How to Elevate Your Brand

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to running a small business. Especially if you want to stand out.

There’s a delicate balance business owners must walk between resonating with potential clients or customers, demonstrating their uniqueness and delivering on promises. Add to that the noise of social media and generally crowded markets, and it can be hard to feel like you stand out.

This is why so many businesses have started putting more emphasis on branding: creating an identity that people will recognize, connect with, and ultimately want to patronize.

Maybe you’ve already thought a little bit (or even a lot) about branding. Still, something seems to be missing, even if you can’t figure out what it is.

Not to worry—we’ve got a few tips so you can elevate your brand and stand out among your competitors to your target audience.

Here are 9 things you can do:

Create a Brand Guide to Stay Consistent

We’re huge advocates of creating a brand guide—a detailed breakdown of your brand’s identity, including your logo, your color palette, the fonts you use, and the voice of all your copywriting. A brand guide lets you give your business personality that will resonate with your target audience, but more importantly, the fact that you have a guide will keep you consistent in all the branding you do. Consistency is important for building trust, because it signals to your audience that they can depend on you for the same quality every time they come to you.

Publish Content Regularly

You know your field or your industry pretty well, right? Very well, if you’re being honest. So you need to demonstrate that to your customers. The best way to do this is by publishing regular content across all your channels, from your blog to each of your social media platforms. Publishing content is the best way to demonstrate your expertise and share your industry knowledge. When your customers have a need, they will naturally want to go with the brand that knows its stuff better than anyone else. Thus, they’ll choose you over your competitors.

Ideally, you should be publishing content as often as you can, so long as your content is thorough, intelligent, and engaging. Remember that it’s better to focus on quality rather than quantity, as a steady flow of poorly written content could end up hurting your brand instead of helping it. At a minimum, strive for publishing content once a week.

Use User-Generated-Content (UGC) to Start Conversations

Sometimes coming up with your own content is difficult. You don’t know where to go for ideas, or you just don’t have the time. That’s where user-generated content can be helpful. By resharing or republishing content that your customers and followers have created, you’re saving yourself time. But you’re also doing something else: You’re elevating your brand with other users because people trust other people. In other words, it’s one thing for you to say great things about your business; it’s better when real customers are saying great things about your business. This positive content from your clientele signals that you are the real deal.

The best way to encourage user-generated content? Make it easy for people, and give them a good reason. Maybe you make a point of packaging your product especially nicely, giving them a good reason to record an unboxing video. Or you simply ask for pics of customers using your product in action. People usually love the recognition they get from having their original content shared, so most are eager and enthusiastic about participating.

Invest in New Brand Imagery Regularly

Outdated photos are, well, outdated. You might be surprised by how quickly images start to show their age—your product or service is always getting better and you (as the businessowner) are getting more distinguished, so why keep using the same boring photos from five years ago? New brand imagery can go a long way in giving you a fresh online presence and level up your overall aesthetic, so take care to make this investment once a year.

Our brand images by Erica + Jon

Add Client Gifts to Your Client Experience

Everyone loves a gift. That includes your clients.

We’ve found that the best time to give clients a gift is when they experience a dip in the client experience timeline – such as when they make a payment.

So next time you book a client, consider sending a small gift to help ease the pain of pulling out their wallets (or credit cards).

They feel appreciated and excited about the idea they did business with you, making them more likely to come back again later. The excited buzz they get might also inspire them to shout you out on social media, which will give you positive exposure to more potential customers.

Although gifts can come in all shapes and sizes, the best gifts to clients are those with special meaning to your brand and that reflect your values. (Want to hear the story behind why we give pizza kits to each of our clients upon booking? Check out our Brand Anatomy Guide—we go into why we started this gifting tradition, and what exactly it means to us and, we hope, to our clients.)

Stay Consistent on Social Media

In today’s culture, there’s probably no place where you’re getting more customer-facing exposure than on social media. So, you need to make sure you’re staying consistent in everything you do. Being lax in your branding just decreases your recognizability, so users aren’t even sure whether it’s you or not. They also might perceive your inconsistency as a sign of being unreliable.

Therefore, make sure everything you share on social media adheres to your brand guidelines, including any colors or fonts you use in your graphics. (By the way, did you know we offer customizable free Canva graphics you can use for your business?)

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to create social media handles that are the same across all the platforms, ideally ones without underscores, numbers, or other characters that could make it hard for people to remember your handle and look it up. You should also use the same headshot or brand icon across all social profiles, which is good for recognizability. This will make it easy for people to look you up and follow you wherever you are online.

Switch to a Brand-Focused Email Builder

Email is an impressive marketing tool—not only does it let you build a relationship with your customers (and potential customers) but also it’s one of the few ways of reaching a following you completely own. If Facebook or Instagram crashed tomorrow, you would still have your list of email subscribers.

But email communications with your followers is only as good as you make it. Simple emails without any visual elements are boring. Instead, you want to use an email builder that lets you brand each one of your messages with your logo, color palette, and font. Our recommended email builder is Flodesk because the templates look great and the process of sending lead magnets to build your subscriber list is made so easy.

(New to the idea of lead magnets and email communication? Don’t worry—we can catch you up right here.)

Find your Brand Voice

Have you ever followed a business on social media because it doesn’t really sound like a business? It sounds more like a friend you could catch up with. You feel as if you really connect with that brand’s personality because of the words it uses and the tone it takes, maybe even some of the jokes it makes. That’s all part of brand voice.

Brand voice is the language that you use to communicate your brand’s message, whether it’s through the copy on your website, social media posts, email blasts, or printed material. It’s a way of talking that makes your target audience feel as if your brand is speaking directly to them.

For a great example of brand voice, consider Draper James, the Southern-inspired women’s clothing line by Reese Witherspoon. Its brand voice is warm, friendly, and clearly female. All its copy sounds exactly like it could have been said by your friend who was a sorority sister at a Southern college.

This is a huge contrast to the brand Harry’s, which specializes in shaving gear and men’s grooming products. Harry’s brand voice is personable and cordial the way Draper James is, but it’s masculine, and it tends to be a little more urbane, whereas Draper James is more traditional.

Ready to Elevate Your Brand?

That’s a lot of ground we’ve covered—but if you’ve stuck it out this far, you must be committed to elevating your brand. Fortunately, we have some other great resources we can recommend to you if you’re interested in learning more. We’ve already recommended our Anatomy of a Brand Guide, which gives you the steps you need to take to create your own distinctive guidelines for your brand. Or if you want our expertise behind your branding, you can choose from our semi-custom brand designs or even a fully custom brand design. You’re on your way to having a brand that’s memorable and trustworthy, a winning combination in the eyes of customers.