Expert Advice For Small Business Branding Strategy

Tips for tactical activities that help create a small business branding strategy are many and varied depending on the business’s competitive circumstances and budget. There are useful books full of tactical ideas for small business promotion. Some include establishing expertise for service businesses, a friendly, helpful atmosphere, an accessible location or a stock of hard-to-find goods for retail stores. These may all be attributes that can be promoted. However, what’s very often missing is competitive differentiation…establishing a distinctly separate value to its customers from its competitors and then consistently applying that difference to all its outbound communications.

This missing piece certainly isn’t unique to small businesses. It’s fair to say that a majority of companies are all over the map with their story. “Never twice the same message” is often the norm. Since in most cases there’s no central strategy, every time someone creates a tactic (ad, press release, article, event, speech, web page, sign) they invent what they think the story should be. Looked at together all that promotional debris communicates nothing.  Discovering and establishing a communications strategy to guide marketing and PR actions isn’t that hard. Your customers may already be telling you what it is. If you don’t know, survey them. However what’s truly difficult is narrowing the focus on what single thing or value the company wants to be known for. “Fear of Focus” sabotages too many PR and promotional campaigns. You can’t be “known for” three or ten things, only one.

My main tip is creating competitive differentiation in your marketing and PR and USING IT for your small business branding strategy. Instead of just dreaming up random tactics, know what’s special and valuable to customers specifically about your business and focus on burning that perception into their perceptions in everything you do. Don’t claim generic benefits like “quality” or “leadership” unless no one else in your area is and you’ve got an established reputation for it. Jack Trout’s “Differentiate or Die” is a wonderful and enjoyable read for anyone wanting to understand how to create a clear difference for their brand.

With a clearly differentiated communications and small business branding strategy in place, time and money are saved and the business, any size business, stands a far better chance of creating a niche and establishing clear preference among a certain group of customers. You can’t be all things to all people (broad) and be differentiated. However, most successful businesses all have clear differentiation in common.

Two added challenges faced by owners and managers for small business branding strategy, in addition to differentiating it as discussed above, are stepping back and seeing themselves from the outside-in and maintaining a consistent program rather than occasional, random, often disconnected, tactical actions. Having someone within the organization focusing on running the campaign or some external help can help keep the program moving and consistently focused. Very often the owner, general manager or CEO has too many other irons in the fire.

Editor’s Note: Ford Kanzler (ford@prsavvy.com) is managing partner at Marketing/PR Savvy in El Granada, CA. Over the past decades he’s helped companies of all sizes and in a wide range of business sectors become more sharply focused, tell their stories more effectively and gain share of mind and share of market.

Tagged as: Branding, branding strategy, business promotion, communications, competitive differentiation, press release, web page