Building a Professional Brand Identity – From Side Hustle to Small Business – Precious Oyetayo Subuloye

By Precious Oyetayo Subuloye MCIM, rpa, MNIMN

 

Introduction 

A brand’s personality, characteristics, and values make up its identity. It’s what distinguishes a company from others. For small firms, a strong brand identity may make all the difference in growth and profitability. Any small firm must have a professional brand identity. It can assist you in expanding your side project into a small business and beyond!

How do you define a small business?
It is crucial to understand what constitutes a small business before we go into the methods and procedures for creating a professional brand identity to transform your side project into a small business. Small businesses come in various forms, including corporations, limited liability companies, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. The most prevalent kind is the sole proprietorship, which is often maintained by one person or a family with no separation of personal and corporate assets. A small business might range from a family-owned restaurant to an internet site that offers handmade jewelry to an accounting firm that specializes in small business tax preparation to a real estate agency.

Designing your small business brand identity has become pretty simple in recent years, unlike when the printing press did not exist and no one considered designing on computers. At the time, you had to rely on word-of-mouth or pay someone to draw/paint on your storefront.

With technological improvements, designing has become a piece of cake, however, this is an exaggeration because options can often be confusing. If you search for “how to brand my small business” online, you will find millions of links that lead to various answers.

The secret to creating an executive-level brand identity for your small firm is to hire a brand designer who can genuinely alter the game for you at this point of development. Once you’ve found a designer for your brand identity, you’ll need to determine what type of company model requires what type of branding. In this situation, when you’re starting a small firm, you’ll need a distinctive logo and a killer website design.

So, what are we waiting for? Nothing more than a voyage to give our tiny business branding a professional appearance!

How To Create A Professional Brand Identity
Before we get started detailing how to create a professional brand identity to turn your side hustle into a small business, it’s necessary to understand what a small business is.

STEP 1: Build Your Brand by Defining yourself
The first step in developing your business identity is to describe yourself. It would help if you had a thorough grasp of your business.

Who are you?
What are your values?
What do you want others to know about you?
What do you want people to remember when they think about your company?
Once you’ve recognized these factors, it’ll be easy to craft a consistent message that matches your values and personality.

STEP 2: Building Your Brand By understanding your audience
The second step in small business branding is to identify your target demographic.

Who is your ideal customer?
What do your prospective customers want?
What does your target audience want?
What are your intended audience’s preferences?
What are their challenges?
In addition to answering these questions, you must understand your target market’s demographics, psychographics, and purchasing behaviors to successfully reach and convince them.

STEP 3: Understand your Market and Competitors
Differentiation is the key to success in brand development. The goal is to ensure that customers choose you above your competitors. You must provide something unique, whether in product, service, or approach, which necessitates a Brand Analysis.
You should never try to replicate what the large companies in your market are doing; instead, you should be aware of what they are doing and understand why.

Examine your primary competitors or brands that stand out in your field, and learn how they built their brand. Exploring the underlying meanings, origins, reinventions, and ethos of these companies will help you shape your own. It is critical to undertake a brand analysis and compare it to your rivals.

Comprehensive market research allows us to focus even more on your brand’s unique selling points and target audience. Businesses that lack a thorough understanding of the market and their customers risk making erroneous judgments, which can result in ineffective branding initiatives and missed opportunities.

STEP 4: Creating Brand Identity with Graphic Visuals
The third step is to develop an identity for your small business. This involves designing a professional logo, slogan, color scheme, and website design. Think about the following.

What should my logo look like if I get one made?
Should I incorporate the motto into the design?
What colors will work best for my business?
Should I control the design or allow the designers to perform their magic?
What should be on my website?

STEP 5 Allocate Budget for Brand Identity
The fourth stage is to create a budget for things like branding and marketing to avoid overspending or underspending.

How much should I first invest in branding?
How much of my profit should I allocate to marketing designs each month?
How can I minimize costs while maintaining excellent design quality?
Will taxes impact my brand design budget?

These are just a few of the questions that come to mind when making the big decision to turn your side hustle into a full-fledged small business.

STEP 6 Plan It All Out Before Designing It
Before beginning a brand identity design, ensure that everything is in order. The last thing you want throughout the branding process is to be unsure of yourself, your rivals, or your target audience. It will be easier to produce a creative brief after you have learned as much as possible.

STEP 7 Starting with a winning logo
Logo is crucial for a small business brand to stand out in a crowded market. Whether or not one believes in the power of a logo, it is a necessary component of all branding and marketing materials.

STEP 8: Create a Strong Brand Story
To stand out in today’s competitive market, brands require a compelling brand story that will aid in the development of a unified brand identity. Your small business branding will be dispersed without a story, so attempt to work with expert copywriters or content writers who can provide you with one.

STEP 9: Design a visually appealing website design.
Designing a stunning website is only one element of this process. When creating websites for your businesses, designers must ensure that they are user-friendly, for example, by providing accessible navigation.

STEP 10: Create the main social media accounts.
Being everywhere is foolish. Using data analytics, discover where your target audience surfs and shops. Begin analyzing your audience’s behavioral habits. One thing that will help you see where your competitors are succeeding.
Once this is done, design your small business’s social media accounts. Ideally, use your brand identity as a profile picture, create an eye-catching page banner, and populate your feed with personalized postings about your company and its products.

STEP 11 Begin your marketing efforts.
Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your small business brand, it’s time to add the building bricks to establish brand position, image, and personality. You can accomplish this by promoting the brand through business cards, display ads, marketing design, brochure design, and other branding materials.

STEP 12 Produce a brand book
A brand book is a set of principles for defining and controlling a brand’s identity. Also known as style guides, they contain information on anything from the company’s visual identity and logo design to its goal statement, key values, and even the tone of voice that should be utilized in corporate communications or collateral.

The primary goal of a brand book is to present and explain your company’s identity, mission, visual style, and core values. Your brand book will help customers and employees understand exactly what you want to convey to your target audience. Once you’ve created the initial edition, reassess it every 5-7 years to see how your brand changes.

I hope I have been able to effectively communicate my points to you. Don’t forget brand promotion entails expressing the value of your brand to a specific audience to foster a favorable image, improve consumer loyalty, and raise brand awareness. Remember that the one-of-a-kind connection you make with your customers is crucial to brand promotion. It’s a combination of artistry, strategy, and true connection.