Last Updated on April 13, 2024 by Umer Malik
What is Brand experience? Business Branding is all about spreading awareness of your brand promise. The effective small business brand experience seamlessly combines every touchpoint your target audience has with your brand. This shapes the way they experience and relate to your brand.
Successful branding takes more than just a big budget. Effective small business brand experience demands creativity, wit, and audience understanding. An impressive brand experience captivates the attention of your audience by showing them you understand their needs. This helps in forming a foundation of deeper connection and an affinity with your products and services. Here we have curated ten tips for you to create an effective small business brand experience.
Be Memorable, Not Modern
Humans are creatures of habit and feel comfortable using things they recognize and are familiar with. Don’t believe us? Think back to Hershey’s rebranding attempt in the year 2009. Unfortunately, the attempt failed, and the brand received a lot of critique and jokes on the internet. Why change? And make your logo look like smoking poop. Fairly, not the thing you want to think about when purchasing chocolate.
What’s the lesson we learned here – be memorable, not modern! Try to look from all perspectives, sometimes things you think are cool have different meanings for your target audience. If your consumers recognize your current branding and are comfortable with that, why change then? As a small business owner, you must have already done a lot of research and leg work for your branding, consider taking help from the following branding checklist:
- Consumer research
- Create an ideal customer profile
- Improve client communication process
- Take help from CRM
- Develop your brand and logo
- Decide on your brand personality, voice, and tone
- Establish your vision and mission statement
- Pick the right designs, color palette, font, and iconography
- Document your brand guidelines
- Roll out your brand across all channels
- Optimize and improve!
Excellent Customer Support
Customer support is the direct connection between your brand and consumers. It helps in retaining customers. By giving top-notch customer service companies can recoup customer acquisition costs.
You may have a competitive product but if your customer service is unreliable then you’ll lose business over it. Investing in customer support will help you activate your brand drive because your existing loyal customers will help you acquire new customers. Their positive testimonials will be more beneficial in your marketing campaigns and cheaper. Some financial benefits of providing excellent customer support
- Customers are ready to pay more to companies with better customer service.
- Well-grounded service grows customer lifetime value.
- Customer retention is cheaper.
- Dedicated customer service always leads to more revenue.
It’s undeniable for every business that well-trained and positive customer service can make your company the best version of itself.
Update and Monitor Your Social Presence
To build your brand identity stronger you need to get approval from your consumers. And most of your consumers are on social media platforms. If you’re only present on Facebook it’s time to consider adding your presence on other platforms. Your brand name over almost all the social media platforms helps in creating an effective small business brand experience. When creating your profiles on social media make sure your brand logo, feel and color are consistent. If not, it may affect your brand name by diluting its identity and will confuse your clients.
Always remember socializing is a two street, to build connections and gain your audience’s trust you have to interact with them. In addition to publishing regular posts, make sure to revert to their feedback – comments and questions.
Research Competition
What makes your small business brand experience unique? What’s your story?
The aim of your branding is always to distinguish yourself from other competitors. Therefore, before deciding on your service and experiences, follow and invest time in your competitors’ strategies. Make a list of brands similar to yours. Research about their services and products. What are you bringing to the table in your industry that others do not? Think about the brands you love – they do not compete on features instead they compete on usability. To have an effective small business brand experience build your reputation for something that stands for easy to use.
Invest in Brand Identity
Since it’s about creating a compelling brand experience, how can we leave the brand identity part! Your brand identity tells your potential customers who you are. It encompasses every bit of your brand including – service or products, voice, tagline, sales, social media presence, and customer support. Brand identity is not just your one tagline. While exploring your brand identity, consider asking these questions to yourself.
- What are the three terms that describe your business?
- What are your core vision and mission statements?
- Where do you stand as a brand?
- What new things do you bring to the industry?
Client Comes First, Always!
Irrespective of what your competitors are dealing with, you need to make sure that you are serving and satisfying your consumers first and foremost. In almost every company people are more concerned about finding new leads and scoring higher revenue. In the process, they forget to nurture the main source of their existence, clients. Yes, you want your existing clients to be seen, heard, and supported. While creating an effective small business brand experience, don’t forget to note the feedback from your clients. Happy customers always help you stand out from the competitors.
What’s Your Voice
No, not your opinions or beliefs. Decide on your brand’s real voice for the advertisements. It’s like whenever you quote the famous dialogue from the movie Bambi “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”, you can hear the voice of the rabbit in your head. Your target customers have to be able to associate with the right emotions you’re trying to convey. The voice will proclaim your brand’s vision, mission, product type, audience, and industry.
The voice could be service-oriented, friendly, promotional, conversational, informative, professional, or even a mix of two. The right choice will maximize your chances of connecting with target clients.
Build a Customer Service Strategy
As discussed above, providing a high-quality customer experience is the foundation of your business. While your brand elements help create the first impression and brand awareness, customer support creates an emotional connection with your brand. More than 50 percent of consumers like to repeat the purchase with a brand after positive customer support.
So to develop a customer service strategy, first ensure that with a friendly and impressive front end you have an efficient back-end process that is helping you secure more leads and clients. Make sure your team is well-trained. Consider taking help from technologies – Chatbots and automatic thank you and apology mails.
Create an Exceptional Brand Experience
To put it simply, an effective small business brand experience is a vital part of your overall marketing strategy. The end goal is to let more people know about your business better, allowing you to build a memorable brand experience on a large scale. The giants like GAP, Nestle, Pepsi, Animal Planet have been doing experiential marketing to create an exceptional brand experience so can you!
To give you some examples to study and work accordingly – Visit Iceland is an initiative started by Iceland. Iceland is a small country but by their impressive marketing campaigns, they left a pretty big impression. Visit the website “Inspired by Iceland” which offers you a virtual tour of the essential things you should do before visiting Iceland.
Or a grocery delivery startup “imperfect foods”. They pick the fruits and vegetables, supermarkets label as unsellable even though they are perfectly edible.
Online Bookings
You can set your brand’s direction by determining how your customers are perceiving it. Many of the world’s best brands Virgin, Skype, Amazon spend their time building and improving their communities. To build your community and extend their trust use identical software, Picktime.
Picktime is an online business event scheduling software. Tailored to manage your appointments and staff bookings 24×7 at multiple locations. Picktime gives you a personalized booking page and a unique URL for your business page with a user-friendly interface. With Picktime you can sync with your favorite calendar (Google/Outlook/Apple) and manage your personal and business schedule without missing a single meeting.
Using Picktime you can view a detailed end-to-end report of your business activities daily. With Picktime you can integrate and connect with all your favorite apps – PayPal, Stripe, Skype, Mailchimp, Drupal, Joomla, and many others. To know more about the exciting features, sign up for free today.
Creating an effective small business brand experience is not a one-day effort or short-term investment. It will consume a lot more of your time, resources, money, and patience. Use the above-shared tips and define your market presence to stand out.
