Small and medium enterprises face a dynamic business environment and the question often arises, is branding still relevant?
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Small enterprises consider branding a costly affair and focus on perfecting product and service strategies first.
While this is a sensible approach, here’s why it’s necessary to consider how branding can help your growth. Branding is not a luxury, but it’s turning into a business need.
What is a brand? Simply put, it’s a powerful statement that unifies and embodies an organization’s culture and values. In a way, it provides the business with a personality that customers can relate to. Branding is unique and allows customers to distinguish it over competitors.
Why is branding still relevant for SMEs?
- Branding helps to expand your customer base. While it’s true that gaining repeat purchases is valuable, you still need more people to find out about you, and how can they if they don’t recognise your brand?
- Branding is often at the bottom of the strategy chain as small owners choose to focus on the day to day operations. However, when branding becomes a critical part of the business process, it can prove invaluable in the future.
- With an SME’s limited access to capital and resources, it’s challenging to experience growth in a business. However, investing in a brand-building strategy can help SMEs create a demand for their products/services resulting in faster sales. For B2B businesses, branding can help create recognition, build a reputation and trust, resulting in faster conversions.
- All this branding, in turn, helps businesses in their struggle to expand into national markets. If, as an SME, your brand is already well established and known in particular regions, it’s easier to spread awareness and acceptance for products and services.
- Branding helps attract talented employees willing to accept lower salaries from well-established brands.
- People are willing to pay a premium price for a consistent brand experience, and SMEs that focus on branding can benefit the same way. You can sell your product or service at premium prices that help boost profits.
- It’s important to remember that branding is not only for big corporations. All big businesses began as SMEs and grew their businesses through creating a brand identity.
- Branding has become easier today than it was before. Traditional media requires large capital investment for advertising or brand building activities. Today, in the age of digital solutions, it’s easier to use digital marketing tools that can reach your exact target audience and at a fraction of the cost of a newspaper or television ad.
This is where thumb360 comes in as a part of our growth consulting services’ we help you develop your branding strategy into one that can bring you long term growth.
To build a brand, you need to be clear about what you stand for and what you promise. It should tie in with your vision and objectives while being relevant to your audiences. It should differentiate you but stay true to who you are as a company.
