A while back I had a friend who was interested in “branding” his new found business idea. Keyword is IDEA. He wanted to sell products to a certain clientele. But he hadn’t lined up his vendors, website and products. But he already wanted to come up with all sorts of marketing collateral such as shirts, stickers and even signs to help gain some exposure for his brand. But when I heard this, one thing came to mind…don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
Though I completely understand what he’s trying to do, but I tried to explain to him that there’s stuff he can do that won’t actually cost money. I told him about Blogging and Social Media, but he just couldn’t see the vision for it because he was too focused on wanting to get stuff to pass out to people.
You see, if you start blogging you’re basically building a buzz about your product, services and company. Besides it’s free and it has the best return for your work. If you have good content on your site, search engines will find you and that means when someone is Googling a product or service you offer, your chances of getting found online goes up.
Don’t get me wrong, I think branding is great, but it’s better when you have already established yourself as a company. Besides, all that branding stuff isn’t cheap, shirts can cost as much as $8 a piece with a minimum order of 100. So all that adds up. My suggestion is after you start making sales and have replenished your overhead, any surplus you have can go towards branding.
