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.
