Branding your business
I'll be the first to tell you that we made a
slew of mistakes during our first year in business. One of our
worst was struggling with branding.
We started selling our automatic chicken waterer
from a page on our blog just because our blog was our main internet
presence at the time. Within six months, I realized my
mistake. People looking for "chicken waterer" or "Avian Aqua
Miser" were much less likely to click on a search engine result that
talked about homesteading than one focused solely on chickens. We
finally got our business its own domain name, but then we had to redo
all of our search engine optimization to get folks to start showing up
on the totally new site, which meant our sales plummeted for a month or
two.
We also sent out waterers for the first few
months without a label or logo anywhere on them. We figured
everyone knew we were a small mom and pop business and would appreciate
us not adding fancy packaging that raised their price. I quickly
learned that Americans like fancy packaging at any price --- a couple
of our customers complained about the homemade nature of our
waterers. So we came up with some fancy labels to stick on the
waterers and used the same logo on our instruction sheet. Adding
the URL to the labels also helped us gain more repeat customers who
might otherwise forget where they'd gone to buy their waterer.
If I had to do it all
over again, I'd give my product its own website from the get-go.
I'd also make up a logo and plaster that everywhere, building brand
name recognition and preventing complaints of our product looking too
homemade. It turns out that branding should be one of the first
steps in selling a product, not one of the last!
Check out more lessons learned in our microbusiness ebook.
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