How Brand Managers Help Grow Your Small Business

Published in

Couple of Creatives

6 min readFeb 25, 2017

Originally published at coupleofcreatives.com on February 25, 2017.

Branding is a living, breathing entity of your business development strategy. It is self-creating, controlled, clear, consistent, ongoing and ever-evolving.

We talk a lot about branding here at Couple of Creatives. It’s second nature to us, a profound understanding we take for granted as marketing professionals. There are a lot of aspects of branding. There is the conceptualization involved when first creating a brand, there is a strategic process involved in the development of the brand and then there is diligence necessary in managing that established branding. It seems that creating the brand from scratch is the easy part. The true challenge is in maintaining that image. That is where the importance of strong brand management comes in the play.

Brand Managers

Brand managers are dedicated to maintaining a certain image for your new business. Here at Couple of Creatives, we collaborate with small businesses and startups as opposed to big, well-established corporations. We have become well-aware of the poor reputation that surrounds the startup community, like not having enough resources to support strong marketing. We take pride in rising to the occasion and accepting new creative challenges like this. Entrepreneurship is at the core of our own branding and we have a true passion for empowering fellow grassroots entrepreneurs. What we want to stress to our clients is the importance of ongoing brand management, as opposed to falling into the trap of setting and forgetting. Branding is a living, breathing entity of your business development strategy. It is self-creating, controlled, clear, consistent, ongoing and ever-evolving. You mustn’t create a logo and call it good. A strong brand must be maintained day in and day out throughout a variety of ways.

Business Name

First of all, who are you and what do you do? That needs to be clear as can be. One simple way to get that messaging across loud and clear is to have a strong business name. The name itself should convey who your business is and what it offers. You shouldn’t have to conjure up a complicated explanation just to express the mission of your business. The goal of branding is to be self-explanatory in your marketing communications.

Graphic Design

Another area into which branding extends is graphic design. Having a strong logo is very important in brand management. To make a metaphor, your logo design is a facial feature of your brand. Just how people recognize others in a quick glance by their facial features, people recognize businesses the same way by design features in their branding. Brand management means ensuring congruence among a variety of marketing materials (logo, color palette, design elements, brochures, business cards, advertisements, posters, company publications, forms, stationery, etc).

Brand Guidelines

Aimlessness is the antagonist to strong branding. To properly manage a brand, one must have strict brand guidelines to follow. New businesses often skip over this important step and end up getting ahead of themselves. Moving forward with brand management without first having brand guidelines established is a bad move. Unfortunately, it happens all to often. Startups, be sure to hire a designer to establish branding guidelines, first and foremost.

Brand Personality

Included in the brand guidelines is the business’s personality and overall tone. For what would you like your business to become known? Considering this simple question and keeping it front and center of mind will be helpful for your brand manager in implementing strategic communication into your messaging. Understanding what type of personality should be expressed will help create controlled and clear messaging that properly expresses your business.

Online Presence

When it comes to digital marketing, it’s a big, wide world out here. Digital brand management is a juggling act. There is the company website, its general user experience design, the company’s various social media platforms, blog and everything that entails. Ensuring consistency and effectiveness takes a keen eye for design and a strong understanding of the end users. Market research goes hand in hand with UX design and ensuring an optimized online presence for your business.

Maintaining Multiple Platforms

Many startups want to join the party in the social media world. Social media management is a full-time job itself when it comes to brand management. There are countless platforms out there. Among the most popular are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram. Creating accounts on these networks is important to managing a new brand. It is important to create captivating, custom graphics that showoff your brand personality.

Being Consistent and Timely With Content

Posting relevant and diverse information on a regular basis is time-consuming (as in full-time job) and is a task that should not be cut out of your marketing equation. It’s more than sharing a random thought here and there. Your social media should be pouring out informative, helpful content all day every day in the form of insightful blog posts, personalized photos and compelling video content.

Copywriting

Copywriting is an art of itself. Granted, all business owners come with basis literary skills to read and write. However, crafting persuasive wording in a memorable way is something professional marketers can help businesses to express what they want to in an effective way. Copy is needed for website content, blog writing, your social media voice and everything else stated in marketing communications. Make sure it’s eloquent by leaving it to your professional brand manager.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ensuring your company’s website is optimized for search engines is a technical job, but nevertheless, a very important part of a successful brand management strategy. Having your SEO professional team up with your brand manager will help ensure certain keywords, terms and search phrases are being incorporated throughout your company’s website content, so when consumers are searching the web looking for what they need, they will find you.