How to Build a Brand That Stands Out in a Crowded Market
Ever feel like your marketing is working hard, but still hardly working? Without suitable and effective brand strategy for small businesses, it’s easy to feel invisible and fail to communicate what sets your products or services apart, no matter how great they seem. This guide tells you how to make your brand stand out in a crowded market, by building brand clarity and not just brand aesthetics.
Why Most Small Business Brands Feel Generic
One mistake most small businesses make is building their brand around what they do instead of what makes them different. This alone can make the brand feel generic and unable to stick out from the rest of the lineup that does the exact same thing. When you do get the messaging right by highlighting your main selling point, you may still run into other problems by trying to appeal to everyone, having inconsistent messaging, and designing a visual identity that does not match your brand voice.
A brand strategy prevents your brand from both being invisible and being all over the place. Here’s a step-by-step guide on clearly defining what your brand is and making it stand out.
Step 1: Get Clear on Your Brand Positioning
To move away from a generic branding, you must first position your brand as something that is unique and different from the rest. Try to identify what distinguishes your brand from your competitors and why consumers would choose you over them. Your unique selling proposition could be a lower price, a perception of luxury and exclusivity, or anything of value to a customer that deems your brand a greater deal than any other brands out there. To get a better grasp on your brand positioning, try to reflect on the following questions:
- Who is your ideal client specifically?
- What problem do you solve better than anyone else?
- What is your point of difference beyond price?
- What do you want people to feel when they interact with your brand?
Step 2: Build a Brand Message That Connects
Messaging can make or break your brand. It sets the tone for the entire brand and how you come across to your intended audience. To build a strong brand messaging, start with a clear tagline or positioning statement. This tagline is what your brand will anchor on so make sure that it captures its essence as well as its unique selling proposition. Be sure to use a consistent tone of voice and a language that speaks directly to your audience.
For one, Mapless Marketing’s tagline, “Most businesses feel lost in marketing, we help them find direction with strategies that lead them to measurable growth,” fully encapsulates what our brand is about, the problem we’re trying to solve, and how we plan to solve them. It gives our client a clearer picture of the brand and what we can offer that’s unique and valuable.
Step 3: Create Visual Consistency That Builds Recognition
The look of your brand is also incredibly important in getting noticed. More than the aesthetics, make sure to create visual consistency so your brand can be recognizable to people everywhere before they even read a single word. Build brand recall by setting a specific, uniform look using carefully selected brand colors, fonts, and photography style, and apply this to every publicity material released across websites, social media, and even print. When the branding is consistent, people will more likely remember your brand more than those whose appearance varies every single time.
Step 4: Let Your Brand Show Up in the Client Experience
It is just as necessary that your brand transcends words and visuals. It must show up as well in the client experience. This means every interaction a client has with your small business should feel exceptional and on-brand. From onboarding to communication to follow-up and down to crisis management, the brand should be felt and recognized by your client. Make it so that your brand is the experience.
For Mapless Marketing, this means a relationship-driven approach to providing marketing solutions to businesses. Consistent building of genuine connection and trust has led clients to associate the Mapless Marketing brand with a hands-on and tailor-fit experience.
Step 5: Measure Whether Your Brand Is Actually Working
Developing a brand strategy is one thing. Making sure it’s actually resonating with your audience is another. Measure whether your brand is working by constantly monitoring relevant metrics. The most common are follower and engagement counts. Beyond these, check for real business outcomes like lead quality, referral rates, and client retention, as well as client feedback. From there, you’ll know what your next steps should be. And whether you should continue with your current strategy or to regroup and come up with a better one.
The Connection Between Brand Clarity and Marketing Results
How do you expect to market your brand if you’re not even sure what it is in the first place? The key takeaway here is that when your brand is clear, every piece of marketing follows suit and works harder. Ads perform better. Content resonates more. Referrals happen more naturally. Get better results by investing in brand strategy first before spending more on marketing tactics.
Your brand is the foundation everything else is built on. Building a standout one is not something you can do in one sitting.
Mapless Marketing can give you guidance on making your brand stand out.
Contact us, book a free Marketing Map Session, and let us help you build one that actually connects, converts, and grows with you.
