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Your brand is one of the most important parts of building your business and promoting it to potential customers. After all, how many of us can name famous companies simply from an image, or a silhouette, or even a single letter (hello, McDonald’s)? And yet a brand is more than just a logo. Your brand can encapsulate everything about your company; its style, its ethos, its reliability. Building your business brand means developing what you want to be known for, whether it’s quality products, smooth customer service, or reliable services – or all three. But how can you build an effective and well-known brand from the comfort of your own home?
A simple, striking logo
Research has shown that overly-complicated logos just don’t work. In order for people to remember your brand, your logo should be super simple and super striking. The easiest way to accomplish this is with bright colors and easily recognizable shapes. The logo should be in some way related or incorporated into your brand name, adding another link to your company. You want potential customers to remember every time they see a positive story or have a positive experience with your company, and a striking logo is the best way to accomplish this.
Perfect customer service
Whether you are a one-person operation or a small team, customer service should be your number one priority. This has always been the main way to attract and keep your users, even before the age of the internet, as noted by experienced businessman Deepak Agarwal. Whilst we’d all prefer for nothing to ever go wrong between our business and our customers, sometimes mistakes are unavoidable. What matters is how you deal with it – often, customers can come away happier after a mistake has been promptly fixed, than if one was never made in the first place! Make sure you have an alert system set up on your laptop, so as soon as any complaints come in you can deal with them promptly. There’s no better way to protect your brand.
Use Your Personality
The best brands work hard not to be seen as faceless corporations. They try to give the brand itself a personality – whether that’s Colonel Sanders for KFC, or the little owl from Duolingo. In this regard, working as a small business gives you a great advantage. You don’t have to artificially create the personal, intimate touch that many big brands aspire to – you have it ready-made. All you have to do is to lean on your own personality a little. Devote a small section of your website to little introductions to you and any employees you work with – make the headshots slightly more informal, and add a little humor to the biographies. Of course, the level of this will depend on the type of work you do, and you don’t want to go overboard (no one wants their criminal defense lawyer to be a laugh a minute). However, a touch of personality can go a long way towards establishing trust, communication, and brand-reliability between you and your customers.
