sacrificing the brand consistency that builds trust and recognition with your customers.
This post was updated on June 21, 2023.