What is your website missing? It’s called small business branding. Branding a small business is a necessity for solo professionals.

It sets you apart from your competition. It showcases your smarts and proves why you outshine your competitors every time.

Branding Is The Way You …

• Let people know what they can expect when they hire you.
• Make your case for why you’re the best choice out of all the others.
• Establish credibility.
• Build awareness.
• Become recognized and remembered.
• Become known, liked, and trusted.

The Five Essentials of Small Business Branding

1. Know Your Why

People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.
Create a purpose statement to help you make decisions about everything
relating to your brand – who you’ll work with, what you’ll offer, what you’ll
say and do and what you won’t.

How To Create Your Own Unique Selling Proposition

2. Know Your Ideal Customer

Which segment of the market are you targeting? Who most needs the thing
you sell? When you categorize potential target groups, which group’s problems do you understand the best?

3. Be Unique

This is often the biggest goof small business owners make when it comes to marketing their businesses and websites. Don’t mimic your competitors’ websites! Be different! Elevate your design, choose distinctive colors and fonts.

How To Build Your Brand Through Web Design

Why would a customer choose me instead?” What are the characteristics or benefits of my service that would be hard for others to copy?

Become known for something. Make it crystal clear to your potential customers what that thing is. Then competition fades away because there’s no substitute for you.

4. Set Expectations

In a clear and concise way, you want to be able to describe the benefits of working with you and the transformation they can expect when they do.

This is your brand promise. It helps people to understand what they can expect when they do business with you.

5. Give Your Brand Personality

People buy from brands and they hire humans. So as you market your business, you want to express consistent personality characteristics and make your company values known through content and graphics.

Think about the words you’ll use to communicate what it’s like to work with you. Will you be a sturdy, reliable consultant? Or a quirky and fun coach? You’ll want to think about how you’ll speak and write that will help people get to know you.

Create a website that distinguishes your business from all the others. Contact Marcia below!

The Small Business Solution

It can be challenging to decide whether to hire a web design agency or a WordPress freelance web designer.  For most small businesses, a website project is a large undertaking, requiring a significant investment of both money and time.

What is web development? It is a complicated process consisting of several stages. Each is important: web design, web development, content creation, search engine optimization, and digital marketing.

There are several advantages to hiring a freelancer to complete your project.  Today is a good example of what I mean! “I’m not sure you will really want to talk to me,” said Karen, my newest client, apologetically … at 8:30 am.

“Now my second partner has quit on me, so we will have to start out once again with designing the website, plus get another new domain. I hope you can help me!”

This was now web design #3 in two weeks. But who’s counting?

Flexibility

Along with setting their own rates, freelancers can set their own schedules. This can positively impact the timeline of the project.

When working with individuals, they may be able to devote all their time to your project to get the work done faster, whereas an agency will be managing multiple projects with different timelines.

Depending on the agency or freelancer, you may experience a more hands-on approach with a freelancer. Since he or she is your sole contact on the project, there can be a more personal approach.

The Generalist

Freelancers speak your language. There are aspects of being a generalist that give us advantages over specialists. The Power Of A Generalist

Generalists are always learning new things. This means there’s a greater chance we have dabbled in your specialty and can understand what you do and what is required for your job. At the same time, we know we’re not the experts — you are.

The BIG Picture

We look at the big picture of how different people and pieces fit together and where we fit. This makes us great people to work with!

So think of it this way in the animal kingdom.

Each creature resides on a species scale of generalists to specialists. The koala bear, a specialist, can only survive on an extremely limited set of conditions: diet (eucalyptus), climate (warm), environment (trees).

Mice, the generalists, on the other hand, can survive just about anywhere. They can withstand heat and cold, eat your organic breakfast cereal or seeds and berries foraged in the wild.

We freelancers are mice and for the first time proud of it!

Contact Marcia Coffey at 561-906-3436 or fill out our Getting Started form.