Branding for Small Businesses Made Simple

There’s a lot of content out there that is written to help small business owners do their own marketing, but it’s often written by marketers who are adept in things like analytics, content marketing, and technical jargon. It may be written using terms you don’t understand and business processes you’re not familiar with, and then you’re left with no clue how to start marketing your brand.

If you own a small business, or are responsible for marketing one, you need to know how to be effective in your market without the hoity-toity language of marketing. You need marketing for beginners.

Here, in a nutshell, are four simple things you can do right now to grow your brand:

1. Develop buyer personas

As a brand, you’re speaking to human beings who share your ideals, and who want or need your product or service. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you’ll have trouble reaching your audience. Creating a buyer persona brings those individuals to life and helps you figure out how to market to them.


A buyer persona is simply a description of the person you’re trying to reach. You might have several. Give the persona a name. Write out the features of that person (“Sally has a master’s degree and likes buying organic food”) to illustrate her and get to know her. Then, when you do your marketing, keep that “person” in mind and address your messaging to her specifically.

2. Establish your tone of voice

How you communicate your marketing message is referred to as the tone of voice you use. It might be professional, casual, or even funny. The tone you use should resonate with your audience. For example, if you’re a B2B firm, you might do better using a more formal tone than a casual one peppered with teen-friendly acronyms. Just make sure to choose a tone that is consistent across all marketing channels.

If you’re outsourcing your content, your writers will need to use your brand’s voice as if it were second nature. Help them by creating a document with your brand guidelines, meeting with them, answering their questions, and giving them examples of the tone you are going for.

3. Know your brand’s values

Establishing what your brand stands for can help you immensely in your marketing because you can then communicate those values to your customers.

How can you do this? Jot down the things that are important to your company. For example, do you care about the environment? If you do, let people know about the choices you make that align with this value, like using green energy in your office, only buying recyclable or reusable office supplies, or volunteering to clean up your community.

4. Blog consistently

Write about things that matter to your customers: write about topics that they have questions about or that can enhance their lives in some way. And if you really don’t have time to blog, hire someone to do it for you.

Don’t know what to write about? Come up with a list of questions you’ve been asked by prospects and clients. Google other brands in your industry and see what they write about. Keep a spreadsheet of topics so you always have one to write about.

These four easy tips will help you attract more customers and build trust with them.

4 Flavors of Sales Lessons From the Ice Cream Truck

One of the rites of passage of childhood in many cities is the beloved ice cream truck! In many neighborhoods and city parks, kids come running when they hear an ice cream truck’s familiar tunes. The ice cream truck is an inevitable part of summer, but there’s also a careful sales strategy behind it—and other business owners can learn from it.

Go where your customers are

It sounds simple, but it works: Ice cream trucks find customers by going to their customers. Whether that’s driving through neighborhoods full of kids playing outside, or driving up to crowded city parks where people might want to enjoy a refreshing treat, ice cream trucks go to where the customers are.

In your business, selling directly isn’t always obvious. Selling ice cream to kids is simpler than selling complex B2B solutions to business buyers. But you need to make sure your sales strategy is working hand in hand with your marketing strategy to find and target the right customers in the right places.

Stand out from the crowd

Ice cream trucks are known for playing catchy jingles from their loud speakers to get people’s attention and to interrupt the usual routine. Even other food trucks that don’t sell ice cream have gotten more inventive about painting their trucks with bold colors and offering unique food creations. What can your business do differently to be memorable and cut through the clutter?

Be mobile savvy

Ice cream trucks are one of the original “food trucks,” and food trucks have become a big business in every major American city, selling everything from tacos to Belgian fries to seafood. Food trucks have become more sophisticated using mobile marketing, and this type of marketing is relevant to all businesses today. Food trucks in big cities are on Instagram and Twitter, sharing photos of their food, offering daily specials to social media followers, and otherwise looking for ways to sell products in a way that is enhanced by the mobile food truck experience.

In the same way, even B2B sales organizations need to get better at using mobile marketing. More of your B2B buyers are using mobile devices to do product research and price comparisons. Is your B2B marketing speaking to a mobile-savvy audience, or are you still stuck in the desktop era?

Create an emotional connection

Many people have fond childhood memories of enjoying frozen treats from an ice cream truck. There’s something about the experience of eating ice cream outside, delivered from a truck, that provides a one-of-a-kind feeling of comfort and convenience. It’s one of those “taste of summer” experiences that stays with you forever. What can your business do to create a similar powerful emotional experience for your buyers?

Ultimately, people usually don’t make buying decisions based on rational, logical, numbers-driven reasons—they buy for emotional reasons. What can your business do to make people feel better? Even if you’re a B2B seller of “technical” solutions, focus on the emotional connection. Can your solution help relieve your buyers’ stress, boost their optimism for future growth, or eliminate daily organizational clutter and tension? Don’t be afraid to sell the emotional side of your product or service; it might be what people respond to best of all.

Summer is often a time of nostalgia, fun, and relaxation. The beloved ice cream truck is one symbol of this softer, easier time of year, don’t assume that it’s just an innocent bit of fun—it actually shows some great examples of how to be more successful in sales.

Business Owners: Don’t Sacrifice Long-Term Success by Making Short-Sighted Decisions

A common situation for many small businesses and SMEs is having an immediate need for cash today, and taking action without considering the consequences for tomorrow. Although cash is certainly an important element for operating a small business, many entrepreneurs don’t understand that certain actions they take to obtain cash can lead to harmful consequences in the future.

A need for cash should never override prudent business decisions that can affect customer relationships. When business owners or managers consider cash to be the most important factor in their businesses, overriding product or service offerings and customer relationships, negative outcomes are certain to occur. Small business owners should not have the attitude of “make what we can today and worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.” With this philosophy, tomorrow will come along with lost customers, a negative reputation, and decreased profits.

You need long-term, favorable relationships with your customers in order to build a successful business. Securing future sales is as important as current sales. Thinking today about satisfying tomorrow’s customer sometimes means letting a sale “go” if all the factors are not right. When customers have satisfying buying experiences, they are more likely to become repeat customers. A combination of returning customers and new customers will build your customer base, leading to business growth and sustainability.

The flip side of a satisfied and returning customer is a dissatisfied customer. Once customers fall into this category, it is highly unlikely they will ever return—once lost, lost forever! But, this situation does not tell the entire story. The residual effect of dissatisfied customers sharing their bad experiences with others can damage your company’s reputation and be detrimental to your profits.

Negative Actions = Negative Results

Here are a few sales actions that can produce immediate cash, but may also cause lost business in the future:

Promising too much. When a business promises its customers more than it can deliver simply to secure a sale (i.e., over-promising and under-delivering), disaster may loom in the future. It is far better to take the opposite approach—under-promise and over-deliver.

Lack of customer service. So often a positive sales presentation turns into lackluster customer service once a sale is completed. During the sales phase, everything the customer asks for can be accomplished; however, once the deal is consummated, there is a quick change of attitude. Customers remember promises and are not too quick to forget.

Short on details. No one likes the hassle of reading the fine print of a sales or service agreement, but it’s necessary, depending on the product or service sold. While it might be easier for a small business to avoid all the legalese, problems can arise if customers think they agreed on one thing, and the business thinks they agreed on something entirely different. Take time on the front end to agree on all the fine points of a sale to reduce customer disappointment in the future. It is far better to rely on written details than your customers’ memory.

Positive Actions = Positive Results

Returning customers are like a cash annuity for your business. As sales increase and satisfied customers give excellent recommendations and reviews, this can create a compound effect on revenues and profits. Long-term business success relies on this type of steady growth: customer retention enhanced with new customers. In contrast, a business that’s constantly obtaining customers, losing customers, and gaining new customers is wasting its efforts and profits.

Take the following actions to produce positive results:

Deliver what is promised. Customers seek benefits, solutions to problems, value, and service. It’s quite simple: Just deliver as promised and watch customer loyalty develop.

Make customer satisfaction a priority. Customer service does not begin and end with a sale. It begins during the sales process and continues past the point of sale. Forgotten customers become lost customers.

Follow up where it counts. You can never go wrong by following up with customers after a sale to ensure they are satisfied. When the competition forgets about the fine details of a sale, having a strict attention to detail and following up can be a springboard to leap past a rival.

Your business’s success is not only impacted by the actions you take today; you also need to be aware of how your actions will impact your business tomorrow. Realize that any sale you make today is an installment for future sales.

Take care of your customers today, and those same customers will take care of your business tomorrow!