Author: Pamela Swift

Categories
Branding

9 Great Branding Techniques to Make Small Business Branding Easy

If you own a small business, you might think that branding is best left to big brands like Apple or Google.

But the truth is, no matter how big or small your company is, you have to think about branding. Of course, bigger companies have bigger budgets to spend on branding.

But here’s the thing: You do not need to have a budget as large as Apple to create a highly efficient branding strategy from the ground up.

There are plenty of things that you can do to make your business stand out, grab your customer’s attention, and make it memorable without blowing your budget.

Now, we will look at the nine branding strategies that will make your small business branding easy.

Start by defining your brand

Branding is more than just the logo that you place on your site. It is who you are as a company, how you treat clients, your values, and mission.

So, before you can move on to more tactical steps like creating your brand logo, do take your time to be clear on who you are as a company. In other words, you need to start defining your brand.

The brand character that you build should promote your business, connect with your existing customer base, and differentiate you from the rest of your competitors.

So, it is high time to review what are the kinds of products and services that you offer. Identify the space in the market that it occupies, and dig deep to the needs and concerns of your customers.

Find your brand’s tone of voice

Having a consistent tone of voice will help reinforce your business’ character to customers. It clarifies what you are offering to them so that they know what to expect with your product or service.

Remember that what you say is important, so do not overlook how you say it. Your company’s tone of voice is the language and personality that you and your team will use to deliver your brand message to reach your customers.

Remember that the most successful brands speak with a unique voice.

Think about all the brands that you look up to. How do they communicate with your customers, and what makes them unique? What’s the thing that you like most about their voice?

Figure out your target customers

The most common mistake a lot of small businesses make is to focus so much on the kind of products and services that they want to deliver, yet they fail entirely to figure out who they are trying to sell their products and services to. As a result, their branding suffers.

You have to take the time to know who is your ideal customer. Who are they? What matters most to them? What’s their predominant demographic? How old are they, and what’s their average income and education? What are they looking for in a company? When are they using your products and services, and why do they need it?

By knowing who your target market is, it serves as a guide in your branding strategy. The result is a brand that your audience will truly want to work with.

Develop buyer personas

As a brand, if you do not know who you are talking to in the first place, you will have a problem reaching your target audience.

Building buyer personas help bring those individuals to life, as you figure out a way how you can market your products and services to them.

At its core, a buyer persona is just a description of a customer that you are trying to reach. You can give that persona a name, and think of features that matches that specific persona. That way, when you do your marketing, you already have that “person” in mind, helping you address your message more specifically.

Create the look and feel of your brand

Once you have clearly defined who you are, your target customers, and what is working well for your brand, the next thing that you need is to create the look and feel of your brand.

Here are some things that you will need to create:

  • A brand style guide: A brand style guide is an excellent way to organize your design details. Start figuring out the details such as your brand’s color palette, design dos, and don’ts, and so on.
  • Logo: Your logo will serve as the face of your brand, and will serve as a jump-off point to other visuals on your site, such as your website and business cards.
  • Business cards: Ideally, your business cards should match your design assets and logo.
  • A website: when people visit your site, the look and feel should be consistent with the overall branding.

Build your social media presence

After you already have a defined brand strategy, the next step is to start connecting with your customers on social media.

Pick the social platforms that you know most of your audience is active on, then make sure that it is bringing a lot of high-quality leads for your company.

Create a consistency of communication with your audience, whether it is formal or informal, slang, or not.

The same way goes with your images, whether you prioritize something fun, serious, high-quality, relevant, and so on.

Stay true to your brand with every comment, like, or post.

Reward customer loyalty

As a brand, you should be doing everything to promote customer loyalty.

Sales are crucial to your business and are a driver of growth, and yet a lot of businesses forget the bread and butter of their income ? their existing customers.

Offering customer loyalty programs not only provide companies with various benefits, but it also becomes an expected part of the customer experience. This marketing approach provides rewards to customers who engage and purchase from a brand repeatedly. This ensures that customers stay loyal to your brand.

Add emotions to your message

As a brand, you need to establish an emotional connection with your customers.

Here’s how you can build an emotional connection with your audience:

  • Think of the emotion that you want to evoke in your message. Is it freedom, pleasure, status, security, health, etc.?
  • Use the right words that help stir up the emotion.
    • Freedom: Career, wealth, travel
    • Health: Participate, be active
    • Safety: Protect your family, loved ones
    • Status: Achievement, exclusivity
  • Craft your message according to your audience.
  • Use the right images to trigger these emotions.

Ask for customer feedback

When running a business, you have to do your best in satisfying your customer’s needs, please them, and make them stay loyal to your brand.

The most important driver of your business is customer feedback. If you do not take the time to find out what your clients think about your service, you will not be able to give them the best customer service.

These opinions are helpful so that you can adjust your business to fit these needs more accurately.

Over to You

When it comes to branding your business effectively, you do not need to spend a large sum. All you need is a little bit of creativity and follow these tips. Now, it is time to go out there and start branding!

 

About the Author – Kevin Urrutia is the founder of Voy Media, a Facebook Advertising Agency based in New York. He aids businesses in effectively improving sales and conversion through the effective utilization of Facebook advertising. Voy Media is an expert in determining the best approach, coming up with a unique solution for each client.

Categories
Social Marketing

3 Ways to Promote Your Business on Instagram

With the help of Instagram business, one will able to create a strong bonding with the followers with ease.  If you want to convert follower into a customer, then one should create a particular group. After that, you need to chat with them regularly. A genuine engagement will surely help you in creating loyal customers. One has to pay attention to two important things like promotion and quality of the content.  In order to promote the business effectively on Instagram, then one has to create an effective marketing campaign for the business.  Following are some considerations that one should take into account while promoting the account on Instagram.

  1. Create interaction with followers

After sharing content, one should make the use of tag feature that will surely attract a lot of users from a particular area.  Apart from that, one should make the use of a live feature that would help make a strong bonding with the customer.

 

  1. Consider for Hashtag

Make sure that you are creating a genuine or interactive hashtag that will able to increase the engagement rate of the business account. Make sure that you are making the use of an interactive hashtag that would be beneficial for the business. It is one of the great things that will improve the engagement rate and will surely attract a lot of followers.  Along with the hashtag, one has to tag the customers that will improve the ROI and sale of the business. It is one of the great things that will able to attract lots of followers. Overall, interactive hashtags are fairly great, which is improving the overall fan following and sale of the business. It is directly creating a positive impact on the ROI.  Make sure that you are creating a genuine or particular tag for the business page. ????????? ? ????????? is a fairly great website that is offering Instagram at a reasonable worth.

 

  1. Show creativity

In order to make a strong bonding with customers, then it is your responsibility to connect with followers by sharing content on a regular basis. You will able to improve the engagement and ROI of business using two important things like content and promotion feature as well. Therefore, after sharing content, one has to make the use of advertisement feature that is attracting a lot of folks from a targeted area. All you need to set a genuine advertisement that can improve the ROI, reach, and engagement of the page without having any complicated problem. It is highly recommended that one should always make the use of innovative and creative content that will improve overall engagement and reach of the page with ease.

Further, with the help of these above-mentioned paragraphs, one will be surely able to improve the reach and engagement of the page with ease. Therefore, it is your responsibility to share content on a regular basis and make the use of the effective hashtag for the page.

Author Bio –

Kristen Smith is the owner of a fashion brand, and she has admitted to using her social media profiles for gaining website traffic. She also visits ????????? ? ????????? for getting more likes on her posts.

Categories
Online Business

8 Things To Look For As You Run An Online Startup

By: Donna Jo

Demand

When you are running a startup, you must look at what the demand is for the goods and services that you provide. Keeping up on the market for your services will allow you to hone your services and make the best business decisions. If there is little to no demand for your services, you are going to have to change the way that you approach things.

Availability

How available is the good or service that you are providing to people? This will determine many things, such as the amount of demand for your good or service and how much it is worth. Are your goods and services unavailable because other entrepreneurs are unable to attain them for whatever reason? Is your good or service something that people just aren’t providing?

What Others Say

As you run an online startup, you should listen to what other people have to say about your business. Talk to friends, family members, acquaintances and even strangers about your startup and see what they have to say. Don’t just listen to their words—look at their faces and body movements. This is because of the fact that some people may lie to you and say that they think that you are on the right track, even if they don’t, to be nice. Different individuals look at subjects from different angles, which is why you should consult others about your startup.

What You Say And Think

It is also important to take note of how you feel and what you say and think. You emotions and gut feelings can clue you in on the truth of what is going on with your startup. More conscious, logical, straightforward thoughts about things can guide you with your endeavor.

Costs

Look closely into costs of running your startup and where things are going, financially. Are the costs worth it when you weigh out your priorities, profits and levels of satisfaction? How much money are you putting into your startup, and how much are you getting out of it?

What Problem Are You Trying Solve?

Do not think in terms of what you can sell—think in terms of what problem you can solve. The problem that you have to solve is the thing that determines which good or service you should be providing to customers. Whether or not your product solves a relevant problem is the answer to whether or not your business has a chance of being successful. For example, if you are trying to solve the problem of home security, you may want to sell advanced wireless security cameras.

Legal Requirements

Look into the legal requirements for operating an online startup. There may be general requirements for running such a business. If you want to officially register your business, you are going to want to look into the laws that concern this. Legal requirements may also be in place for selling specific items that have restrictions on them. For example, if you are a plant seller you may want to look into whether there are any localities where your plants can’t be shipped to. Depending on your country, state, province, county or local municipality, there may be laws regarding starting a business.

Opportunities To Speak

Look for opportunities to speak about your business to other people. It is important that other people hear about your business so that they can become either potential customers or potential investors. Even if the people who hear about your business will never have anything to do with it, they may recommend your goods and services to their loved ones and acquaintances.

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Efficient Record Keeping for Conscious Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners

We are nearing the end of the tax season extension period. Did you file your taxes physically or digitally? As a small business owner or entrepreneur, have you ever taken note of how much paper is involved not only in taxes but in your business operations in general?

In the digital age we live in today, any conscious entrepreneur or small business owner knows that the piles of paperwork required to run a business aren’t environmentally friendly, and switching to digital record keeping today is a must. Villanova University highlights how being environmentally friendly has “become [one of the] key focuses for companies across the globe.”

A shift toward digital record keeping is not only good for the environment, but also more efficient than filing away loads of paperwork. Digital record keeping allows for easy accessibility, cuts down on storage space, and are more secure than having physical documents lying around.   

Filing records electronically is becoming increasingly popular for a reason. Being more efficient while remaining environmentally conscious is a win-win. It can be hard when making this transformation to know what records do you keep, and for how long? So, how do you successfully make the transformation from physical documents to digital?    

What Records to Keep

For an entrepreneur, it’s easy to feel like you are drowning in paperwork — so much so that you may feel like getting rid of some to free up space and declutter your operations. However, you may end up throwing out business records that you will need to rely on down the road. It’s important to distinguish between the documents you will need to keep and the ones you can get rid of. The loss of some documents can hinder your daily operations, while others can halt your business entirely.

Financial records such as income, payroll, expenses, and bank statements will be needed for tax purposes. They will also be needed for the analysis of the progress of your company. Legally binding documents will need to be kept in case of any legal dispute. 

Conflict such as employee and partnership disputes or instances where you need to prove ownership of your business can arise. Licenses, permits, and insurance documents are also important in the event you need proof that your business can operate within certain regulations. Keep client and employee information readily available to those with the proper authority. The laws are the same whether you’re a small business or a big corporation.

Electronically filing your documents eliminates the problem of storage as well as while you throw away enormous amounts of paper. Digital records don’t require physical space to be held Computers can now hold massive amounts of data and are very capable of handling any and all of theses documents for a small business owner or entrepreneur. As a result, you can store and hang on to any records you need just in case you need to look back upon them.  

How Long to Keep Records

Even if you know what records to keep, they can pile up over time. Sometimes, you hold onto them for too long. In some occasions, especially with physical documents, piles of outdated files can impede on your time retrieving relevant files. Not knowing when to get rid of documents will clutter up your business’ day-to-day activities. 

You’ll want to keep client and employee records as long as they are under your employment or services. You don’t want to hang on to them long after that, unless you foresee the need of a dispute. Financial records should be given greater consideration when deciding whether or not to shred or dispose of them. Tax records especially should be held onto for around 7 years after your first filing.

In an earlier, more wasteful time, worrying how long you should keep records was relevant to maintain storage space. Electronic documentation completely takes this worry out of the picture for business owners. You don’t need physical storage space to hold onto these documents, they are all on your computer — you just need digital space. What’s more is that when you delete documents electronically, there is no need to shred paper or throw it away — just hit the delete button and it’s out of your hair.    

Electronic vs. Physical Records

In the modern age, more and more businesses are going with electronic documentation for ease of access, to save space, and to make a conscious effort to go green. Consider scanning the documents mentioned above to if they are physical to turn them into a digital copy and properly recycling the paper documents you no longer need. This change will end your cycle of waste and dependence on paper.  

If you do choose the physical documentation route, just remember they’ll have to be physically indexed and accessed. That is just too much of a time consumer and environmental waste in today’s world. Record Nations points out this waste, saying, “The average person in the U.S. uses 749 pounds of paper each year. Imagine how many trees could be saved if companies began to implement a paperless system.” Not to mention, disasters such as fire can destroy your records, leaving you with nothing. Digitally filing your documents allows you to backup all records in the case of a disaster.

The move toward digital documentation is essential to any entrepreneur or small business owner looking to run a successful, environmentally friendly company. The days of filing your documents physically are over, as it is just not economically or environmentally feasible any longer. If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, your efforts in making your documents digital will not only help your business, but it will help the Earth as well. If the majority of business owners are making this switch, even just for the benefits of their business operations, it will conserve a significant amount of trees.

Categories
Finance & Capital

5 Ways to Regain Control of Your Personal Finances

Few things feel worse than not having a secure financial life. But this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. Only about 30 percent of people in the United States are in a situation that’s considered “financially healthy.” If you’re in the majority, you probably want to have more security in your life. Here are five ways to regain control of your personal finances.

Create Saving and Investing Goals

Chances are, there are some things you know you want to do in your life. Maybe it’s traveling the world, sending your kids to college, or just retiring on time. No matter where you want to go, you won’t be able to get there if you’re finances are a wreck. It’s smart to build saving and investing goals that coincide with your life goals. Creating timelines for all of these will help you stay accountable to yourself.

Create a Budget

Budgeting is one of the most important steps in regaining control of your financial situation. You need to see exactly where your money is going in order to start spending more effectively.

There are a few steps to building a budget. First, add up all your income and expenses. It’s key to note that these aren’t going to look the same each month if you have variable factors. This can be made a lot easier if you designate between fixed and variable income and costs. Once you’ve added up net cashflows, continue tracking your spending and make changes.

It should be noted that modern technology is making budgeting easier than ever before. People can now skip all the paperwork of budgeting, and manage money with an app. This can save you a ton of time, while also potentially improving accuracy. Some apps, such as Clarity Money, will even make suggestions to users based on their activity. If you’re not using your subscriptions, it’ll suggest you cancel them. There’s no reason to not utilize such a helpful free service.

Automate Recurring Payments

You probably have a lot of bills you need to pay every month. And if you’re like most people, you might not remember to pay them every single time. Setting up recurring payments is a great way to avoid late fees associated with late payments.

It’s important to note, however, that you might not want to do this with bills that fluctuate each month. For instance, your rent or mortgage payment is steady. Your heating bill is not. The drawback of automating payments is that it can lead to over-drafting charges if you don’t have enough money in your account.

Negotiate Bills and Don’t Over-Insure

Utility and other service providers want to get paid. If you’re struggling to make your payments each month, there’s a chance they might work with you to set a lower price. Try explaining your financial situation to the companies. They will be even more likely to listen if you do some price comparisons with their competitors beforehand.

You should do this same process with your insurance payments. Shop around to find a better rate. Present this to your current provider, and switch to somewhere else if you can save money. You also want to ensure you’re not paying for too much or too little insurance. Having too much means you’re going to be throwing away money. While have too little exposes you to the risks of a major event wrecking your life.

Sell Things You’re Not Using

One of the best ways to boost your finances is finding ways to generate cash flow. There are few quicker and easier methods than selling some of your things. There are many websites, such as eBay, that let you list your items for sale online. Getting some additional money from these sales can set you up for a much brighter financial future.

Reclaiming your finances can feel like a daunting process. It’s not impossible, however, if you take it seriously and follow though with your intentions. Having a stable, healthy fiscal life can make every other part of your life better.