NEWS
How to have a clear brand meaning for your Australian small business
We have a client that always comes up with new business ideas and like all business owners, they always have a lot of ideas and they always want to be creating new businesses and adding add-ons to their existing service or product offering. It’s easy to be tempted and just throw them onto the existing brand and business that you have, but the client that I’m talking about on the back of all the advice that we give him, he creates a new business and a new brand every time he creates a new service offering. Now I know what you’re thinking, I’ve got to create a new brand, a new website, new branding every time I want to create a new service. So, the question I have for you is what is harder and what is more expensive? Creating a new business and a brand and marketing individually or adding it on to your existing product or service offering and then try to cut through and communicate to people that you do everything and do all of these services and all of these products, when they’re not related and they confuse people. Trust me – that’s harder than building a new brand and marketing and communicating individually. Every brand has one meaning, so don’t confuse your brand and throw everything into it. One brand has one meaning, communicate it clearly. We live in an overcommunicated society, so you need to be really clear about what your brand does, who you do it for and where you do it.
9 simple ways for your small business to get more business
I’m going to show you how to create a point of difference. I’m using a gardening business as an example, but the same rules apply regardless of your business, so hopefully it's useful for everybody. So there's a couple of ways regardless of your business for how you can stand out. Firstly it's about what you do and the offering that you provide. Secondly, could be who you do it for and thirdly it could be where you actually provide an offering or as a fourth one it could be the leadership and expertise that you have in your offering. You can use one or a combination of these four elements to create a point of difference, so let's apply that specifically to a gardening business and again the way that I apply it can relate to any business. Firstly let's pretend as a gardening business you could focus on luxury homes and that being your expertise or you could focus on family home and really go hard communicating that across the your marketing. You could be a gardening service specifically to strata properties and that being your expertise. Now remember regardless of your focus, regardless of your expertise what's most important is that your obvious and you're super explicit about what you do, who do you do it for and when will you do it. They might have an expertise but they don't strongly communicated or they don't communicate on purpose because they want every type of business and every type of work that comes through. That means they're competing unnecessarily. Let’s continue it could be that as a gardener let you focus on investment properties, it could be that you're the youngest person in a suburb offering and gardening service so you communicate that you're energetic and the youngest in what you do or it could be that you're the oldest in the suburb, so you've got the experience and expertise so communicate that in a really clever and cheeky way. It could be that you're the quickest in the gardening service you provide and put a guarantee around the time that you will spend offering your gardening service. I've given examples here around ways that you can differentiate by some idea what you do do.
The team here at Little Marketing have been working with small business owners for over 16 years and helping them in this approach. If you're looking for a consultative approach to your small business marketing, then speak with our team today.
