Branding is the First Step of a New Business

Branding is vital to the success of a business. Without a well-defined, narrowly focused brand, the focus of a business will be scattered all over the place, customers will be confused, and promotions will not be as effective as they could be.

What is branding?

Your brand is the image you present to your customers. By creating a brand, you tell them who you are, what to expect from you, and why they should trust you. Your brand defines your products and services and how you are different than your competitors.

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or B2B. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. John Willians, Entrepreneur

When you look at it that way, defining a brand is precisely the first thing that a new businessperson must do.

That’s the mistake of many new entrepreneurs – they just jump in and start doing their thing. They don’t have a lot of money, so any efforts at branding are haphazard and chaotic, and only done when absolutely necessary.

That approach is one of the primary reasons small business fail or struggle at first.

So what should a small startup business do to brand themselves?

1. Define your brand. We’ll get into how to do this in more detail in later articles.
2. Create your branding materials – graphics, elevator speech and so on.
3. Create a highly professional LinkedIn profile that exactly describes you in relation to your brand.
4. Make a blog that is aimed at your brand and update it regularly. This gives you a home on the web.
5. Consider publishing a book about you and your brand. A ghostwriter can help you with this. A book is the ideal way to establish your credibility with clients and others.
6. Define your Facebook business page (not your profile), twitter account and so on.
7. Clean up your social media of any unflattering pictures and comments, and anything that doesn’t support you and your brand.

Allocate funds to help for some or all of these tasks from professionals. If you are in business, you need to treat it like a business and spend the time and money to do it right.

Once you complete these tasks, customers will be attracted to your business because they will know, like and trust you and your brand.

Richard Lowe Jr

Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.