How To Nurture Your Brand Presence as a Small Business

As a small business, you have the opportunity to mold your business into anything you like. You’re likely still establishing who you are as a brand and what you want to stand for, and that’s an advantage but it can also be a curse when it comes to developing an online presence. You need your online presence to be recognizable and a strong representation of your business and your organization’s values. Read on for some tips on how to nurture your brand presence as your business grows. 

Be consistent

You want to be recognizable online and have people spot your brand instantly. From Apple to Nike, Coca Cola and Red Bull, there are plenty of brands in our lives that we immediately know and can spot straight away. 

What will ensure that your audience can spot your brand out of the swathes of content online is consistency, from the style of your images to the colors you use and the tone of voice in your captions. As a small business, you want to nurture your brand so that you can achieve instant recognizability in your industry. This increased reach will, in turn, help your business to grow as well as your audience and customers. 

Creating branded assets that can be reused, such as logos and photo filters, will help you stay in line with your usual style. Every time you release an email or upload a blog, make sure it’s authentic to your brand and in keeping with your usual style, so that your audience knows what to expect from you. 

Get social

Thanks to a myriad of online platforms, small businesses have a wealth of options when it comes to building online communities. Whether you want to capitalize on your existing presence to grow your follower numbers or you’re starting from scratch on a platform that your brand’s never been on before, there are a few ways that you can nurture your brand by creating valuable social content that builds customer loyalty and engagement. 

Create your social channels around impactful visuals that stop the scroll and entice people to click through. Powerful visuals and videos are often the magnet that draws people in, especially on popular platforms such as Instagram, YouTube or TikTok​​.

Set aside extra time to refine the aesthetics to fit your preferred social platform, and come up with an engaging style that works for your brand. This could be flat lays for products, eCommerce style shoots, captivating short-form videos, or lifestyle photos that are visually striking to boost your online reach. 

Advertise on the right platforms

With a multitude of advertising platforms and types of ads to choose from, from social media to paid advertising and display ads, you need to be sure you’re choosing the right ones to attract the right audience and promote your brand in the most efficient way.

Firstly, start with where your target customers are hanging out so you know where to find people that automatically have a vested interest in the type of products or services you’re promoting. Next, do your research into your competitors and where they’re advertising. It’s also worth looking at the networks that align with the type of content you share, as all of these factors will impact your decision and the results you achieve. 

Partner with like-minded brands

Strategic partnerships with other businesses that align with your mission and values can be a mutually beneficial way to open up both businesses to new markets and customers. It’s a form of marketing that businesses large and small utilize every day and it enables customers to find other brands they may be interested in and broadens the reach of a marketing campaign for both brands. Planning an effective campaign that you can track the marketing performance of is a good way to measure your combined marketing efforts.

If you offer physical products, why not partner with a local business that sells similar items or sponsors a campaign to have your logo included on the packaging? If you’re a digital brand, perhaps you can partner up with another business in your industry to create an online resource for your customer base. Creating content is another way that businesses can work together, such as writing blog posts for the other’s blog.

Convey your purpose 

As a brand, you want to be clear about the value you bring to your customers. How will your product or services help to improve their lives? If you can convey this to your customers and the purpose of your brand, it will help you to resonate with the right people who will become your loyal customer base as your business grows. 

Understanding and being clear about your brand mission at the start will give you these values that you can then use in your content and throughout your site so that when a customer finds your brand, they’re instantly aware of what you stand for. It also enables you to build an emotional connection with your customers, which cements your brand as a business they can trust and which aligns with their own set of ethics and ideals. 

People like to buy from businesses they know and trust, so establishing a strong brand presence is vital for your success as a small business. You need to get your name out there early and let people know what you stand for and the value you bring to people, in order to attract customers and build a community of like-minded people who will eventually become brand advocates for your business. Using social media wisely, creating assets that enable you to maintain consistency, and developing strategic collaboration opportunities are just a few of the ways you can strengthen your brand presence.