Does Your Contracting Business Have a Brand? Here’s How to Build One

When you start a business, it is really tempting to slap your own name on it and call it good. In this online world where you are constantly trying to get ahead of your competition, it may not be enough. You need a brand, something that prospective clients can understand and remember. Here are five things you can do to get started building one.

Choose Your Company Emphasis
Every contracting business wants to have a few things that people will associate whenever they think about the company. There’s a lot of options for the business aspects that you can emphasize as a contractor, such as:

• Personal Service
• Value
• Expertise
• Emergency Assistance
• Relatability

The ones you choose depend on your target market and what they are looking for when they hire your services. For example, if you’re working primarily with businesses, you may want to emphasize efficiency or accuracy. If most of your clients are property owners or homeowners, you may prefer to focus on ways that your business relates to individuals. Keep in mind that emphasizing one doesn’t mean you don’t care about the others.

Determine Your Target Market
In order to figure out how best to build your brand, you need to know more about your target market. This includes:

• Who they are
• Where they shop
• How they are most likely to notice your brand
• When they will need your services
• Where they spend leisure time

If you hire a company to create logos and branded items for your business, they will probably have lots of research into these aspects of your prospective clients. But if you’re not prepared to invest in that yet, there are still a few things you can do for yourself. For example, you can look for online publications providing demographic statistics. You might also see if there are friends or family members in your target market who might be willing to give you feedback on your design ideas.

Create a Mission Statement
A mission statement for a business may seem like something that is a tired relic of a previous time, but it’s not. Your mission statement lays out for future clients what they can expect from your business. Mission statements tend to be optimistic, which means that yours may demonstrate what you expect to prove over time. It’s wise to revisit it once or twice a year to see how your brand is meeting those expectations. Even if you end up changing it on occasion, it’s still a good exercise. It helps you clarify what you want to achieve with your business, as well as how you show it to customers.

Select a Color Scheme
Although your brand concerns much more than just the way that your company logo looks, you’ll still need to have a design that works well with your mission statement and catches the eye. If you’re going low-budget on this at first, start by looking at complementary colors. Check out your competition to make sure that yours will be distinctive. It’s a smart idea to get feedback on your color choices and to do some research into the associations that people make with certain types of colors. For example, if your logos use contrasting colors of yellow and black, people might associate it with either caution signs or hornets.

Design Logos
Fortunately, your logos and design don’t need to be particularly complicated. As you test out a few possible layouts, be sure to look at them on different types of devices. If you plan to put it on a vehicle, confirm that people will be able to read it as an additional form of advertising. Remember that font choice can be a key factor in your success. If people have a hard time reading or remembering your company name because of the font style, they may look for someone else.

Building a brand is one of the ways that you create your persona as a licensed contractor. Taking the test is another. For expert exam preparation, contact CSLS today!