The process of starting a business is akin to jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. Both take equal enthusiasm, courage, and faith that you’ll survive to tell the tale. A well-planned startup with a branding strategy can act as a roadmap for your business, leading you toward growth. Keeping the same in mind we have curated effective inexpensive branding strategies for startups.
You have an idea, and a well-defined business plan, but now you’re facing people, your target customers and you know getting their attention is hard. Enter Branding. Branding is a whole different creature than doing business in a traditional way. Selling a product from a well-known brand is far easier than selling one that no one knows about. One way of achieving this is investing time in the branding strategies of your startup. A few challenges that require your time when starting a new business are
- Brand Trust
- Market Education
- Brand Awareness
- Unskilled Team
- Underestimating Social Media
Small businesses can benefit from branding as much as large businesses. The only problem is that branding can be a complicated process. From your product, target market, name & logo, and investment there’s a lot to think about. As a small business owner, new in the industry you must think branding and marketing are best left for Apple, Microsoft, and the Gucci of the world. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how big or small if you’re in the industry you must think and plan for branding your business.
Know Your Target Audience
It may sound obvious but it’s impossible to build a successful business without knowing the context. In other words, you need to know your ideal market to invest in. Take some time to know your ideal customers. Who are you going to offer your product and services to? What kind of income and background do they have? What are they looking for in a business before investing? When and why would they use your product? When you know the answer to all these, you can use it as a guide to building inexpensive branding strategies. Ultimately your niche audience will help you to build and improve the product offering. By knowing your target customers you can trigger them into an emotional purchase. Your customers will perceive your business brand based on those emotions.
Automate as Much as Possible
There are many ways to automate labor-intensive jobs in any business. Automation tools can put a dent in your budget, but they’re usually inexpensive branding strategies rather than hiring a second person or trying to do everything by yourself. To bring you some help and inspiration we would like to introduce a cloud-based resourceful appointment scheduling software, Picktime. Picktime is tailored to serve every business need. It can be accessed without any extra installation from multiple locations.
Using Picktime you’ll get a customized booking with a unique URL for your business. From education to business to Medical to health & fitness Picktime benefits a variety of industries. With its innovative features, you will be more productive and have less workload and stress. With Picktime you can have 24/7 online booking with online calendar sync (Apple/Google/Outlook) to notify you regularly with automated SMS & email updates about any upcoming, canceled, or rescheduled appointments. Business owners can handle their teams and client-related data in one place with 24/7 email support. You can also manage one on one or group meetings and your resources within a few clicks. Not only this you can also have regular detailed reports of all the business activities in graphical format.
Picktime also offers integration with business tools for your convenience – PayPal, Square, Google Meet, MS Team, Zoom, Mailchimp, CRMs, Facebook, Google Maps, WordPress, Wix, Weebly, and many more. Sign up for free today to know more!
Use What You Have
Great branding & marketing strategies require content and content is expensive. But with a little creativity, you make the best out of what you already have and build inexpensive branding strategies for your startup. Start with something little, for instance if you’re launching a new business that offers tech support, you can invest your time in creating a series of videos illustrating steps of how to use your product. You can write content by yourself and shoot videos even using free online video recording tools.
Establish Yourself as SME
As we already discussed, you don’t have a huge budget to spend on advertising, but fortunately, you need to spend a big amount of money to get in front of the right clients. Content marketing is a better, easier, and more affordable way to get your name out in the industry. Content marketing works on different levels. It gives you a platform by establishing you as a subject matter expert in the industry. Your audience will trust you and come to you if needed to read any authentic content. Using this you can strengthen your relation with them which will eventually help you to strengthen your branding. Do thorough research and then decide to create content on the most famed topics. The point here is to stand out from other tons of information in the industry.
Capitalize on Social Media
With billions of people using smartphones, social media has become a big success these days. It is the most important channel for marketing and branding. If you can compose your content well for social media consumption then you can surely have a limelight on your business. Some of the points to remember when dealing with social media to build inexpensive branding strategies are:
- Use storytelling to be more appealing.
- Make sure the content should be natural and as human as possible. So that you can make connections with real people.
- Interact with your customers regularly by responding to their comments and feedback.
Your startup should come out as a reliable and reputed brand to attract its targeted clientele.
Your brand is an invaluable tool that can lift or break your business. There you have it, some most inexpensive branding strategies for startups. Any business in the industry can learn and implement them to gain a competitive edge in the market.