As a small business owner, you need to regularly measure your business success – part of that is reviewing that your brand is on track to represent your business to potential clients accurately.
Your brand is a tool to represent your business based on a set of criteria that are important to you. I believe it creates a longterm customer relationship based on trust when you base it on a set of core values or giving your brand a personality to better represent the human side of the business. In order to do that effectively you need to 'know' your brand and business better – a business review is also a great way to recognise where processes can be streamlined and automated to help you focus on areas of your business that will achieve growth.
The key areas of your business to focus on:
Mission statement / Vision statement
Core Values / Brand Personality
Growth goals
Customer journey / experience
Target client avatar
Automations
Competitors
These are the elements of your business, once reviewed and defined, will form the 'soul' of your brand. By knowing where your business is and how you want it to grow will guide your decisions when it comes to branding. Join my FB Live next week to find out more - FB Group: East Anglia Small Business Branding - or watch the video at your leisure here, on my YouTube channel.
Here are a few helpful tips to guide your business review.
Mission statement / vision statement
When it comes to writing a mission statement, short and simple is best – it'll help to motivate you on difficult days and keep you on track with growing your business. Go here > for an article to help you to create your own mission statement. Here > is another example of how to create a mission statement as well as the difference between Mission and Vision statements and some examples to use as inspiration.
Core Values / Brand Personality
Core values are the fundamental beliefs of a person or business. They are used as guiding principles that can help you to understand if you're on the right track or guide you in your marketing decision making. Here > are some ideas to follow in making your own set of core values along with some examples.
Defining a Brand Personality, while similar to core values, these are more intricately defined, have a look at this document that I use to help my clients to define their brand personality, upload the document below:
Growth goals
By regularly reviewing your goals, you can see if you've veered off track and need to pivot your direction to get back on track or if you need to revisit your original goals and amend them, this will also effect your brand identity, especially if your growth goals are about perceptions of your business from the customers point-of-view. Here > is an article that can help to guide you how to create your own set of goals if you're struggling to get started.
Image taken from https://ghcc.org/5-steps-to-set-smart-objectives-examples/
Customer journey / experience
Look at your business from the customers point-of-view, do they receive a good service at every touchpoint?
Email enquiries – this is where you can extract frequently asked questions and create template documents to automate replies, this will also help you to create a page within your website that also covers frequently asked questions, FAQs
Telephone enquiries – do you have a system for answering calls, do you introduce yourself and the name of your business when you answer? 'Hello, Mystery Hare, Caroline speaking, how can I help?'
Estimates, invoices and receipts – here's another automation opportunity, I use Quickbooks to invoice and provide receipts to my customers but I send itemised estimates a different way but I have set up branded templates for all of them
Website – is it easy for customers to navigate, is it enjoyable? Does it encourage browsers to convert into buying customers with easy call-to-action instructions?
Complaints and refund requests – how would you deal with an unhappy client? If you have staff, do they know how to deal with uncomfortable situations like this in a consistent manner to be fair to every customer? Here > is some great, simple advice to create a strategy around customer service rules for your business.
Target client avatar
I can't wait to research this topic in more detail and present it in a future FB Live, mainly so I can create my own! To start with, I recommend describing yourself – I know that a lot of the clients that I can help are in very similar situations as I am, busy mother, wife, daughter-in-law who often forgets that her own dreams are valid and working hard for. My avatar, similar to me, is in need of reassurance in order to boost her confidence and believe in her own abilities. I've found this article that might point you in the right direction to make a start, click here >
Automations
I've already mentioned a few ideas above, you may wonder why this is important and how it forms a part of your brand. It's simple, anything that helps free up your time will afford you more time to work on growing your business and recognising repeated items that can be automated give you a clue as to what's working and could influence the direction of your business growth which effects your brand.
Write down a list of questions that you get regularly and create a Frequently Asked Questions page on your website as well as producing email templates so that you don't need to reply from scratch every time, it'll save you a culminated amount of time
Do you have any documents that you use repeatedly? These should be branded and you can save them as Word documents to change the information for each individual client – estimates, invoices, receipts – contract / service agreement – ts & cs – client information/data sheet Can you think of documents that you use regularly to add to your list? Another resource is to use Canva.com to create branded templates like flyers, social media posts, etc.
Competitors
You may think this is an odd one, surely you only really need to research your competitors when you start your business in order to see where you fit in within the market? You also need to review your competitors when you review your own business, the benefits of this are: – keeping up with your competitors sets the industry pricing categories – your competitors are a great source of knowledge and inspiration, seeing how they do things right and adopting those practices keep you up to date with your peers – it's also a great way to identify your unique selling point! How do you do things differently than your competitors and how is that a benefit to your clients
A point to remember, local competitors are your direct competitors, you're both fighting for the same client so you're finding out how to best serve them. Researching businesses in your industry but in really large towns (like London) show you how to future-proof, basically seeing how the 'big dogs' do it and applying good practice to your own business
A few articles to help you conduct competitor research – The Basic Principles of Competitive Intelligence – An essential guide to competitor research for local businesses – 6 top tips for carrying out a thorough competitor analysis
I hope you found this article helpful. Join me next week for another Live video on my Facebook group.
If you would like Mystery Hare to help you review your brand and advise you on simple changes you can make, along with a list of goals to start working towards please email me at caroline@mysteryhare.com
#branding #smallbusiness #website #selfemployed #graphicdesign #smallbusinessowner #competitoranalysis