Digital marketing makes branding your business much easier.

Branding is crucial for business success. A brand is the collection of identifiers (name, logo, packaging, etc.) that help people recognise a company, product, or individual. If your customers do not recognise your brand, then they are more likely to purchase from an alternative they can identify. Additionally, branding helps improve the success of all of your product or service offerings. Customers having a good experience with one product increases the likelihood of them purchasing a separate product of yours in the future.

Digital marketing utilises online technologies and channels to promote products or services. But, how does digital marketing help branding? Digital marketing allows companies to increase visibility, create associations between their products and symbols, and target customers at each stage of the brand recognition process (brand rejection, non-recognition, recognition, preference, and loyalty). These abilities provide companies more flexibility in advertising to customers and help them make their brand identifiers more widely recognised.

Importance of Branding

Branding has many important roles in a business. It drives customer brand awareness and recognition, builds customer trust, improves advertising results, and generates customer loyalty. Brand awareness and recognition helps customers recognise your product, service, and logo, which increases the likelihood of them choosing your offerings over a competitor’s. Likewise, customer trust in your brand makes consumers more likely to purchase from you in the future.

Customer loyalty is arguably the most important metric because it greatly increases the chance that past customers will purchase future products. Customer loyalty is often measured with the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric, which gauges how likely a customer is to recommend a product. Research America is a great resource for explaining more about the NPS and how beneficial it is for nearly every industry and organisation. Understanding how many customers have already achieved brand loyalty helps businesses revise their marketing plan to either target new customers, focus on converting existing customers, or focus on keeping current loyal customers happy.

Choosing Your Digital Marketing Strategies

There are many ways to market your brand online; prioritising the strategies that will provide the most value for your business is crucial for success.

Some of the most popular digital marketing strategies include:

• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Blogging
• Video marketing (typically on YouTube)

Choosing the right mix of strategies for your business will depend on a number of factors, including your marketing budget, company goals, industry, target audience, and more. For small and mid-sized businesses, starting with social media and email marketing is likely the best strategy. These options are both low-cost and highly effective at building an online brand. Social media allows you to engage with a large audience and help more people achieve brand recognition, while email marketing is useful for connecting with past customers to encourage them to buy again or to build customer brand preference or loyalty.

Larger businesses can choose to specialise in a few strategies or diversify their efforts across multiple channels and techniques to see which performs best for their industry and target audience. Preliminary research can be used instead to eliminate this guesswork and find which channels generate the best results before investing a large amount of time and money in nonoptimal strategies.

Optimising Your Website

Your website is one of the most important places to create your online brand. On your company website, you have nearly unlimited freedom to showcase your brand colors, logo, name, products, services, packaging, and all other elements of your brand. Your website is likely the first place many customers discover your brand or research your products, so your web pages should be helpful, engaging, and branded. Adding a blog to your website is a great way to provide more value to consumers.

Your website should represent your brand identity and highlight how your products or services meet the needs of your target audience. Including demonstration videos, positive customer reviews, and suggested next steps (a call to action) can help market your brand to consumers. Providing your contact information or offering forms to request more information can help turn your website into a lead generation powerhouse.

Overview

Overall, digital marketing can be a powerful tool to build your brand and increase advertising success. Maintaining consistency in messaging and branding across digital channels is essential for creating a holistic and unified brand image. However, switching tones can be acceptable, especially when creating content for your website versus social media. Generally, social media has a more casual tone, but it is important to keep the core messaging aligned with your website or emails.

By choosing the right digital marketing strategies for your business, you can effectively build your brand, increase customer brand recognition, and improve your sales over time.

Content writing affects your social media, website, and print marketing efforts that effectively increases your social media traction. It allows you to consistently engage with your customers through high-quality contents that bring in even more customers. Content writing allows you to showcase your brand through expertly crafted articles that can significantly add to your business’ growth and success.

As more and more businesses start to focus their efforts on new and modern types of marketing such as content marketing, it is only right to expect the high intensity of competition between brands. Of course, because of this growing competition you will also want your written contents to stand out.

It is highly suggested that to be able to ensure that you’re making the most out of your content writing, you have to properly outsource content writing. By doing this, you will not only get your money’s worth but at the same time be able to build content that not only resonates with your target audience but elevates your brand through the words of a professional content writing service. 

Once you have expertly chosen the perfect content writer for you, you will need to work on maintaining the continual stream of old and new customers by providing them with consistent written materials that will interest, entertain, and inform them of what your brand has to offer. 

Different Types of Written Content

• Blogging – Blog posts are definitely the most common type of content writing that you will find everywhere. This type of written content helps boost your website’s SEO rankings, since search engines reward websites that are constantly putting out new content. Blogging is very easy to throw into your marketing routine since it can cover a wide range of topics and have a variety of writing styles, depending on the topic and the goals of your business.

• Copywriting – This a basic type of content writing that includes things like writing your website copy, product descriptions, sales collateral, advertisements, and focusing on traditional print media and infographics. Copywriting is a type of written content that should be carefully crafted to be able to effectively promote your brand and catch the interest of potential customers.

• Technical Writing/Long Form – This type of content writing is probably the most intimidating but for someone who fully comprehends your own business and your own products, this can sometimes be the easiest type of content to produce. Technical writing ranges from creating white papers to ebooks to guides that explain how your product or service works, how your customer can apply it, and educate your audience on the specifics. 

• Social Media Posts – This type of written content is arguably the one with the farthest reach. Almost everyone is already on social media which is why the method of digital marketing began in the first place. The huge audience in these platforms allow businesses to stay relevant and in touch through platform specific posts. 

A Dedicated Content Team Without The Price Tag

If it is your vision to boost your business and customers in a cost-effective way, content writing should be delegated to dynamic professionals who are trained and experienced in the field that are more than capable of writing more than one type of written content. This strategy offers high-quality output that will not only save you resources but most importantly, will save you time and energy. 

We at UnicornGO will arrange a highly skilled and dedicated team that will provide you with unrestricted and unlimited content writing so that you may be able to concentrate on building your business, focusing on the big picture. With UnicornGO, you’ll finally be able to do all those sales and marketing campaigns you have been putting off due to writing holdup. Let us help you create without limits, contact our support team today. 

Small businesses start with limited investments. Any help and hiring to the business will cost the owner. It is tough to decide which cost to incur and which one to curtail. The financial matters of a business are not such in which attention should be paid to save cost.

Small business owners looking to save money consider hiring accountants as an unnecessary expense. Some businessmen think that it would be expensive to hire an accountant. However, an accountant takes care of some time-consuming business activities like taxes. Comparison will likely cost less per hour pay an entrepreneur saves by utilizing his precious time and energy.

Appointing an accountant to manage business accounts allows the entrepreneur to keep his mind cool because an expert handles his business details.

Some Questions That May Clear the Confusion

Here are some of the questions an entrepreneur should ask himself when deciding on the need of hiring an accountant for a small business:

Can I Handle My Business Accounting on My Own?

How much knowledge does an entrepreneur have about accounting? Does he know about the types of bookkeeping systems? What is an Income Statement? These are questions that need genuine answers, and nobody except the businessman himself can answer these questions.

If the response to the inquiry is no, it is time to introduce an accountant to manage business finances.

Am I Tech Savvy?

Perhaps, use of computer software and apps is common in everyday life. Using some apps daily does not make the user an expert in that particular field. Accounting for small businesses is not child’s play. Today’s accounting system depends on technology. New software keeps on coming, which helps in accounting but creates confusion for some not-so-professional.

The small business owner needs software that tracks the invoices and expenses as well. Still, these apps and software cannot operate on their own and need your precious time.

How can an Accountant Help Me?

Understanding what change an accountant can bring to the business is the foresightedness of the businessman. It may help in taking a better decision whether or not to appoint the accountant. An accountant can help in financial analysis, data management, generation of financial reports, etc.

Do I Have Enough Time to Handle My Accounting Myself?

Accounting of a firm requires complete concentration. It demands your heart and soul in one direction. The nature of the business may demand the owner to be on-road constantly or have regular meetings with clients.

The owner is continuously on the phone or replying to the mails; it could be anything. Whatever the reasons are, a simple question is, does the entrepreneur have enough time to handle the accounts book himself.

It will be a great relief to hand over the responsibility to a professional who takes some amount and will do your work systematically to meet the statutory compliance of accounting practices.

Am I Acquainting with the Process of Filing Tax Returns for Small Businesses?

The new small business owners are not acquainted with the tax filing procedures. It is challenging to deal with accounting and taxation procedures along with concentrating on the business. It is one of the reasons why so many small entrepreneurs hire accountants for sole traders.

The owner’s precious time is not for filing tax returns but for making new business deals and satisfying the existing clients.

Can I Bear the Expenses of Hiring an Accountant?

There are no fixed or standard rates to hire an accountant. The fees depend on the individual requirement and paying capacity of the business owner. The work experience and education of professionals are important factors that decide their professional charges.

The average cost of hiring a certified public accountant (CPA) to file a tax return ranges from £35 per hour (for common services) to £150 per hour (for complex accounting work).

Will the Absence of Accountant have any Impact on the Business in the Long Term?

Analyze and evaluate the business conditions. What will be the condition of the business 5 or 10 years from now? How much do you need an accountant in the future? If the accountant is not with the owner, what will be the consequences?

Advantages of Hiring an Accountant

Hiring an accountant helps the business in many ways and has plenty of advantages. Here are a few benefits of hiring an accountant:

• The accuracy of books increases
• Least accounting mistakes
• The owner has more free time for other productive tasks
• Helps to make decisions in the right direction
• Minimize business expenses

Accountant for Long Term Business Prospects

Hiring an accountant helps small business owners to do business with a peaceful state of mind and achieve newer heights with accounts in the perfect position.

An experienced accountant can help the business owner during every stage of their company’s growth and development. Hiring an accountant can make life easier for the entrepreneur, and he can concentrate on what he does the best. The small business owner’s specialty is running the business. Leave the financials to the accountant.

The beauty industry is currently soaring, so there is no better time to think about putting your hairstyling skills to work. If you have a flair for hair and the desire to run your own business, opening your own salon offers a unique challenge. Before you rush into signing the lease on your premises, consider the following important steps.

Write a business plan

Writing a business plan might seem like an unnecessary step, but it can help to bring focus to your business. Creating a business plan will not only help you if you need to find investors, but it can also help to keep you on track. 

If you ever lose sight of what you are trying to achieve, you can refer back to your business plan and all will become clear again. Your business plan should include things like your unique offering, an overview of local competitors, a cash flow forecast and how you plan to grow and expand. 

Even if you don’t have lofty ambitions to open multiple sites, you should think about how you can expand your business once you have reached full booking capacity. This could include things like hiring more staff or expanding your merchandise line. You could also go down the training route and offer courses in hairdressing.

Research local laws and regulations

Check with your local council to find out what rules you will need to follow for things like health and safety and taking care of your employees. The rules may differ by area, so don’t rely on advice from online blogs. You may be looking at rules and regulations from another country which aren’t relevant to you.

Choose your niche

The number one way you can guarantee success in your salon is to define your niche. Your niche is the thing that you do better than anyone else. If you are too general in your services, then you will struggle to build brand loyalty. By picking your niche, you can quickly become the go-to person for that particular service. For example, you might be skilled with hair extensions, bright and bold colours, or offer a family-friendly service. When you choose your niche, you’ll make your services more profitable.

Talk to suppliers

This is about more than just the hair products you will stock. You also need to think about software providers such as Salon Iris salon software. Suppliers may be able to offer you a deal in exchange for visibility online or in your salon. They might also be able to offer a free trial period, or samples to get you started. Don’t assume that you will have to pay for everything straight away. By approaching suppliers with your business plan, you might be able to get some freebies to get you up and running. 

Pick the right location

Your business will thrive or fail based on the location alone. A busy city-centre location will be expensive to maintain and you might struggle to compete with all of the other established salons in the area. While a remote and off the beaten track location will lack the foot traffic that can help to drive more customers to your salon. You may also need to think about parking or public transport links. Take the time to choose the correct location for your salon. Rushing this stage could leave you with a long lease on-premises that actually hurt your business.

Build an audience

You don’t have to wait until you have your premises to start making a name for yourself. Going mobile can be an excellent way to get your name out there and start building a portfolio. You can get set up with little more than a Facebook page and start offering your services in people’s homes. This can also be a great way to try out products from suppliers. Once you are ready to launch your salon, you will already have an engaged audience of fans.

Hire an interior designer

Leaving the interior design of your salon to chance is not a great idea. Even if you think you’re skilled in this area, it’s usually better to leave this to the professionals. An experienced interior designer will help you to make the most of your space and ensure you only take on the square footage that you need. They can also help you to define the look of your salon, making it a welcoming and inviting space that people will want to spend time in.

Train your team

In the early days of planning your business, you will need to choose your salon business model. You can either hire and train your own staff, or you can rent out chairs in your salon to established stylists. There are positives and negatives to both. If you choose to hire and train your own team, remember that it’s about more than just the technical skills. They will also need to be trained to use your salon software and to interact with your customers. It’s important to get these things right from the beginning so that your business appears more professional.

Create a marketing plan

If you choose to go mobile before you open a salon, this can create a strong foundation for your marketing plan. But where will your plans take you next? How will you drive more customers through the doors during the quiet months? And how will you manage demand during peak trading periods? A marketing plan that outlines promotions for an entire year ahead will give you some reassurance that you will be able to manage the peaks and troughs in demand.

Set your prices

As part of your competitor research, you will have to look at what other companies in the area are charging for similar services. If you want to set yourself apart as a high-end salon, you can increase your prices, but you need to make it clear to customers what they are getting for the higher price. For example, you might offer premium hair care products or highly skilled staff. Beware of falling into the trap of setting your prices too high and then always running a promotion. It’s far easier to set your prices at the market level and then increase them as your skills and experience improve.