Three keys to branding that will turn small business advertising expenses into an investment

If you don’t have an effective, unified brand strategy, most of the money you spend on advertising is going to waste. Small business advertising is often the bane of business owners’ existence, because most small business owners don’t understand the principles or, more importantly, the benefits of effective branding. The brand will convert its ad spend into ad spend.

I’ve worked with over 150 small businesses to help them with their overall online marketing strategy and I always start with the brand. The brand should be the foundation of your advertising approach. Here are the top three things small business owners struggle with that a branding strategy will solve:

1. Effectively communicate what you do. The most common words you would find on a website are: “We have a wide variety of quality products.” What does that mean? You could put the same sentence on any website that sells anything and it would probably make sense, but it doesn’t communicate what you do or what you sell. If you sell baseball equipment, it should say “We have a wide variety of baseball equipment.” Ideally, you would even be more specific than this and list the brands you have and the niche you are in. “We carry Franklin, Louisville Slugger, and Wilson baseball gloves.” This sentence is only one word longer than our original, but after reading it, a visitor will know whether or not he is on the site he wants.

2. Tell people why you are unique. This is really the essence of what the brand is all about. Most small business owners have a specific niche that they have found where they can compete and make good money, otherwise the business would not work. However, most small business owners do not have a brand strategy and therefore have failed to effectively communicate what it is that makes them unique. This should be an honest presentation of what really sets you apart from the competition. One company I worked with, for example, is a mattress company that is only open by appointment. By announcing this, they were able to generate some curiosity and a lot of word of mouth about the different strategies.
3. Make it pretty obvious why the things you say are important to your customers.. When working with websites, I often find that on one site I can not only find the highest quality products, but also the cheapest or most affordable products. That is quite impossible. Everyone knows that you pay for what you get. This doesn’t mean you have to say we sell junk and guarantee the lowest prices, it just means you have to present a credible profit across your entire site. Either you have the lowest price or you have the best products. You may be in the middle, but you guarantee the best customer service. No matter what it is that really makes you unique, that is what you should focus on. With the mattress company we focused on not just saying that they only sell mattresses by appointment, but because of that they are able to lower their mattress prices as much as they do but their payroll overhead. Often in branding, this is called selling the benefits.

Once we addressed these three issues, we found that the stats improved rapidly. In some cases, we had a noticeable conversion improvement the day we made these changes.