Foolproof brand design tips for small businesses

Luckily, you can put your struggles behind you because you no longer have to sacrifice your brand’s design because cash is tight. All you need are a few brand design tips for small businesses that won’t empty your pockets. And guess what? That’s exactly what we have for you.

Design your brand around your target audience

Your brand exists to serve your target audience, meaning you have to design it around them to sell to them. You achieve that by defining who they are and then defining your brand to suit.

Your first step for creating a brand that consumers relate to is building a customer persona to understand your audience. This is where market research comes into play, and all it costs you is time. 

You figure out who your target audience is by researching the platforms they use when searching for brands in your market, their demographics, such as age, gender, location, education, and employment, and discovering their pain points, the what and why they need a brand like yours.

When you discover who your target audience is, it will guide your branding strategy, resulting in a brand people will organically gravitate towards and trust. And those are things money can’t buy.

You can use these tools to help you discover your target audience:

• Keywords Everywhere: It’s a free keyword research tool that provides CPC information on a chosen keyword and its search volume. It’s an excellent way to uncover which keywords your audience use when searching for your products or service.  
• Facebook Analytics: Provides numerous demographic information pertaining to your current customers.
• Social Mention: Tells you when your brand is mentioned, and across 100 social media networks, so you know how customers perceive your brand. 
• Statista: Provides invaluable statistics in graph form on over 600 industries.

Developing your brand identity and voice can save you money

One of the most important brand design tips for small businesses is defining your brand identity and voice. Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to establish a strong brand identity so you stand out from your competitors.  

When you create your brand identity, you give it a voice, the tone you’ll use to communicate with your public. Your tone consists of your brand values, goals, what they represent, and ultimately how people will feel when they first see your brand.

Give your tone of voice some thought and what it is you want your brand to say. If you’re in a professional market, then you should use a sincere and authoritative voice; on the other hand, if you’re an outdoor adventure brand, then your tone would be exciting and rugged.

Once you have your tone, create content that supports it. Such as your blog, emails, social media, and web content, as the secret to a brand voice that gets its message across is consistency.

Build a high UX website cheaply

Gone are the days when you had to mortgage your house to build a high UX website because now you create a drag and drop website and build one relatively cheaply. 

And these sites enable even the most technically challenged business owners to build one in a matter of days, and depending on the size you need, even hours. Making them the perfect solution for businesses on a budget.

Here are four sites that can make your brand look like it invested heavily in your website design:

• Simbla: If your business has technical needs, this is an excellent choice with an online database and integrated application. 
• Weebly: An easy-to-use platform that offers highly responsive web design.
• Strikingly: If all you need is a clean-looking landing page with a CTA (call to action), Strikingly provides a polished, optimized, single-page design.
• Wix– You’ve probably heard the name before, and for a good reason. There’s not much you can’t do with their intuitive interface, and their customer support is legendary.  

Create a logo design brief

A logo design brief traditionally outlines the fundamentals about your business that you’d provide a designer, including elements such as market, target audience, and logo style.

Logos are an essential element in branding because they’re a visual that instantly connects with our emotions and can create cohesion throughout your marketing platforms. So much so that large corporations spend tens of thousands designing theirs to ensure their brand is instantly recognizable and stays in the viewer’s memory.

However, you can cut out the expense of hiring a logo designer and instead use a logo creator, you can create a professional logo at a fraction of the price – usually about $20. 

These innovative AI machine learning tools can create market and consumer-relevant logos in minutes. All you have to do is answer niche-related questions and then click and drag until you have the one you feel represents your business. You can try this using free logo maker tools.

Use visuals with your branding

90% of information transmitted to our brain is visual, and we process them 60,000X than written content. It’s why visuals are now the driving force behind successful brands, and social media platforms like Instagram enable brands of all sizes to use them for their marketing campaigns.

Visuals create the look and feel of your brand, and your goal is to use ones that match your tone of voice. 

You find the right visuals for your brand by creating a brand style guide. A brand style guide is an excellent way of bringing all the visuals you’ll be using together, ensuring they suit and complement one another. Elements you should include are your logo, color palette, infographics, photography, and video. 

If you already have a website, ensure any visuals you’ve chosen complement it, as your site is often your leading business real estate, so your overall marketing look has to be consistent with your shop front.

Starting a blog is a great investment

Not everyone’s a born writer, and most of us don’t give blogging much thought. But it’s well proven that a blog can be hugely beneficial to a brand, especially one on a budget, as all it costs you is time. That’s why you will it’s good to learn the basics of good small business blog writing yourself. But if you don’t have the time or blogging isn’t your forte, you can outsource at an affordable price.

Paying for traffic using ads and using high-tech conversion strategies aren’t cheap, so one of the most beneficial brand design tips for small businesses is driving traffic on your website by writing relevant, helpful content over advertisements every time. 

Create valuable content and reap the rewards

Content, however, goes beyond your blog.

Content marketing is still the driving force behind the internet and everything on it, especially when building a brand. It provides you with a golden opportunity to establish yourself as an industry expert and go-to resource in your marketplace. 

When you achieve that, people will trust you and choose your brand before your competitors. 

The key to a successful content marketing strategy is creating relevant and helpful content that your target audience needs. It also comes back to our earlier tip relating to your brand voice and using it throughout your content, as this reinforces who your brand is, why you exist, and how you can benefit your audience. 

Social media is free, use it to your leverage advantage

Social media is an essential brand design tip for small businesses on a tight budget. It’s because social media has quickly stepped forward and become a leading platform for brand marketing. There are numerous ways to use it to increase your brand awareness, run marketing campaigns and connect with your target audience.

Such as affordable Facebook ads that specifically target your audience’s demographic, encouraging people to like and share your brand posts and product images, and using links to connect your visuals to your website.

And now, there are free tools that enable you to consistently promote your brand and interact in real-time with your customers. Like a social media manager that automates your scheduling calendar and plans your post-release times on all your social channels, ensuring you post at the times your audience is most active. 

Conclusion

There are amazing brand design tips for small businesses that will only cost your time. Being curious about new trends, learning new skills, and improving your knowledge is “the secret” behind the success of your small business. Knowing you have to be the man behind everything might sound overwhelming at first, but implementing these tips will make the process easier and entertaining.

12 steps to being a better boss

Being a better boss tomorrow is often easier said than done, but you have us. We searched the globe and managed to find the best advice on how to be a better boss from people who are indeed bosses themselves.

As experts in this field, they all shared the most important things you must do in the name of being a good boss. And don’t be so sure that you know what they are, keep reading. Most of them will surprise you. That’s a guarantee.

Be supportive

Employees are people, and they can make mistakes. How you handle mishaps reveals who you are as a boss. If you are asking yourself how to be a good boss – recognize that employees benefit from support and mentorship, but most of them are more likely to use a reward/punishment scheme to deter bad conduct. 

If an employee excels in a particular field, the talent should be recognized and grown. The ability to harness the strengths of others to accomplish a shared purpose is one of the most important qualities of a successful boss. 

It’s important to take care of each employee’s strengths and weaknesses and guide them individually. Rather than targeting skill gaps, focus on filling them by guiding employees through their flaws and increasing their confidence in new areas.

Pranchil Murray, Head of Customer Success at Malwarefox

Have a clear vision

Well, I believe that being a good boss requires having a clear vision. A boss’s ability to successfully lead his or her team depends on having a clear view of what they want to do at work and where they want their team to go.

A good boss is someone who guides a group of people in the same direction, whether that direction is towards getting more customers or increasing sales volume. If you want to know how to be a better boss, first you must understand the big picture of the organization, including its vision, purpose, and strategic objectives, before determining how your unit, department, or team fits into the overall company vision.

Jason McMahon, Digital Strategist at Bambrick

Listen

YY Lee, Director of Zoewebs

Employees want to put more effort in with bosses who are passionate about all aspects of the business, including employees.

Elliot Kim, Co-Founder and Finance and Operations Head at Brevitē

Be patient

Greg Berry, Founder and CEO of Municibid

Trust your employees

Give your employees trust from the start and do not make them earn your trust. By doing this, you are being a better boss and you are empowering your employees to demonstrate that they are individuals, with unique ideas and perspectives to add to the company that feels the freedom to be independent thinkers and not micro-managed.

If an employee feels like they are walking on eggshells to earn trust before they can really blossom then everyone loses. The caveat however is that if an employee breaks your trust as a boss, there are few ways for that employee to redeem themselves from my perspective and they likely are not a long-term fit.

Jaclyn Strauss, CPA/Founder at My Macro Memoir

The ability to trust their employees is one of the traits of a great boss. Trusting the employees will not only empower them but also will give them a sense of value, which in turn will make them more productive and sincere with their job.

Being able to trust their employees also means that they do not micro-manage, which is a hassle not only to themselves but also to the employees as well.

Seb Hall, Founder & CEO of Cloud Employee

Give feedback

Continuous feedback on employees’ performance in satisfying expectations is the answer to how to be a good boss. Assist them in recognizing when they are performing well and communicating when they are not meeting the criteria.

This may be accomplished by routine coaching of personnel. Mention something they are doing well. If you notice something that needs to be changed, make a note of it as soon as possible. Oftentimes, employees are unaware that they are not meeting the criteria.

Coaching and developing them is the manager’s role. The boss is responsible for informing them when they violate customer service standards. For instance, if management overhears staff being nasty to a client over the phone, they should call attention to it and teach them how to communicate more effectively with consumers. If this does not occur, the customer experience may be negatively impacted, and the employee may be unaware that their behavior is wrong.

Mike Chappell, Founder of Formspal

Be decisive

A boss needs to play a constructive and direct role. I believe in a stress-free and healthy working atmosphere, which can be achieved by providing proper and clear job instructions to the employees.

I need to ensure that my employees understand exactly what they are expected to do so that they are not frustrated and overwhelmed by any sort of ambiguity. This results in you being a better boss by increasing worker motivation and morale, which boosts business efficiency. 

Setting clear expectations encourages employees to do their best and be on the same page as me, reducing miscommunication. Finally, when there are set goals and workplace orders, employees experience a sense of pride when they meet the deadlines or complete the assigned tasks.

Jeff Johnson, Owner/Acquisition Manager at Simple Homebuyers

Share the credit

One of the common demotivating things that some bosses do is reaping all the credit and either neglecting or ignoring to accept the input, participation, and effort of others. That’s literally the definition of poor leadership.

Being a good boss means always supporting and appreciating the input of staff and crew members. It uplifts the characters of the team when a boss openly points out the great work and unique contributions that the team has done in creating a particular project a success. It also encourages collaboration and confidence among the team.

Sharing credit among others does not cost the boss anything though it has a great return on investment. When righteous behavior and achievements are honored, recognized and acknowledged, it is possible to be repeated.

Daniel Carter, SEO manager at Property Investments

Offer mentorship

To be a good boss, create a culture of mentorship in your company because it will encourage your employees to grow with the business. One of the best traits of a successful leader is passing down the knowledge they’ve accumulated. You can start doing that with something as easy as recommending business movies or even entrepreneurial podcasts just as a way to show them that you notice them and have a desire to grow their talent within the company.

Having said that, the secret to being a better boss entails further involvement by creating and providing opportunities for personal and professional development within the organization. Create an internal hub where seasoned workers have the opportunity to volunteer by mentoring new hires. Also, develop criteria to become a mentor to incentivize others to work towards it. Accountability is also key for creating a culture of mentorship, as it helps ensure your business’s leaders stay on top of their tasks, progress, and inspire others to strive for advancement.

Nathan Liao, Founder of CMA Exam Academy

Be empathic

Before I hire employees, I make sure that I can rely on them in the future but I don’t forget that they are people too and they are at different stages of their life. Some are just learning and need a helping hand; others are going through monumental periods in their life outside of work, and some have many years of experience.

Being empathetic means you can relate to these employees and understand their perspectives. When something happens or I need to react to something, I take a minute to try and understand where they are coming from and what their situation is. I believe that a good boss should be empathetic and can help build trust, bring the best out of everyone, and build long-lasting relationships that make a difference.

Lindsey Allard, CEO and Co-Founder of PlaybookUX

Be open for communication

How to be a good boss? Simple. Have an open-door system and be ready for juniors when they need you. Convenience is critical; it grants you an advantage because employees seem comfortable reaching out and communicating to you primarily before a problem occurs. Even if you are managing a remote team, make sure your online communication is flawless and you are easy to get to.

That way you don’t end up being a boss who is working around helter-skelter wildly setting out fires because employees were hesitant to approach you in the first place before the fire was inaugurated.

A friendly boss is committed more by juniors and develops a culture of high confidence and more comprehensive employee engagement in their work. That waythe employer reduces the stress in the workplace and employees are more comfortable sharing with the boss their ideas, feedback, suggestions, clarifications, and opinions that could be relevant for the success of the company.

Chris Nutbeen, Founder & CEO of Nuttifox

Reward your employees

Offer training opportunities to motivate employees to advance their skills. Incorporate weekly check-ins between managers and employees. Send out monthly surveys to gather anonymous feedback from staff on company culture, work-life balance, and overall attitude towards work. Listen and make positive changes based on the feedback received, so you won’t end up with toxic company culture or/and unhappy employees.

Kelli Lane, Chief Marketing Officer at Genexa

Conclusion

Benefits of the content marketing funnel for small businesses

There are countless statistics that prove the incredible potential of content marketing. Here are a couple:

• B2B companies that have a blog and post blog content consistently generate 67% more leads than their competitors that don’t have a blog.
• Companies and marketers that prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI from their marketing dollars.

However, even if we ignore this just for a second and look at how the content marketing funnel for small businesses works differently from paid advertising, you’ll understand why it is an amazing thing. There are actually two significant differences between content marketing and paid marketing. 

The first one is the upfront cost. To get any kind of results from your ads, you don’t need much of a budget. However, producing content is often an expensive undertaking, especially if producing high-quality content is high on your priority list. 

With that said, the upfront content of producing content is higher but it isn’t a recurring cost. Sure, you may have to pay your content vendor or dedicate a resource to content production for a few weeks or a month but after a point, this investment will not be as intensive.

The case with paid advertising is different because even the low upfront cost is actually a recurring cost. The moment you stop feeding money to your paid campaigns is the moment they will stop producing results.

The second difference between content marketing and paid advertising is the time it takes to realize results and a positive ROI. With paid advertisements, the results start showing relatively quickly. Within a week or ten days, you can collect enough information to optimize your efforts and get a positive ROI.

With a content marketing funnel for small businesses, getting results will take time. However, let’s say that one of your content pieces starts ranking on the first page of Google for a lucrative keyword. In this case, the returns from that content will be virtually evergreen. The best part is that you will not have to actively optimize anything in order to get these results. 

Create a content marketing funnel for small businesses correctly

After establishing that long-term growth can be achieved, follow these guidelines to make sure you fully understand the content marketing funnel for small businesses. Implement the strategy in your business and start working on your growth right away. 

Understanding the buyer’s journey

The most critical part of perfecting your content marketing funnel for small businesses is to understand your customers and how they end up becoming your customers. If you are reading content marketing funnel tips, a good sign that the content is actually valuable is to see how much stress has been put on building buyer personas.

Understanding this journey from being a prospect to becoming a customer will help you understand what kind of content will resonate with prospects at different times.

For most products and services, the customer journey can be divided into the following stages:

• Awareness: This is where the prospect becomes aware of a problem that they have. After becoming aware, the prospect usually starts researching their problem and its possible solutions.
• Consideration: By the time your prospect reaches the consideration stage, they have usually identified the solution. Now, their concern is choosing the solution that is best suited to their needs.
• Purchase: If all goes well in the consideration stage, the prospect moves to the purchase stage and converts into a paying customer. But your job isn’t done!
• Post-purchase: The post-purchase experience starts the moment the sale is concluded. The quality of this experience plays a critical role in deciding whether a customer will run off to never return or become a happy customer that spreads positive word-of-mouth about your brand.

While a variety of experiences can be used to interact with prospects and customers in the different stages of the buyer’s journey, content is definitely the most versatile asset for this purpose. That’s perhaps why almost half of the marketers surveyed said that they use dedicated content to support three to five buying stages.

Content for the awareness stage

From a marketing standpoint, your objective with your content for the awareness stage should be to validate the problem that your prospects have identified and highlight the fact that it needs to be addressed.

However, there is a hidden benefit of producing awareness stage content. By the time your prospect starts researching solutions to their problems, your brand will already be positioned in their minds as an authoritative source of credible and valuable information. So, considering that, informational is the kind of content that will work best for your business.

Since your prospects are in research mode right now, educating them about their problem and the possible solutions is the best way to become visible to them.

To this end, you can produce “how-to” guides in the form of videos or blog posts, articles, and even infographics. “How-to” guides are actually one of the most popular forms of content used by marketers in the awareness stage.

This is also the stage where you should think about lead generation. A lead magnet is an offer that enables you to collect the personal information of your prospects. This way, even if the content you are producing is not able to reach them, you can reach out to interested prospects by email marketing.

What kind of content qualifies as a lead magnet? Anything that your audience will find valuable enough to give up their email address. From a whitepaper with findings from original research to a detailed ebook, lead magnets can take a number of forms. Which one works for you, depends on who you are targeting and of course, your current content production budget and capabilities.

Content for the consideration stage

The number of prospects that graduate from the awareness stage will only be a fraction of the people you attracted. However, the people present in the consideration stage are very likely to purchase the product or service that you offer. Content will help you ensure your customers purchase from you instead of choosing your competitor.

Half of the job was done in the awareness stage when we shared useful content with our audiences. We have already established ourselves as a trustworthy brand that provides valuable information. All that’s left is to prove that yours is also a trustworthy brand that offers a valuable service or product.

For this purpose, content assets like case studies, feature comparisons, product demo videos, and client testimonials work amazingly well. Each one of these either shows your prospects how well your product or service performs in the real world or shows people benefitting from your product or service.

This practice of using a content marketing funnel for small businesses and experiences to nudge prospects towards a desirable action is called nurturing. While publishing nurturing content on your website and social media channels is a great idea, it often makes the most impact when shared through email.

This is why you were asked to create a lead magnet in the awareness stage. Once a prospect has shared their email address with you, you can assume that they have moved into the consideration stage and can start sharing nurturing content with them.

Content for purchase stage

At this stage, equipping your sales team with supporting content will make their job easier and the chances of conversion higher.

Content like original whitepapers, case studies, and documents outlining the use cases of your product or service will work well at this stage. It is also a good idea to create video testimonials with your best customers that you can share with interested prospects right before they speak to a sales rep.

Content for post-purchase stage

Once a prospect converts, the post-purchase stage starts. Delivering whatever features and services you have promised to them in the previous steps are given here. This is the stuff that your customers expect from you. It is the bare minimum that you are expected to do.

Hence, your objective at this stage should be to delight them. And in addition, to do that you have to create a delightful experience and content is an excellent tool for the same. The most basic content-related necessity of this stage is to have a delightful post-purchase email sequence in place. 

To set yourself apart, take it a step forward and follow up the ‘thank you’ email with a series of instructional emails that enable your customers to achieve success with your product or service.  At the end of the email sequence, send out a feedback form that will help you in improving your post-sale experience. 

Speaking of customer success, you can also use content to help your customers make the best of your product or service. When they are able to do that, their experience with your brand will automatically improve. 

Prioritize

So, that’s a lot of content that you will have to produce and that’s one of the most common challenges that prevent small businesses with limited budgets from enjoying the benefits of content marketing. Luckily, with a little bit of planning, it is possible to overcome this challenge.

The key here is to prioritize. Sure, content for all the stages is important. However, depending on your current needs and content production capabilities, your priorities may vary.

For instance, if you are just starting out, getting more visibility and feeding your content marketing funnel for small businesses more and more leads may be important for you. If this is the case, you must prioritize creating top of the funnel or awareness stage content. 

Besides prioritizing your content production efforts, you can also make use of nifty content distribution techniques like content syndication. Such techniques allow you to make the maximum impact with whatever volume of content you produce.

Conclusion

If approached with the right mindset, your content marketing funnel for small businesses can rise to be the most powerful weapon in your brand’s marketing arsenal. All you need to do to avoid producing content that isn’t impactful is to work with a solid goal in mind and develop an equally solid plan to achieve that goal. Fortunately, the information shared in this guide will help you formulate the right kind of content strategy for your brand.