Don't Over-Brand Yourself

As an entrepreneur and emerging business man or woman, you often hear how important it is to “brand yourself”: find your niche, your catchphrase, the product or service you are for which you are known. While this self-branding concept is important to bring attention to you and your business, you need to be careful not to over-do it. You want people to know you as you, not your tagline. So what are some guidelines to creating a name that sticks, but doesn’t stick too well?

The great thing about finding a tagline that’s original is that you can build other phrases around it to represent other features of your business so it becomes you own personal set of products, services, and advertising that people remember. When choose that first one, make sure it is something that can either blanket many parts of your business with some variations or something that you can change readily without too much confusion for your customers.

Once you build a bigger audience, you can expand away from your first set of branding because now that people know very well who you are, they can follow you when you make changes. So even though you may start out with something like “Beauty for the Nature Lover”, you can still branch out with a new campaign such as “Evergreen Women’s Clothing” in the future.

When it comes to that first catch phrase, use it the right doses. For example, if it’s on the walls of your store and on your product labels, you may want to keep it off receipts and mix up the wording on other print materials. Small print items such as coupons and receipts are good places to test out new slogans and campaigns because the customer will always receive them when they purchase and it many prompt them to ask you for more info.

That being said, it is important to find your focus. If you focus on growing one successful area of your business, it can exceed your expectations and grow to epic proportions. If you put a little effort into several things across the board, it will be much more difficult to grow anything very much. Bottom line: find a niche and concentrate on growing it, and when you think it’s reached its full potential find another niche that branches off from that one to keep you, the business owner, fresh in the minds of customers. Make it happen!

© 2012 eMarketing 4 Business LLC