Budget-Friendly Branding Tips

When people hear “branding”, they often think of big budgets, flashy ads, and long campaigns with so many moving parts. But branding does not have to be a budget-intensive endeavor meant only for big corporations with deep pockets. Following some great branding tips can take your business a long way, if not all the way.

Good branding can increase your customer’s loyalty, trust, and recognition. In this article, we are going to show you how to go about creating a brand as a small business, especially when you do not have a big budget. 

The Basics of Branding Yourself

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  Brand Identity Kit: You want to start your branding journey with the foundation. This includes designing your business’s logo, its color scheme, and the fonts that will be associated with your brand. Do not treat this process lightly. It is important to research these elements before deciding on any of them.

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  DIY Design Tools: To come up with the best logo, fonts, and colors for your brand, you will need design software. Many design software today help with simplifying the process and lower the skill level required to make great designs with AI-powered features. If you decide to save some money and come up with your brand identity kit yourself, you have so many options including Canva, Krita, Adobe Express, and Figma.

Leverage Social Media

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  Platform Selection: 

A big part of getting your brand together is choosing the right social media platforms that’ll do the all-important job of reaching your target audience. Do your research, while such platforms may essentially be doing the same thing, they often serve different purposes. While Instagram is known for its glamor and being a good place to market products, X is better at helping brands build communities of loyal customers and leverage trends for marketing.

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  Consistent Branding:

To maintain recognizability, it is important to have a consistent branding voice across all social media. This does not mean that you should put out the same posts on all social media platforms; as we have established, what works on Instagram might not work on X. It also does not mean that you should stick religiously to your brand colors - this may have the effect of making all your post look samey and uninventive. However, you should have a consistent tone and message.

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  Engaging Content: 

You do not need a big budget to get great shareable content; what you need is a good old brainstorming session. Ask yourself: what kind of post will get me to engage with a new brand? The easy “big-budget” answer is to do a giveaway or spend money on ads, but results from such things are often fleeting. 

You can never go wrong with looking at what your competitors are doing. Look at the kinds of posts that get the largest numbers of likes, comments, and shares, and try to do these your own way. Also, look at your posts; don’t be afraid to try things and see what works

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  User-Generated Content: 

No matter how brilliant your posts are, consumers are going to look at it as an ad or marketing material - you need to leverage user-generated content. These will help you build brand awareness online and even offline. An easy way of doing this is to create a competition asking users to contribute, but it is also possible to get users’ participation without that. 

Networking and Partnerships

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  Building Relationships: 

As a budding brand, it is important not to think of other businesses only as competitors, fighting for a consumer base. Always look for how you can collaborate with other businesses for your mutual benefit. 

Take any opportunity you get to network with other businesses - look for ways you can be of value to them, look for similar challenges and offer to collaborate to solve them, and very importantly, keep to the promises you make.

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  Strategic Partnerships: 

Do not try to do it all by your own, partnering with other businesses can speed up your growth as a brand. Do your research - look for complementary businesses and form strategic partnerships that will help you get into places you would not have ordinarily been able to. This might mean new customer bases, additional and vital resources, or opportunities. 

However, make sure to only partner with brands that have similar values as yours. In terms of the shape such partnerships might take, you might carry out a cross-promotion together, do some co-branding campaigns, run a contest together, or simply create content for your customers.

Affordable Marketing Tactics

Email Marketing

You can do a whole lot with email marketing. You can drive website traffic, spur online shopping of your product or service, request donations, and much more. To get started with email marketing, it is important you determine who your audience is and what you want to accomplish with email marketing. 

You should then choose an email marketing platform - there are so many out there with varying features and prices. Go for the most cost-effective that meets all your needs. You also need to build your email list organically by asking people to subscribe to your email newsletters using your website, blog, and social media. You may also use existing email lists if your business has one.

Content Marketing 

There are some great benefits associated with having a blog and writing quality content as a brand. For one, it helps with web visibility - provided you follow SEO best practices, blog posts are a good way to get new customers who may just be searching the internet for something related to what you do. Blogs can also help you show your expertise and in so doing build trust with potential customers. They can improve your conversion rate and grow your email list.

Local SEO

This involves optimizing your website to rank for searches made where your business is located. You can do this by researching and using local keywords, setting up a Google My Business page, creating local content, encouraging customer reviews, and whatnot. Local SEO helps you get to your customers online without having to spend a lot of money on traditional advertising.

Print Marketing

You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands on billboards and posters on every street corner, print marketing can be as simple as printing business cards and flyers.

Measuring Your Impact

The best way to improve your branding efforts is to monitor how well you are doing. The analytics tool, of which there are so many, can help you track your progress and steer you in the right direction. These can analyze your social media accounts, websites, and mobile apps to understand how users are engaging with your content.  

Always be open to adjusting your strategies if you find out it is not working. This can help you make informed decisions about the shape your brand needs to take to continue thriving.

Conclusion

You do not need a huge budget to get your branding right. What you need is to be consistent with any branding techniques you choose to follow. Consistency will ensure you build trust with your customers, and this in turn will increase their loyalty and your bottom line. Finally, just start. Start implementing these budget-friendly tips and see your business transform over time.

Need help getting your branding on point without breaking the bank? At SeeNergy, we have what you need. We center your business, goals, and dreams into the creation process and make sure you have a brand that contributes to driving sales and building consumer loyalty. Get in touch with us here.