6 Starter Tips to Create a Big Brand for Your Small Business

It's the time of year to start new projects and create new goals for your personal life, so why not extend those aspirations to making your brand bigger and better in the next twelve months? Ideas and inspiration can be thin on the ground if you're starting from scratch (or need to completely reimagine your brand), so we thought we'd start you off with some broad starting points to expand awareness of even the smallest business. [caption id="attachment_3318" align="aligncenter" width="689"] How will you build your brand during the year to come?[/caption]  

Small Business, Big Brand

If you're resolved to build a brand bigger than most would think possible for your small business, here are six steps to work towards that goal this year: 1. Choose an Identity: First and foremost, you'll need to get all the ideas out in the open about what your business does (this may be more extensive than you think!) and what it stands for in the eyes of your customers. No thoughts or feelings are bad at this point and this stage should be about putting everything on the table, good or bad. Obviously you want to emphasize the good and erase the bad as you build your brand this year, but to do that you'll need to know the down and dirty details of each! 2. Align Company Culture: In a similar vein to the first point, it's important to know what kind of company you are internally,and how that feeds out to your external brand. The way you run the business and the values your employees encapsulate plays a major part in how your brand comes across, so perform the same exercises to understand what that looks like on the inside as you would for the outside. 3. Define and Describe: Once you've verbalized (and written down!) what your business is about, it's time to distill all of that brainstorming down into some brand keystones: your tagline, elevator pitch, and mission statement. You may have one or all of these elements in place already, so run any existing content through the filter of your revised brand identity. The tag line will be a short phrase or sentence used to spark the emotion you want your brand to evoke. The elevator pitch should quickly describe your core offering and brand outlook,while your mission statement is an expanded version of this (and any other important company culture points.(If you need more on these elements hen stay tuned, we'll be writing about each in detail during the remainder of January.) [caption id="attachment_1244" align="aligncenter" width="575"] Align your marketing, build your brand.[/caption] 4. Choose Your Tools: After defining what you're about and what you want your business to be known for, picking the right platforms and marketing tools to communicate those things is the most important element of building your brand. We obviously encourage the use of vanity telephone numbers as a versatile marketing tool that can be integrated to any channel, but there are many others to choose from in terms of print materials, digital download content, email campaigns, social networks, and a wealth of other brand assets that we'll talk about a lot more this year. 5. Helpful Brands = Happy Customers: Branding is different to selling, especially across new media channels. The more you can find ways to position your company as a valued and trusted resource. Creating how to guides or videos, for example, or offering a daily "quick tip" on social media channels. Being useful has never been so rewarding, and in digital nice brands finish first! 6. Boost Your Brand: Once everything else is in place and you're happy with your brand assets online and off, consider amplifying your message with advertising. Paid social media posts, native advertising, billboard and other print ads are all excellent ways to get your new brand identity ouut there in front of people, whether in the real world or the digital one. Always choose places and new media spaces that allow you to target the kind of customer who's most responsive to your message, whether that's achieved by age, area, or any other demographic distinction.   These tips are just the beginning of what we'll be bringing to you this year, starting points from which to think about your small business branding and build out consistently through the year. Connect with RingBoost on Facebook, Linkedin. Twitter or Google+ to let us know what kind of articles would most help to boost your business!