Last time, we talked about what is a brand and how it relates your customers to your business. In this post, we will discuss some general guidelines on building your brand.

1) Own One Word
What do you think when you hear Volvo? Safety. How about Toyota? Reliable. How about Mercedes-Benz? Prestige. Even though all three companies build safe cars, use reliable engines, and have more prestigious expensive models, one word stands out for each of them. For your brand, you will want to own one word that sticks in the mind of your customers. If you try to get too many words to stick, then chances are none of them will stick and the identity of your brand will get diluted. Focus is the key.

2) Be Authentic
How many of you came across an internet company claiming their internet service is fast, but the actual speed is slow as snail? How about a car dealership claiming they have the lowest price, but you find another one that gives an even lower price? Whatever the branding image or ideas you are going for, you have to make sure it’s authentic, reflecting what you can deliver. Volvo never claims they make the fastest cars in the world, and Toyota will never try to sell you on the prestigious side of their cars.

3) Own One Color
What color do you think of when you hear about Coca-cola? Red. How about Pepsi? Blue. How about Mountain Dew? Green. Owning one color allows your customers to associate the color with your brand, and differentiate you from your competitors. Pick one that closely relates to what your brand offers, and that it separates you from your competitors.

4) Be Consistent
A brand is never built overnight. If you want your customers to remember your brand, you will need to consistently apply the same theme over and over again for a long time. You need to apply it on everything your customers see, which includes your website, your brochure, your product packaging, your retail store design, and so on. Repeated exposure to the same theme is the key to getting your brand to stick in the minds of your customers.

If you want to learn more on what makes a good branding strategy, read this book.

A lot of small business owners might not give much thought to branding. It seems like an abstract concept that’s only applicable to widely distributed products backed by big marketing budgets from large corporations. But if you want to grow your business over the long term, then you should start seeding your brand into your customers’ minds even when you are still small.

Where should you start? Before we explore ways to build your brand, let’s start by looking at the question, “what is a brand, anyway?”

From Wikipedia, “A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service.” This might be a really good textbook answer, but chances are you won’t remember it in a week.

In essence, a brand is the images and ideas that people remember you by. The images are visual, like your logo, color scheme, mascot, etc. For example, you might remember Nike’s “swoosh” logo. For Fedex, you might remember the purple/orange/white color scheme. The ideas can be as simple as a single word. What do you think when you hear Wal-mart? Cheap! How about a Volvo car? Safety!

If you are able to get those images and ideas into your customers’ heads, everytime they see the images or think about those ideas, they will automatically think about your company and your products. Next time, we’ll look at some general guidelines on building your brand.

Most small businesses these days have a website up to share information and attract new customers.  If you don’t, you might want to consider getting one designed.

If you already have one, have you ever wondered what kind of people are visiting it?  Where are they from?  What do they click?  How did they get there?  How many come back?  Answering these questions helps you understand how people interact with your website, so you can improve on weak points and promote your selling points better.  Luckily, there are free tools online that can help you track how people use your website.

Google Analytics gives you detailed information on how your users browse your site.  It can tell you what time of the day you get the most traffic, which countries the users from, which page is the most viewed, etc.  The nice thing about it is that the graphs are all interactive, allowing you to drill down to find the exact information you want.

Quantcast shows you the demographics of your users.  Information like the age group, average household income, the gender percentage, etc.  How could you target your marketing message better if you found out that most of your visitors were women over 50?

Using these tools is very easy if you already have a website.  Simply sign-up for a free account, and follow their instructions to attach a small piece of HTML code on your website.  You might be surprised by how your website is being used.  We know we were when we saw Malaysia in the top 10 countries visiting us.  Time to go international, anyone?

Using barcodes to enter products can be quicker and more accurate than manually typing in item codes. If your products already have barcodes on them, then all you really need is a barcode scanner and some software. If not, you can first make your own barcodes.

If your products are going to be sold in other retail stores, you’ll need to use standardized formats and pay to make sure your barcodes are unique. We won’t cover that in this article, but you can find more information here.

Otherwise, if the barcodes are just for your business’ own use, it’s pretty easy to print them yourself. Barcodes are just a special way of writing letters and numbers so that a scanner can read them. You can make up your own letter/number codes (e.g. ABC1234) for each of your products. Then, use some software like IDAutomation’s free version of their barcode label printing software to print them as barcodes onto some sticky address labels, like those Avery sells in office supply stores. You can then peel them off and stick them onto your products, and you’re all set.

If you want to print barcodes directly onto your packaging or other materials, you can instead get a barcode font and use that to type barcodes into your designs in Microsoft Word, Publisher, Adobe PageMaker, etc. IDAutomation also offers a free Code 39 barcode font. There are different types of barcode fonts and symbols - Code 39 is the simplest type, but perfect for your company’s own use. Other common types you might come across are UPC-A in North America and EAN-13 in Europe.

Don’t let all the barcoding jargon scare you away - it’s quite easy to get started and you can really speed things up for your business.

Having a professional e-mail address and telephone number will help you make a good first impression when you hear from customers, but having a nice logo and website will make them more likely to contact you in the first place.  As a businessperson, you don’t need to be a great designer if you can find someone who is.

Traditionally, hiring a designer involves first finding someone you can trust on quality, style, and budget.  This is not easy.  A new alternative is to host a design contest for your logo or website, let designers around the world submit entries, and award the prize to your favorite.  This way, there’s no risk of getting tricked into hiring a lousy designer.

Two websites that make it easy to host these contests are:
- 99 designs
- Crowdspring

Ballpark costs are about $250 for a logo and $500 for a basic website design, including the contest prize money and administrative fees.  The average turnaround time is about a week, with somewhere around 25 entries.  Of course, you’ll get more entries with a larger prize or if your contest guidelines spark the designers’ creativity.

If you want to touch up your company’s look, holding a design contest may be a good way to do it.

If you keep products in stock, you’ll need to know how many you have. How can you keep track of this? The first thought that comes to mind often involves pencil and paper or Microsoft Excel. However, if you invest a little more time into setting up an inventory software system, your business can continually benefit from the following 4 things:

1. Automatically update inventory as you buy and sell - There’s no need to make an invoice and then come back and update your inventory later on; do both in one step.

2. Use history to find errors - Do you have less in stock than you expected? Get a detailed history of inventory movements to help find out if it was an honest mistake or if something was lost or stolen.

3. Automatically re-order - When you run low in stock, get suggestions on what to re-order, and automatically make purchase orders for your vendors.

4. Share with others more easily - Do you work with other people who also need to check and update inventory? Set up two or more computers and let everyone always have up-to-date information.

We designed inFlow Inventory to give you these four benefits, and much more. You can download the Free Edition and start entering your inventory or import it from Excel right now.

Do you know someone in a small business that might want to improve their inventory handling?

Next time you need to invoice a customer, the quickest thing to do might be to open up Microsoft Word, find an invoice template, and fill it out. But by investing a bit more time into setting up some business software for invoicing once, you get the following 5 benefits as free side effects forever:

1. Save copies automatically - Instead of printing and filing extra copies of your invoices every time, have them automatically saved for you.

2. Quickly search old invoices - Is a customer calling and asking about an invoice? Instead of fumbling through papers to find it - search electronically by customer, date, or invoice number and find it right away.

3. Track payments - Track payment status right with the invoice instead of keeping separate books.

4. Get reports on sales history - How much money did you make last month? How did your sales in April compare to March? Get these answers right away, without tedious calculations.

5. Automatically track inventory - If you sell products, why enter your invoices in Word and then update your inventory somewhere else? Have it all done for you in one package.

What can you use to get all these benefits? Two common choices are the Quickbooks Accounting Software and Microsoft Office Accounting. Or we designed inFlow Inventory to be a better choice for both non-accountants and people who stock and sell products. You can download the Free Edition right now, which allows you to send out unlimited invoices for free!

Do you know an entrepreneur who might want to improve their invoicing habits?