Good branding is crucial when it comes to taking your business to the next level of success. Although building a brand seems a difficult task, it won’t be as burdensome with these quick steps on how to brand your business on a budget.
Table of content:
- 2 Questions That Needs To Be Addressed Through Value Proposition
- How to Brand Your Business on a Budget
- Useful Tips To Consider
According to Lisa Gansky, an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker—
“A brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir.”
That means the consumers use products, but it is the brand that draws them in and speaks to them about your product. Rightly said!
Branding is a huge term. It might be expensive but you can save tons of money if you know everything about it and know how to do it in the right way. But before continuing further, you should ask yourself the following questions.
2 Questions That Needs To Be Addressed Through Value Proposition
It’s the value proposition that paints the picture of your brand in the mind of your target audience. If you don’t understand your brand’s value proposition, you can’t build quality relationships with your audience. Your value proposition should answer your audience the following questions:
- How can your products or services satisfy the needs of your customers?
Describe what are the characteristics and usage of your product and how it will help your customers. - Why should your customers prefer your brand over your competitors?
Point out the benefits that your customers will get if they buy your product. Also, mention how your product is far superior to your competitors.
Got satisfactory answers? Fair enough!
Now, let’s talk about how to brand your business on a budget.
How to Brand Your Business on a Budget
Be clear with your company’s mission statement and value proposition. This will be the key to creating a brand-building strategy in a budget-friendly way.
Let’s discuss the crucial steps on how to brand your business on a budget.
1. Understand Your Audience
You’re going to market your brand message. But to whom? Who will hear your brand voice? Do you know them? Their demographics? Their likes and dislikes? Their needs or desires? Their preferences? or anything else about them?
If your answer is a big ‘NO’, it doesn’t make sense to invest your time and resources into further marketing. Rather, first of all, you have to focus on building a foundation. And, this can be done if you understand who is your target audience and how your products can fulfill their specific needs.
When you know about your audience, it will be easier for you to plan your brand marketing campaigns. Otherwise, all your efforts might go in vain.
Build your buyer’s persona and figure out the common challenges that you might encounter while branding in front of that kind of audience. Creating buyer personas will gonna help you in many ways such as:
- You know everyone’s needs are different. Your marketing approach would be different for a B2B customer than for a B2C customer. Hence, an ideal buyer persona will help you craft your message accordingly.
- Your customers might be in different stages in their buyers’ journey. Some of them might be your active customers, some of them might be your leads, or some of them might still not get interacted with your brand. Hence, your marketing goal would be different for each of them, and accordingly, you need to plan your marketing strategy.
- Your customers may not be on the same platforms. Some might be most active on social media platforms or some might prefer to spend their time on YouTube or any other platform. Hence, creating buyer personas will help you figure out how you should proceed further.
And, a lot more!
2. Create Your Brand Identity
How do you want your audience to talk about your brand? What will be your company’s value? How would your employees represent your brand? What will be its logo and trademark and what color combination it will have?
Once you figure it out, you’ll be ready with your brand identity. And, this can’t be possible unless you’ve identified your buyer personas. It is advisable to make your brand voice consistent across all platforms.
Want to know more about brand identity? Here is a complete guide on how to develop a unique brand identity.
3. Create a Consistent Brand Presence
Remember, in the first step, we have talked about creating buyer personas. That helps you know about your audience and where they are most likely to be active.
Now, it’s time to make your brand presence on all those platforms where your audience is. Make sure your brand presence is consistent across all those platforms.
Besides brand building, you also have to maintain its presence. Else you’ll lose your audience. If they won’t find fresh and interesting content on your profile, they’ll no longer be interested to stick around your brand. Therefore, plan your content and publish it regularly to keep your audience engaged.
4. Provide Excellent Customer Support
When it comes to cutting the marketing cost, creating brand advocates will help a lot. Brand advocates will generate only when your customers are delighted with your products and services.
Therefore, it’s your responsibility to make sure your current customers are satisfied with your brand.
How does this help?
When they are satisfied with your brand, they will become your loyal customers and recommend your products to their friends. Free word-to-mouth marketing! Genuine customer reviews! Ultimately, good brand positioning! That’s what your aim is.
5. Increase Your Reach With Co-branding
If you’re a new brand and would like to amplify your brand’s reach as soon as possible, co-branding would help.
Casper, an online mattress and bedding brand, sells mattresses in a box. On the other hand, Enter West Elm is a well-known furniture company. Both partnered and allowed their customers to try out the comfy mattress on the West Elm bedroom furniture before purchasing.
This is what co-branding is. The target audience for both brands is the same and ones’ success would benefit the other one as well.
When seeking a co-brand, keep in mind the following points:
- Your partner brand should have an audience with the same interest category.
- Make sure your audience has trust in your co-brand.
- Both brands should have some value to provide to each other, i.e., there should be a win-win situation for both.
If your resources are limited, co-branding can cut your marketing cost in an efficient manner.
6. Engage Your Audience With Your Expertise
Have something to talk about your talent? Do you think it will help your audience in any way? Have any findings or recommendations for your audience that they are most concerned about? If yes… share it with them.
Let them have something interesting to talk about you and your expertise.
For example, we, at Strategy Soda, a Brand Marketing and Advertising Agency, aim to help businesses grow online with our creative endeavor. We’re experts in managing brands online. And, on the other hand, we would love to help our readers learn the common branding mistakes that they should ignore. And, something like that we have expertise in.
This strategy will help you a lot in getting your customers engaged with your brand.
7. Reach Qualified Customers Through Blogging
The best way to drive qualified customers to your website is to earn their attention rather than force them to get engaged with you. Try to attract them with useful content on your website. Try to satisfy their search intent. Create blog posts that are relevant according to their search intent and optimized for search engines.
Make sure you’ve done proper keyword research and prepared an editorial calendar before start working on your company blogs.
Useful Tips To Consider
Working on a tight budget may cause hindrances. That’s why before ending up this blog here, we would recommend you to consider the following tips:
- Try your hands on these tools while conducting your marketing research. Keywords Everywhere, Facebook Analytics, HubSpot’s Make My Persona Tool, Statista.
- Create content like articles, educational videos, guest posts, infographics, and other long-form texts to paint your brand’s impression.
- Be found on forums like Quora and Reddit. Address the queries of your audience with satisfactory answers.
- Connect influencers within your industry.
Wrapping Up
Walter Landor, a renowned brand designer—
“Products are made in a factory, but brands are created in the mind.”
So, try to figure out ways on how to position your brand in the mind of your target audience. The better you’ll position, the more successful your business will be.
So, what do you think? Did you get how to brand your business on a budget? Is this possible? We would love to hear what you think.
