Would you like to make your business feel smaller? While it can pay to appear big and powerful in business, there are some situations where you may benefit more from emphasizing your business’s lack of size.
From talking about your personalized service to emphasizing that you understand the challenges of small businesses, showing off your business’s lack of size can be a great way to market your business to other small businesses.
It can earn you new clients and contracts, win you loyalty from local customers and give your business a unique feel that larger businesses often lose as a result of their scale and size.
Making your business feel small can be difficult, particularly if it’s growing rapidly and no longer feels small organically. The four tips listed below can help you make use of design and copywriting to emphasize your business’s smallness.
Keep your design simple and friendly
As businesses grow larger, their corporate identity tends to transform itself from simple and friendly to sleek and professional, often at a cost of the small business style that made them successful in the first place.
We’ve all heard of fashion brands growing too large to truly be desirable for their original audience before. This can happen in other industries too, where being too big can hurt you rather than help you.
Keep your branding simple, friendly and approachable as your business grows to preserve its small, easygoing image. By deliberately avoiding the design trends of large businesses, you can keep a small business feel even as your company grows.
Focus on your small business selling points
Small businesses have very different selling points than large businesses. Instead of marketing based on their size, they emphasize their smallness by focusing on great customer service, friendly staff members and an incredible level of understanding.
As businesses grow larger, processes that work at a small scale become optimized to work at a large scale, often losing value in the process. A great way to position your business as small is to focus on selling points that are exclusive to small businesses.
Instead of using an automated phone system, hire someone to answer the phone in your office. Send hand-signed letters to customers and clients. Emphasize all of the points that seem exclusive to small businesses and you’ll rapidly win customers.
Avoid making your branding too consistent
Large businesses are fond of hammering down nails that stick out too far, making all of their marketing materials consistent in the process. Creative freedom is replaced by a list of design principles and a very consistent, predictable looking brand.
One great way to make your business feel smaller than it really is is to throw this on its head. Instead of being consistent, deliberately make your branding weird, unique and fun to emphasize that you’re still a small business at heart.
From handwritten advertisements to signage that's clearly put together without any attention to sleek and sophisticated “big business” design, having a sense of fun and lack of consistency to your branding can have serious benefits for your business.
Be unique, personal and fun to interact with
Customers rarely love small businesses specifically because they’re small. Instead, they love big businesses because they have a sense of fun that’s extremely difficult to find in bigger, more successful companies.
If your business can grow while retaining this sense of fun, it can benefit from the levels of efficiency and productivity that only a big business can achieve, all while enjoying customer loyalty on a small business level.
By all means, optimize your business for efficiency and productivity. However, it’s also important to ensure you never lose the sense of fun and personal service that often sets small businesses apart from their larger competitors.
