Small business branding: How to build a brand identity

Small business branding is about more than just a logo or tagline. It’s how a company presents itself to the world and how it wants to be perceived by its customers and the world at large. In other words, brand identity is about look and feel. Having a defined brand identity helps small businesses:

Stand out from competitors.
Build credibility and trust with customers.
Create consistent marketing materials and communications across all touchpoints, including website, email, and social media.
Create an emotional connection with customers and foster brand loyalty.

Overall, brand identity is a fundamental aspect of your business that you’ll want to get right from the start. In this article, learn the steps and strategies to build your brand.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Save time and focus on the things that matter most with AI in Microsoft 365 for business.

Learn more

Tips for building your brand

For small businesses on a tight budget, it’s not always possible to hire third-party professionals to develop your brand identity. But, there are a variety of free small business resources that can help guide you as you build your brand. Here are some small business branding steps and questions to help get you started:

Define your brand’s values, mission, and personality. Ask yourself, what does your business stand for and what is its purpose?
Identify your target audience, their needs, preferences, and pain points. Ask yourself, why would they be seeking out your product or service?
Determine what your unique value proposition is. Ask yourself, how is your business different from your competitors?
Create guidelines that promote consistency. Ask yourself, how does your brand look and feel across your emails, social media, events, and website?

As you can imagine, answering these questions to develop your small business branding requires you to evaluate your business’ strengths and weaknesses, your competitors, market and industry trends, customer needs, and pricing.

Research and competitive analysis

Your brand identity will be based on your business niche, the specialized area of a broader market that your business serves. This involves not only understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your business but also evaluating market and economic trends, the overall competitive landscape, and customer needs. A common method for conducting a competitive analysis is SWOT, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strengths refer to what your business does particularly well, or ideally, better than your competitors. It’s your competitive advantage. This can also include proprietary assets and unique resources that your business has. Examples of strengths may include advanced technology, efficient processes, and exclusive partnerships.
Weaknesses are the internal factors that put your business at a disadvantage and hinder its performance. These are also areas for improvement or further development, such as outdated technology and staffing shortages.
Opportunities are external factors that your business can use to get ahead of the competition. These opportunities are potential areas for growth—like changing market trends or new consumer preferences.
Threats are external factors that pose risks or challenges to your business. Examples of threats could be regulatory changes and economic downturns.

The goal of the SWOT analysis is to create a comprehensive overview of the current situation for your company and your competitors. For small business branding, doing a SWOT analysis on your company helps you:

Gain a better understanding of areas where your business excels, needs improvement, and stands in the market.
Allocate resources more effectively.
Develop contingency plans and strategies to minimize the impact of potential threats.
Stay ahead of industry trends and respond to emerging customer needs.
Discuss the company’s current situation and future plans with employees, partners, and stakeholders.
Streamline operations and processes, making your business more efficient and cost-effective.
Meet customer needs and stay responsive to changes in the marketplace.

Conducting a SWOT analysis of your competitors is equally important, as it helps you:

Identify areas where you can outperform your competitors or differentiate your offerings.
Gain insights into market trends, customer preferences, and emerging opportunities and threats—which can inform business and brand strategy.
Identify underserved customer segments or unmet needs, so you can adjust your products or services accordingly.
Discover opportunities for innovation and product development.
Refine your customer acquisition and retention strategies.
Discover strategic partnerships that can help your business, such as co-marketing or distribution agreements.
Inform your pricing and determine where to make investments in your business and where to reduce spending.

Conducting a SWOT analysis on your business and your competitors provides a powerful foundation for strategic planning and decision making. In combination, these analyses empower you to identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and create a competitive advantage in the marketplace while keeping a close eye on the evolving competitive landscape—including customer trends and behaviors.

The role of social listening in brand development

Nowadays, social media platforms are a treasure trove of insights and information about how customers regard brands. And listening to your customers helps you better serve their needs using data-driven insights, manage your brand reputation, refine your small business branding, and stay competitive. You can do this manually or use social listening tools—software or services to monitor, track, and analyze social media conversations.

When deciding what social listening tool is right for you, look for features like:

Real-time monitoring of the social platforms most relevant to your business to ensure you get the most useful information possible
Tracking for keywords, hashtags, and “@” mentions to surface what you’re looking for.
Sentiment analysis that helps you understand the tone and context of comments as either positive, negative, or neutral.
Data visualizations and reporting that make it easy to see insights and share them with your team and stakeholders.
Filters and segmentation, like location and demographics, for more detailed insights.
Competitor analysis that helps you compare customer sentiment between your business and your competitors.

Define your brand’s purpose

Defining your brand’s purpose is the process of articulating why your brand exists, and it’s often aligned with your brand values and mission. Your brand purpose goes beyond business goals to communicate the broader impact and meaning your brand has in the lives of your customers and in society.

Your brand purpose is the guiding force for all aspects of your company and interactions with your customers, so you’ll want to take time with this step. Here are some tips for crafting an effective brand purpose statement:

Use aspirational and inspiring language to connect with customers on an emotional level.
Avoid generic or cliché statements that could apply to any brand.
Avoid generic or cliché statements that could apply to any brand.
Avoid referencing specific products, services, or deadlines to keep it evergreen.
Work on your statement using collaborative small business tools, so you can get input on it in real time and get perspectives from multiple team members.
Test your statement by sharing it with customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders—and make changes based on their feedback.
Keep it simple and concise so that it’s easy to understand.

Develop your brand’s voice and personality

Brand voice and personality are fundamental elements of small business branding. A well-defined brand voice aligns to your brand purpose, feels authentic to your audience, helps build stronger connections with customers, and distinguishes your brand in the marketplace.

Key components of brand voice include:

Tone—the emotional characteristics and style of your communications. The tone should convey a sensibility that reinforces trust and credibility for your brand. Depending on the niche of your business, this may mean it’s more casual or more professional and serious.
Personality—the sensibility and tendencies of your communications. Think of your brand as a person to decide how its voice will sound. The personality of your brand voice should be relatable to your target audience to foster a sense of familiarity.
Language—the words, phrases, and vocabulary of your communications. The language of your brand voice will reflect its tone and personality. It’s helpful to call out if there are any words or phrases to avoid, as well as if there are any special terms unique to your brand.

Keep in mind that your brand voice should be consistent but also adaptable to different contexts and audiences, when applicable. It may vary slightly depending on whether your communications are for social media, a press release, or a customer support email, for example.

Create your brand identity design

How your brand looks is just as important as how your brand sounds. The visual appearance and style of your brand is another valuable opportunity for your business to stand out among competitors and win over customers. It’s common for small businesses to hire a third-party professional branding agency or a brand designer to develop its color scheme, logo, iconography, typography, and imagery.

To help develop your brand identity design:

Consider your brand’s personality to create a look and feel that match it.
Keep your industry in mind to create a design that either conforms to industry standards or stands out from them.
Think about who your audience is and what their aesthetic preferences and expectations are.
Be sure that the visual elements are easy to use across different marketing assets and channels.
Ensure your colors, fonts, imagery, and design principles meet accessibility standards.
Provide guidance around visual details, including font weight, image opacity, and color combinations.
Be sure your brand resonates with your target audience by getting their feedback before making anything final.

Maintain consistency with a brand style guide

After you’ve gone through the time and effort to develop your brand identity, you’ll want to ensure that it’s implemented correctly and consistently. Otherwise, you could put your brand’s reputation at risk and confuse your audience. A brand style guide, also known as brand guidelines or brand manual, is not required but it is very useful to help ensure all of your communications adhere to the same standard.

While the exact structure and content may vary, most style guides are comprised of the following elements:

An introduction of the brand, mission, values, and the purpose of the style guide.
An overview of the brand’s history, background, and verbal and visual identity.
Guidelines for the brand’s color scheme and logo usage.
Typography, imagery, and photography guidance.
Brand messaging, including guidance for the brand voice, tone, and writing style rules.
Additional resources, such as design templates and logo files.
An appendix that includes a glossary of brand-specific terms and frequently asked questions.

Compiling your brand style guidelines into a single source of truth helps your current and future employees more quickly create content and communications that are in line with your brand identity. It also helps your entire company avoid mistakes in its marketing, sales, and customer service.

Boosting your brand with marketing

With your small business branding established, it’s time to promote it. You can get started with small business tools, and consider some effective ways for promoting your brand that include:

Establish a website that is mobile-friendly and optimized for search engines.
Develop an email marketing plan for a cost-effective, targeted, and measurable way to communicate with customers.
Create profiles on social media platforms that are relevant to your audience. This is where you can share content, connect with your customers and prospects, and use paid advertising that can be targeted to specific audience segments.
Identify social media influencers who can help promote your brand to their followers or who you can collaborate with on sponsored content or endorsements.
Use paid search advertising to appear in results when someone is searching for one of your competitors.
Create engaging, short videos that can be used across different marketing channels with a tool like Microsoft Clipchamp.
Incentivize your customers to refer other customers to your business with a referral program.

Remember that promoting your brand is an ongoing effort. You’ll need to adapt your tactics as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t. As you progress, maintaining consistency, using data-driven insights, and staying attuned to customer feedback will be key for brand growth.

The Microsoft 365 team is focused on sharing resources to help you start, run, and grow your business.

RELATED PRODUCTS
Microsoft 365

Get started with Microsoft 365

It’s the Office you know, plus the tools to help you work better together, so you can get more done—anytime, anywhere.

Buy Now