Member Article

Thinking outside the pencil box: creative branding solutions for the offbeat SME

All small business owners aspire to cultivate their business into an iconic brand, an audible voice amid the drone of indistinct corporate entities. And this is especially true for SMEs hoping not merely to outperform their competitors but to stand altogether apart.

There are innumerable marketing implements at your disposal, able to boost sales performance and facilitate substantial growth for companies across all industries. But for maverick SMEs craving something a little more remarkable, the same ambition and innovation must be applied to your branding efforts.

The Infographic

Infographics are still desperately underutilised by SMEs. The potential of this visual medium is just colossal, allowing massive amounts of data to be condensed for user consumption – and there’s no reason this potential shouldn’t be able to translate to brand messaging.

Your prospective customer doesn’t want to read endless promotional texts on your service offering and what exactly it is that makes your SP a USP. They want to be smacked in the face with persuasive stats, pizzazzy salesmanship and irresistible calls to action – that’s it. Infographics offer the liberation of disregarding anything inessential, which can otherwise be so difficult – and they look pretty.

The Networking Hour

Paramount to effective branding is establishing a powerful, authoritative company voice – and it makes a lot of sense to exploit social channels for all they’re worth to achieve this. Social media is the key to communicative reach, with hashtags allowing any tweet to be indexed and later discovered by any number of Twitter users stumbling across your tag.

Launching your own relevant networking hour is easier than you’d think and can prove catalytic in the conversion process. Make sure the hashtag for your networking hour is original, succinct and brand reflective – then simply pick a time, promotional tweet the hell out of it and start some big conversations.

The Guest Contributions

Another ideal way to give your brand voice some credibility is by organising collaborative posts to go on your business blog. You’ll have to conduct some basic link-building processes here, approaching relevant and respectable bloggers with a community sizeable enough to give your collaborative post some reach.

Pick your topic (ensuring that it is relevant to everyone’s specialisms and the concerns of the collective audience), then round up those contributions. The piece will have the combined reach of all participants’ followings, which can really get your name – and brand voice – out there.

The Instagram Campaign

When done correctly, this is an obscenely lucrative form of marketing campaign. The process is simple: find an aesthetically powerful and original way to promote your business. Major corporations really getting it right include Nike and Starbucks. It has to work on a purely visual dimension and be extremely sharable – if both aforementioned are boxes are ticked, your branding should take care of itself from there.

Small businesses have everything to gain from thinking like big ones. It’s precisely this enterprising appetite that got you to where you are now – and it can take you a great deal further than that.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tori Atkinson .