6 Ways To Brand Your Business on a Budget (2024)
As a business owner, you likely understand the importance of visual branding. When done correctly branding can play a significant role in your business's success (more about that here - How To Build A Successful Brand In 8 Steps For Your Business.)
However, if you have a limited budget, what do you do?
Well, worry not, this article will guide you as I share some insights as a visual brand identity designer on the different ways you can brand your business with a limited or small budget.
1 | Brand consistency
The ultimate goal of branding is to create consistency for your business. The ideal solution is to avoid having to rebrand often as this will confuse your clients and target audience, it can also be quite costly to your business as it can portray you and your business as untrustworthy and unprofessional.
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Avoid...
Avoid hiring a cheap brand identity designer, and avoid getting “just a logo”.
You may not realise it right away but as one of my clients once said to me “if you pay peanuts you get monkeys”, so keep this in mind when searching for a brand identity designer. Although easier said than done, putting money aside to invest in branding that really portrays your business vision and goals will have a long term benefits and will allow your business to grow if you have all the right assets in your brand toolkit.
Action...
Whilst you find your funding or put together the investment lumpsum, I suggest gathering ideas and preparing for what the brand identity designer will want. There are tools out there, like Pinterest, that can help you gather inspiration, but keep in mind these should guide you and help identify what you believe will resonate with your audience.
2 | Blogging
Blogging can do wonders for your brand and business. Often independent business owners forget that a brand isn’t just a logo, but it is everything that visually and verbally (whether that be on the phone, email, social media, advertising, or marketing collateral) encapsulates your business vision, goals and personality. It is all part of your branding.
Blogging is a fairly inexpensive way to build your brand. Being able to showcase your expertise, provide advice, share content, and build your credibility are just a few reasons why blogging is a great way to build your brand on a limited budget.
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3 | Use a website template
Depending on your industry and background setting up a website can either be easy peasy or super difficult. Either way, there are a number of resources out there that have made it easier for independent business owners to create a website. Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows you to set up a trial and a site within 2 weeks.
I highly recommend looking into a CMS platform that has prebuilt templates or themes that are easy to customise and are responsive (ie: `look and work great on mobiles and tablets) and is intuitive to set up.
Squarespace is easy to set up, responsive, has beautiful templates (that can be customised), it’s user-friendly, easy to maintain, secure and has great social media integration.
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Note: I am a Squarespace Expert and Squarespace Circle member, which in a nutshell means I get 20% off the first year of Website or Online Store annual plans, and I get a 6 month trial period on new websites, meaning if we work together to build your website, we have a longer time to perfect the look and feel, the style, the content, before we launch your website. To provide you with a bit of insight, if you sign up to Squarespace yourself, as a new user, you will only get 2 weeks trial period before you are asked to upgrade.
4 | Join forces
Collaborating with other independent businesses or brands is a great way to cost-effectively promote your brand and business. You want to ensure you share the same type of audience and that it is in line with your target audience. You would also need to consider what you bring to the table, especially if you are trying to collaborate with another brand with a bigger audience than you.
But, co-branding, guest blogging, and collaborating with others can help you to brand your business cost-effectively.
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5 | Outstanding customer service
Recently I contacted a small business to help me set up some Ikea furniture. To get straight to the point, the small business was appalling when it came to its customer service. The lady on the phone, although was not the business owner, was rude, and unhelpful and the experience I had was one I will not forget. And not in a good way either.
Once the call ended I was left with an unforgettable experience which led me to never want to contact that small business again or recommend them to anyone I know.
The point is, by creating an awful experience, their brand and business will negatively stay with me, for a long time.
Ideally, you want the opposite for your small business. You want to create an outstanding experience so that anyone that comes in contact with your brand will have an unforgettable, GOOD, experience. A shareable experience that they will want to tell other people about - this inadvertently spreads the word about your brand and business, in a good way, and word of mouth is a great way to gain repeat business and new business as well. Especially as people are more likely to get in touch with an independent business for their services if based on a good recommendation. It’s a straightforward way to brand your business on a budget.
Don’t forget to have already established your brand voice and personality though. More on that in this article: How To Build A Successful Brand In 8 Steps For Your Small Business.
6 | Create an emotional connection
The above leads me to share, that your brand should create an emotional connection. A positive emotional connection. It’s the emotions and experiences your clients, potential clients and target audience need to feel for them to want to work with you.
Your logo, font, brand colours and visual elements should also create an emotional connection as well - you want your website visitor to instantly recognise your logo, colours and how they all work together.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you need to be sure of your business vision, goals and personality. Once you have nailed that and are confident in knowing you have understood your own business requirements I recommend investing in and working with a brand designer who will help create a strong visual identity.
If you need help clarifying your vision, feel free to get in touch as I have a questionnaire that asks numerous defining questions, which are part of our signature branding process.
The key is to always create value. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you have tackled this issue of branding with a limited budget.