Around 80% of the small businesses we spoke with in the past few years were adamant that their business doesn’t need a Brand Consultant. They strongly believed that ‘fancy’ terms such as ‘branding’ are reserved only for big organizations and companies, and small businesses are better off without them.
How wrong they are!
This notion against branding stems from their ignorance of the very business strategy of branding. Due to this lack of knowledge, they are most likely not to hire a Brand Consultant and potentially lose a large chunk of business that could have been theirs.
Why Brand Consultants are Required for Small Businesses?
Every business is based on just one focus: Sales. Unless there are sales and revenues, there can’t be profits, and when there is no profit, no business can exist – Be it a small business or large business.
And where there is selling involved, branding automatically kicks in. If your small business is selling, then either you are doing branding or you are not. Yes, you can sell even without branding, but it’s always better to be one step ahead of your competitors, and create a unique story via branding to make the sales even more proactive and even more stellar.
Branding is a creative, unique marketing strategy that helps small businesses create stories about their business, their products, and create more engagement with their customers. Branding can turn strangers into friends and friends into your regular customers because of the connection they develop with your brand (not business!).
Branding is the story that people tell about your business when you are not in the room, and branding is the sole reason why a customer will feel more connected and more engaged with your brand.
Refer here, to learn How to Implement Low-cost Marketing Strategies for Business Growth
How to Select Brand Consultants for Small Businesses: 3 Factors To Consider
Although there are hundreds of reasons why every small business should hire a brand consultant, and make their business even bigger. But if we summarize the pointers, then we can extract three main critical factors to consider, are mentioned below:
1. Biggest Quality: Storytellingman
Always remember: People don’t buy from your business because of the products/services you are selling. But people buy from your business because of why you are selling.
And this “WHY” is the biggest question which every small business should attempt to answer, not only for their customers but also for their own good. The answer to why, can be derived by story-telling and branding, and hence, this the single biggest factor to consider while hiring brand consultants or experts for your startup or small business.
The brand consultant should be a storyteller who can filter down complex theories and concepts into simple, easy to understand stories, and 60-70% of branding exercise boils down to this skill.
In very layman terms, branding is the story that entices your customers and well-wishers to connect with your business, and what other methods it can be, except stories. Stories about your passion, your focus, your dreams, and your future plans related to your business.
2. Passionate For Organic Marketing
A good brand consultant should have passion and dedication for organic or unpaid marketing. Yes, paid marketing can be used for instant branding as well, and in the case of trending products or services (like face masks during a pandemic), it can work too.
But if we are seeing a long-term goal and vision of creating a historical, epic brand out of your business, organic marketing should be the focus and intent. By organic marketing, we mean unique, interesting stories about the business, creating an inbound lead magnet that works on auto-mode, and cheap.
Spending big dollars on advertisements is something small businesses cannot even afford, and this is another big reason why your brand consultant should have a keen desire to experiment and evolve organic or unpaid marketing.
There are many benefits of embracing unpaid, organic marketing for a business, especially using digital platforms and tools. Online Search, for example, is a very lucrative and beneficial marketing tool for branding and for selling. If a small business can establish a solid search presence, then there is no need to even think about offline sales since there will be so much demand.
To be a brand and an influential entity on platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and others, it’s crucial to have an ongoing organic marketing initiative, and branding is the best way to accomplish this.
Refer here, to learn 5 Brand Building Strategies for Small Businesses.
3. Creation of USP & Branding Tone, Personality
Branding is not just about a fancy logo and futuristic website/app design, along with an expensive-looking letterhead. These are part of brand identity and not branding directly.
The brand consultant you are hiring for your small business should be aware of how to create a set of unique USPs for your brand, which helps you to stand out from the crowd. The development of your branding tone is another major requirement for establishing a solid branding exercise for small businesses.
The development of a personality is yet another factor in overall branding, and the brand consultant should know how to develop one. As shared earlier, the skill of storytelling and passion for organic marketing can collectively help your business develop a branding story, a branding tone, USPs, and more, which can transform your small business into big, without heavy investment and paid advertisements.
You can choose the best, most creative branding consultants for your small business from an online platform called MSMEx, wherein business consultants and business advisors are available on call, any day and any hour you need. Consult and talk with the best brand consultants in the industry, and ensure that your small business grows big, and evolves into a much bigger entity than you had initially envisioned.
