Branding for Small to Medium-Size Businesses
The Ultimate Guide

Formulating your business’ brand identity is crucial to ensure you depict your organization accurately and represent yourself truthfully to prospects and clients. You can approach brand identity from the perspective of your brand strategy or brand expression. For this discussion, we’ll examine it from the angle of brand expression.

Brand identity describes the introduction and expression of your brand with respect to your brand tone and personality, communication strategy, and visual expression.

Each of these categories plays a significant role in clarifying the crux of your brand: who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what makes you different. Amplifying these individual details of your brand ensures they are conveyed correctly to your target audience.

What are brand personality and tone?

Brand personality and tone are central characteristics of your brand identity. Similar to a human personality, your brand personality includes the human traits that your brand embodies. In other words, if your brand were a person, how would it look, act, communicate, think, and feel?

Brand personality can be determined in part by brand archetypes, which provide guidelines for attaching your brand to recognizable personalities that people already know. These archetypes include core frameworks for messaging, imagery, colors, and more based on universally recognized categories.

The success of archetypes lies in the fact that they are proven and known. They take a personality that is already understood and shown to connect with audiences and allow you to layer your brand on top of them.

For instance, one archetype is the Caregiver, which embodies aspects of service and aims to infuse a supportive and kind tone into all messaging. Well-known Caregiver brands include UNICEF and the World Wildlife Fund. If your brand aligned with the Caregiver archetype, people would remember their connections with caregiving brands when they think about your business.

Branding is all about associations; people create associations with your brand based on their experiences with other brands, stories, or their individual backgrounds.

Your brand’s tone is also an essential piece of your brand identity. Brand tone is the attitude your brand conveys in its messaging, visuals, and other branding materials. You’ll want to align your brand tone with your brand personality for maximum resonance.

For instance, if your brand embodied the Caregiver archetype, choosing a robotic and detached tone might not be the best way to share your organization’s warm and connective features.

Since you can communicate the same message in a variety of different ways, it’s essential to take the time to choose the tone that best fits your business, audience, and mission. Adjusting your communication style to form an aligned, coherent tone will help your audience have the right experience every time they interact with your brand.

What is a brand communication strategy?

A brand communication strategy involves determining the topics and messages you want to share with your audience and aligning them around a core framework. Determining your focus areas and central communication theme can help keep content relevant, consistent, and connected.

To accomplish this, you can develop a core message framework. A core message framework defines your business’ primary motivations, goals, services, and more in one cohesive place. It serves as a reference point for content and messaging creation efforts to ensure all communications are on-brand. This framework can also include names, taglines, hooks, and slogans, along with how to incorporate them into messaging efforts.

With this type of foundational material in place, you can create alignment and understanding about who your clients are and who you are as a business.

What is brand visual expression?

Brand visual expression is how your business appears to your audience visually through logos, colors, fonts, imagery, and more. Keeping visuals coordinated with your brand personality and tone through every communication medium will help boost brand familiarity with your audience. To ensure your team uses all visual elements correctly, you can develop a brand style sheet that summarizes key characteristics of your brand.

Brand style sheets are helpful reference documents that outline integral branding guidelines for your organization and are easily accessible by your team. They can even include links to download the correct logos, icons, and images to streamline content creation processes.

Another piece of brand visual expression is brand presence. Brand presence includes your brand assets, such as your website, social media presence, blog posts, print collateral, ads, physical store, products, and more, and how each channel conveys your brand.

An example of brand presence is entering a new Starbucks location and observing the same coffee cups, paint colors, special advertisements, and more as other Starbucks locations you’ve visited. Even though this location might be different than the one you usually frequent, you would still recognize characteristics of the Starbucks brand and feel connected to the company.

However, it’s important to note that your brand presence does not have to be physical; it can include digital assets like your social media presence and website. For example, if your core brand colors were purple and white, you could infuse those colors throughout your website for increased cohesion and user awareness. On the other hand, if your core brand colors were purple and white and you only used red and blue colors throughout your website, it might result in a disjointed user and brand experience.

Focus on keeping your brand presence decisive and consistent to achieve uniformity.

Brand culture for your employees isn’t just about sharing the correct color palettes with them. It’s also about establishing brand substance so your staff can clearly communicate your core values and primary focus in every interaction. Discover how to build a positive brand culture at your organization for a better staff and customer experience.

What is brand substance?

Brand substance includes your business’ purpose, vision, mission, and values and explores who your company is beyond the commercial benefits. It’s important to be intentional and clear when defining your brand substance because it supports a central structure and promotes consistency. Once you have information about your brand substance laid out, you can evaluate whether your current actions and communications reflect your brand.

We’ve discussed how brand personality consists of the human characteristics of your brand; let’s use another human example to understand brand substance better. Let’s say you have a friend who is passionate about becoming a doctor and wants to attend medical school. If they voice this as their ultimate goal, they will probably take actions aligning with that objective.

For instance, your friend would likely spend much of their time studying, focusing on health and fitness, and working hard to achieve their goal. However, if your friend never studied, lived an unhealthy lifestyle, and expressed dismissal about essential steps to reach their goal, it would create dissonance and unease.

It’s difficult to trust someone whose actions directly contradict the words they say and the goals they have. Your brand functions in the same way. If you tell customers that you embody specific core values, like honesty and speed of service, but don’t follow through, you will create disjointedness and distrust. Without a clear structure, you allow staff to use their own value systems to dictate their actions.

To mitigate this, you can take a unified approach and share transparent expectations for every employee. For instance, we have a core belief system at Miles IT that guides our actions, communications, and service delivery. From “Family Comes First” to “We Start With Yes,” our beliefs frame clear expectations of how our staff should treat each other and our customers. By building a strong brand culture, this system helps keep everyone aligned with Miles IT’ values.

Why does brand substance matter?

With brand substance, you can convey who you are outside of your products and services. Aligning words, actions, and beliefs happens naturally for a real person. But since your company isn’t a person, you have to be intentional about establishing consistency through brand substance.

If a business only focuses on its products and services, it is essentially a commodity. When buyers shop for commodities, they focus on purchasing at the lowest price available. However, what separates brands from commodities is the connective details that give a business deeper meaning beyond its products and services.

People are willing to pay more when additional connective ingredients exist, like “What impact are you trying to make on society?” or “What are your company goals?” Forming these emotional connections also helps show an impression of quality.

Take Coca-Cola as an example. If you’re looking for soda, you could choose a well-known brand like Coke or an off-brand soda at the dollar store.

Many people choose Coke instead of the dollar store, off-brand alternative, but why? Coca-Cola made an effort to associate their products with happiness, family, and togetherness, qualities that evoke real emotions in people. Even though it’s essentially the same product as something available at the dollar store, most people have no emotional affinity or regard for dollar store soda.

Why does this matter?

According to Zippia, 90% of customers are willing to spend more if they’re buying from brands they trust.

Your brand itself is an asset, and you should treat it as such. Try attaching more connective, emotional elements to your brand to resonate with your target audience.

With so many brands vying for attention in today’s fast-paced, social media-driven world, telling stories is an excellent way to capture your target audience’s attention. Consider the steps in the marketing funnel.

If a user is at the top of the sales funnel and just discovering your business, they probably won’t have the interest or stamina to read a long piece of content summarizing your entire organization. They might be ready for a piece like this when they reach the bottom of the sales funnel and are ready to make a purchase.

However, top-of-funnel content should pique interest right away. Let’s explore how we can create top-of-funnel resources using the storytelling framework.

What is the storytelling framework?

The storytelling framework takes themes from your core messaging framework and breaks them into small, bite-size pieces. This strategy immediately captures your audience’s attention by telling a story. After people have had the opportunity to consume your brand and content over time, they can better connect the dots and gain a clear understanding of who you are.

To keep people engaged in this process and moving forward, you can reference the concept known as the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is a concept that follows a hero character (in this case, your ideal client) as they experience a problem, work to solve it, and come out stronger on the other side.

The Hero’s Journey model instills curiosity in prospects who want to learn more about your business or continue the conversation.

You can think of it as the beginning of a movie that picks up in the middle of the action and immediately captures your interest. Later, the characters may share important plot points through a flashback scene to help bring you up to speed, but this method keeps you engaged and curious from the start.

With the Hero’s Journey and the storytelling framework, you can attract users with a single piece of content and interest them to keep learning more.

Another benefit of storytelling is that it is a proven engagement method. Humans are more apt to tune into stories, whether watching a film, listening to a podcast, or talking with a friend at dinner. In fact, humans are 22 times more likely to remember facts when they are shared in a storytelling format.

Incorporating storytelling into your marketing strategy will help you resonate with prospects on a deeper level so they can remember who you are.

How does the storytelling framework relate to the Hero’s Journey?

With the storytelling framework, you can tell one story in dozens of different ways. Think about the path someone takes to make a purchase.

Let’s say your car is quickly fading, and you need to consider purchasing a new one. In terms of the hero’s journey, your problem is that you need a new car due to failures with your current one. At this point, you recognize your problem but haven’t arrived at the right solution yet. Unless you know someone trying to sell their car, you probably need to conduct research and spend time thinking about what matters to you in a new car. If you live in a snowy, wet area, a car that drives well in all conditions is probably at the top of your list. Or, if you are frequently transporting people from place to place, an SUV or a larger car is likely important.

Let’s say that after weeks of research, you finally select the car you want and make the purchase. Once you start driving your new car, you realize how happy you are with your decision. It has plenty of storage space, drives well in the snow, and perfectly suits your needs.

This example shows a buyer moving through each stage in the Hero’s Journey, from the initial awareness of the problem to the final decision.

As a marketer intent on leveling up your brand, you’ll want to create content for each step in the Hero’s Journey.

Starting from the moment your audience realizes they have a problem (their car isn’t running well), to their thoughts during the decision-making process (essential car features), to their opinion after making the purchase (thrilled with their new car), you can publish resources centered around each of these stages.

Since your audience is at all different points in the buyer’s journey, following this structure will help you make an impact and encourage them to continue engaging with your brand. This way, you can paint a complete narrative of the process and help prospects feel confident about purchasing from you.

At this point, you’ve learned all about defining your brand personality and substance. You understand the storytelling framework and might even have ideas for stories you can share. But how do you start building a brand strategy?

To formulate a thorough brand strategy, you should take advantage of relevant data to inform your decision-making.

What is a brand strategy?

A brand strategy helps a business form a relationship with its target audience through specific, consistent messaging. You should continually incorporate this strategy into your marketing plan; it isn’t just a one-and-done tactic.

But before you can start honing in on your target messaging, it’s important to understand your ideal audience and the competitive landscape. There are several ways to gain the data you need to guide your brand strategy.

Persona development

Buyer persona development involves creating a detailed, clear representation of your ideal customer. Based on demographic and psychographic data about your audience, information from your sales team, and news and trends in your industry, buyer personas give you a clear idea of your target audience.

Buyer personas break down the ambiguity of your target audience into a clearly defined individual with thoughts, emotions, and goals.

Depending on your products, services, industry, and business objectives, you can have one buyer persona or multiple.

Market research

Market research can help you understand and analyze trends, patterns, and future initiatives in your target market. In terms of your brand, it involves drawing on data and analytics to make strategic branding recommendations and decisions. These decisions will likely generate impact and resonate with your target audience because there is supporting research and informed insights to back them up.

Market research is an excellent way to understand your audience’s pain points and problems and incorporate them into your messaging. The following categories are all part of market research and can be used to hone your brand strategy.

Competitor analysis

Seeing what your competitors are doing—and what they aren’t—is essential for your brand strategy. Take the time to zero in on a list of competitors, examine their products and buying experience, and provide an analysis of your findings.

Another way to approach competitor analysis is to see what customers complain about in competitor reviews or online platforms. >See if you can leverage those pain points in your existing copy. You can also discover ways you might be standing out in a positive or negative light compared to your competitors. 

Keyword research

We’ve talked about the immense value of keyword research for your SEO marketing strategy, and it’s also helpful for your brand strategy.

Searching relevant keywords on a search engine or an SEO tool like SEMrush can give you insights into how users phrase their problems and needs. You can also view additional questions they might ask to help guide your branding and content creation efforts.

SEMrush features a “Questions” tab that shows questions pertinent to a relevant search. If you answer these questions concisely on your website, both your SEO and brand strategies will benefit. You can give your audience the answers to what they’re looking for while establishing trust and credibility.

Interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs)

Your sales team and internal staff are excellent sources of information. They likely speak with customers every day and hear how they explain their problems, the difficulties they’re facing, and the answers they’re looking for. You can later analyze these common concerns for patterns and trends and incorporate them into your content.

How do you incorporate your brand strategy into future marketing recommendations?

With a strong brand strategy, you can produce content and materials based on actual data and information. This way, you’re not just guessing what will resonate with your audience; you know what will work based on your competitive research, expert interviews, and other tactics. The right strategy can also ensure that your marketing assets complement, not contradict, your brand.

Branding is generally based on emotions or feelings, so creating the right impression is important. This concept also helps from a marketing perspective in terms of targeting.

When our marketing team writes and implements targeted content, like Google or social media ads, it’s best to have a clear idea of who we want to see those messages. Knowing who this audience is, what they want, and what they value are crucial insights that can guide your overall marketing efforts.

Just because you have all elements of your brand clearly defined doesn’t mean they have to stay the same over time. In the same way that trends and markets evolve, brands can also.

Many well-known companies, including MailChimp and Starbucks, have refreshed their logos over the years. Other companies have rebranded entirely, like Domino’s and Dunkin’ (formerly Dunkin’ Donuts). Keep reading to determine whether it’s time for a rebrand.

What is rebranding?

Rebranding occurs when aspects of a business’ brand, such as visuals, key messaging, or tone, are refreshed or modernized to reflect changing values, new standards, or evolving products and services.

Businesses undergo a rebrand when they want to update the way their audience perceives them. Though you might be unaware, many popular companies have completed rebranding initiatives over the years.

When would I need to rebrand my organization?

There’s no rule about rebranding your organization after a certain number of years. At a certain point, many companies may intuitively feel that the message and visual expression they’re putting out there no longer reflect who they are. They may feel it lacks professionalism, creativity, or consistency, which can happen when different team members produce assets.

One sign that you may need to consider rebranding is if your assets aren’t performing well. In this case, there could be a need for more alignment between the audience you are trying to target and the messages they need to hear or experience. If you feel like you’re seeing a lot of top-of-funnel activity but experiencing a significant downturn in any activity later down the sales funnel, it could be a sign of disengagement with your assets.

Your website’s bounce rate can also show how people behave when they view your materials.

Another instance where rebranding might be necessary is if a company is just starting out as a brand-new organization. A strong first impression is essential, and having the appropriate brand assets, messaging, and strategy in place can help you put your best foot forward.