How to Brand Your Small Business on a Budget

Small business owners and entrepreneurs need to wear a lot of hats. They may be called on to handle bookkeeping, sales, marketing, strategic planning, and custodial work over the course of a day, and we all know it’s not easy to cultivate expertise in all these areas.

SmallBizViewpoints.com is here to teach you powerful small business tips that can help fill gaps in your experience without costing hours out of a busy day.

In this article, we’ll cover a few highly effective but inexpensive branding options small businesses can use to improve their brand recognition, awareness, and customer loyalty on a limited budget.

Digital branding opportunities

There’s no shortage of available advice on this site and many others regarding how to take advantage of digital marketing tools to engage with customers and boost sales. But, from a branding perspective, one aspect of this vital piece of the marketing puzzle is often overlooked.

That has to do with consistency of your visual brand.

If your company has a website (perhaps a blog) and is active on several popular social media channels, you’re making an effort to produce content that’s going to attract customers to you. There are a number of ways you can either build or destroy your visual brand as you go about your online activities.

Your company’s visual brand

The first step is to choose a visual theme that effectively communicates your brand’s personality, mission, and target audience. This usually involves a logo of some sort along with a color scheme, and font selections.

You may already have that established with offline materials like your business card or signage, but it’s smart to take the time to create variations on that theme that are specifically designed to work well in various digital formats.

Applying the brand to your website and social channels

For example, with some simple image editing using free software, you can apply the same visual brand to a Twitter profile’s background image as you use on your website header and your YouTube channel art. You can also ensure that your company’s profile image or avatar on every channel is consistent.