Your brand is everything. Simply put, if you don’t have a strong brand your business will struggle to be a strong competitor in your market. But it’s easier said than done, and you may have no idea where to start to make your brand stand out. You could pay to have a logo designed, choose your brand colors, and still struggle to stand out as a brand. We’ll walk you through 4 easy yet effective tips that can make your small business more competitive with its branding.

A Clear Purpose

If you struggle to clearly and easily describe the purpose of your business, chances are others will too. Your brand should invoke a distinctive sense of what your business does. It makes your logo and design work have a more powerful effect when they are aligned with the services or products your business offers. The goal is to have your brand linger in the minds of customers, and that’s less likely to occur without a clear understanding of your business’s purpose.

Attention to Design Details

This is where you may want to consider hiring a professional to help with your design work or seeking product photography services. When you take the extra effort and expense to care for the small details it will communicate to your audience your level of attention to detail. In short, it says something about your businesses quality. That will carry over cognitively to how your audience thinks about your business. Sometimes it is worth the extra money and effort to show your audience that you take your business seriously and hold yourself to a higher standard.

Align with Your Audience

This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to become stuck in eternal people-pleasing in your business’s identity. You simply have to consider the needs, wants, likes and dislikes of your primary audience. After all, the work you are putting into your branding is to communicate with them something about your business. It can go a long way to understand the memes, the language, the icons, and the popular styles of your target customers. You can also utilize this to not accidentally repel your audience by misunderstanding them. Getting to know your audience and using your brand as a bridge from them to your business can be an effective way to compete in your market.

Innovate

So much of what’s out there is a regurgitation of what already exists. While it can be effective to take what already is known to work and restyle it in your image, this can also trigger an automatic pass for potential customers and audiences. They might think “oh, another one of those” and simply move on. This is no good if you want to stand out and stick in their minds. You can find a unique angle to your approach. Something novel and appropriate that hasn’t been overdone. To apply this to your logo design, choose to hire an artist to create your logo instead of using a generator. If you use a lot of product photography, get creative with backdrops and props. You can also try new things in your web design, the voice or writing style of your business, and your products.

It’s good to remember that your brand is much more than design. It’s the physical expression of your business’s values, mission, purpose, quality, and vision. There are many ways to capture these things within your brand and make your business stand out competitively. Using these 4 tips will help get you started to be a strong competitor in your market.