Green Focus: 4 Tips to Make Your Business Eco-Friendly

Corporate social responsibility is a big deal, and not just for the large multinationals. For SMEs and startups, an eco-friendly focus brings financial benefits, and garners a positive reputation in the marketplace. Consumers are increasingly conscious of a supplier’s green credentials, and will be more likely to choose a company that has policies of protecting natural resources. Going green also creates ensures long term jobs for employees, while preventing unnecessary environmental damage.

Go Green

Image Credit: AIO-CIO/Flickr

Here are some ways to give your business a green focus in a way that will leave your customers with no doubt that you are serious about championing sustainability.…

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Sole Proprietors: How to Appear Bigger to Your Future Clients and Partners?

“The bigger the better” is a phrase we’re all familiar with. It’s true too, no matter how much many of us wish it weren’t so. The first thing you’re supposed to do when you see a bear in the woods is to lift your arms high, puff up your chest as big as you can, and yell as loud as your voice box will allow. Many in the animal kingdom have also learned this trick, such as the peacock who use their massive tail feathers to make themselves appear bigger to predators, and each other.

Appear bigger to clients

As humans, we’re told to “fake it til’ you make it” because it’s a well-known fact that if you can effectively pull off looking the part of a big shot, you might just get lucky enough to actually make it to the big time.…

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Branding Your Business: Everything You Need for Small Business

Branding your business correctly is key to its success. Creating a brand that resonates with your customers gives your business a unique personality, and establishes a unique position in the marketplace. Not only does this attract the right customers, but it also helps to raise revenue as more customers turn to you for their purchases.

Small business branding on small budget

So how can a small business develop a strong brand on a tiny budget? Here are five simple things to get you started:

1. Make a Great Logo

Your company logo is an important part of your branding. Not only is it a visual representation of your business, but it also builds brand identity and customer loyalty.…

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Building a Strong Brand Identity: The Key to Small Business Branding Success

If you want your business to succeed, one of the things you need to take seriously is branding. Your company’s unique identity is what sets it apart from everyone else, a representation of your story and goals to your customers. Take Dunkin Donuts’ latest rebranding, for instance — dropping the word “Donuts” from their name. This is their effort to show their vision of becoming the “store of the future.” As a customer, you will not go to Dunkin just for their donuts anymore, but for their coffee, sandwiches, and shakes as well.

As a small business, your job to create the kind of identity that differentiates you from everyone else may be challenging.…

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8 Branding Mistakes You Don’t Know Your Small Business is Making

The startup industry is thriving today as the budding entrepreneurs have access to all kinds of nifty software and resources to convert their ideas into robust businesses. However, this also means that there is a lot of competition too, which is why branding has become more important than ever.

Although more and more people are realizing the benefits of branding and taking it seriously, many are making huge mistakes due to the lack of knowledge and experience. A lot of them don’t even know what these mistakes are.

Let’s take a look at the top 8 branding mistakes your small business might be making:

1.

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How to Use Charity to Develop Your Brand

Americans are the most charitable people in the world. Private philanthropy in the US has the size of around 1.4% of the country’s GDP, which is almost twice as much as the next most charitable country in the world, Canada. 67% of American households donate an average of 4% of their incomes to charity.

With 71% of total charitable donations, individuals are the biggest charity donors in the country. That is surprising for many reasons, including the fact that charitable giving can come with significant benefits to businesses. If you are a business owner, a CEO, or someone in charge of the development of a brand, here’s how you can leverage charitable activities to further develop your brand.…

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Does a Virtual Office Address Help Your Branding?

A Virtual Address definitely helps you to improve your branding efforts. The toughest part of running a lean SME is that you just can’t budget for an office in a prestigious area of the city. Also, when a business does have a great office location and it comes time to expand into new areas; lease expenses, among other things can become a huge hurdle.

Financial district in London UK

The big issue with leasing costs overall, is that money is robbed from other critical areas of the business that are most hungry for cash, like marketing and recruiting. I haven’t even mentioned the need for office equipment, furniture, utilities and maintenance yet.…

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Four Ways To Help Your Designer Perfect Your Product Label (Infographic)

If you’re an entrepreneur with a product launch coming up, it makes great sense to bring in a professional to design your first product label. A professional will be able to create a design of an extremely high standard, and they may have experience of product labels already, making the process far simpler.

Wine labels

It’s important to bear in mind that designers can’t create product labels unless they have access to certain information about the brand, the product, its target audience and other features it has. You can’t just throw a brand name and a vague demographic at a designer and hope they’ll come up with a label design that will win over potential customers!…

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The Different Parts of Branding – Explained

We live in an age where customers are not always going to be happy just going to the cheapest option, especially in certain areas. Instead, branding is becoming more and more important.

Apple Macbook Air brand

It doesn’t matter if you are a small business, large business, online company, B2B, or anything else. If your brand isn’t on point, customers will be more leery of turning to you in the long-term. Sometimes, this is money you can’t afford to leave on the table.

Of course, this doesn’t answer the question—what is branding exactly? Learn not just what branding is, but all the different ways it seeps into your business’s operations, and how to make sure you’re doing it right.…

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7 Traits Every Successful Brand Logo Has In Common (Infographic)

Is your brand logo working the way it should? No, it’s not a trick question. This is a serious topic that every business needs to consider. If you haven’t started your business yet, this question should still be on your radar—after all, it’s better to know your logo will work than to just create one and hope it works.

Logo recipe

According to Company Folders, every successful brand icon works for its parent company because it has 7 necessary components for a good logo. But what are these components, and how you can you implement them in your next design?…

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