4 Ways to Make Your Home Business a Brand to Reckon With

To many home business owners, the word ‘branding’ is likely to conjure up images of huge budgets and complicated strategies. In reality, there are many economical and simple ways to build up a small business as a brand and to ensure that your brand’s recall factor stays fresh.

Here are some ways to ensure that your home business is clearly branded and recognizable:

Have a clear strategy in place: Before you outline strategies for branding your home business, make sure that you are clear about the basics of your business – like the objectives and the target audience. It is difficult to reach your business goals unless you are sure about where you want to go.

Ensure repeat business: It is easier to convert an existing customer to a repeat customer than it is to get a brand new customer.  So before expanding your business, build up a base of loyal customers for your brand. Build up trust by ensuring that your product or service lives up to their expectations. Let your customers know that you value them by getting feedback, building trust and generally demonstrating that you care about their well-being.

Get creative with your business card: A business card is the first impression you have of someone, so creating one that is memorable is a great branding strategy. A customer typically takes business cards out of politeness and then either throws them away or just forgets about them. But, there are ways to beat this behaviour pattern. A law firm which used fake million dollar bills as business cards, with the photo and information of the attorney on the reverse, had great response from potential customers. It was not just the eye-catching pattern; the customers were hesitant to throw away million dollar bills, even if they happened to be fake!

Get creative with website content: Make sure that the name, tagline and logo of your business are distinctive. The website design and the content should aptly represent your company. And when you generate website content, use words and images that are in sync with what your company stands for. All online content should reinforce the image of your company in the minds of your current customers and the potential ones. This is the hallmark of good branding.

Although simple, these steps will require hard work and perseverance to generate results. But when they do, you will have a business brand that is ready to take the market by storm.