Marketing for Small Businesses: Simple Steps to Boost Your Brand

Marketing is HARD! All small business owners struggle with marketing.

It’s hard to know where to start. Social media? Website SEO? A flyer? An e-newsletter?

Before we get all sweaty and angsty about social media (believe me, we get it!), let’s talk about your brand.

WHERE DO WE FIND THE TIME? 

Take a deep breath. Let’s go back to the beginning when you were thinking about a name for your business. Then came the logo.

In the before times did you think about your future clients’ and customers’ feelings? Maybe? Maybe not? Brand is all about feelings.

Marketing for Small Business: The Basics

It is common for small business owners to not have a clear brand or brand strategy. On the surface, brand is often thought of as your logo, your fonts, a clever tagline, and all the stuff you put your logo all over. This may be hard to read, but that is not BRAND. Those are brand assets that support your brand. But your brand should (and could) go much deeper. Down to the part of our body where feelings live.

Feelings can be uncomfortable, just like marketing. However, FEELINGS are the single most powerful thing you can infuse into your brand to stand out from the crowds and competition.

What do I mean by this?

One of my favorite quotes is, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou.

Does Your Brand Have Feelings?

How do we ensure our clients and customers remember how our businesses make them feel? The first step is recognizing it can’t be all the feels. We have to narrow it down to one specific emotion or feeling. You pick one and stay with it.  You create all of your marketing around that one feeling.

I’ll give you an example. Think about the brand Nike. Think about their commercials. Just do it! (See what I did there?)

Everything Nike does in its marketing is about sweating. Active humans doing incredibly athletic things. It is high energy. It is motivating. It is exciting. They often include professional athletes in their ads. JUST DO IT!

Nike is the HERO Brand. The single emotion (or feeling) that they always focus on is making you feel like you can be a hero in your own life if you use their products. That’s it. That is the ONLY MESSAGE THEY SEND.

Nike doesn’t talk about its customer service. The quality of its products is rarely mentioned, if ever. They don’t try to make you feel all warm and cozy. Instead, they hype you up and make you want to sweat. EVERY TIME!

Your brand can do this. Even without a gajillion-dollar ad budget like Nike has. And you don’t have to be a Hero brand. There are lots of other emotions out there that are just as powerful.

How to Choose Your Brand’s Emotion

Don’t worry. I am not going to tell you to download another app, take a 3-month course, or attend yet another vague webinar that forces you to buy something at the end so you feel like you didn’t just waste an hour of your life. Been there!

Building a powerful brand around a single emotion is simple if you use the Brand Archetype Strategy. Nike does. Apple does. Harley-Davidson does. Heck, even Dove Soap does. You could too!

What is an Archetype?

An archetype is a universally understood concept that is powerful and evokes an emotion. There are 12 Main Archetypes that have been defined by scholars like Carl Jung and others with big philosophical brains.

Discover the 12 Main Archetypes HERE.

There are more than 12, but the main 12 are the most used and most recognizable by every person on earth – hence the whole universally understood thing.

If I were to ask different people all over the world to use 5 adjectives to describe what a MOTHER is, I would get very similar answers from everyone – no matter where they lived.

Caring, warm, nurturing, loving, affectionate, dependable, and devoted.

You get the idea.

Your brand could be all those things too if you chose the Mother Archetype. If you decide you want your clients to feel extremely cared for and like they are your favorite.

Each Archetype focuses on one emotion or feeling. What will yours be?

You don’t have to have a huge marketing budget to do this. But you do have to dial it in and lock it in.

Here’s how.

The Brand Archetype Strategy Process

STEP ONE: Take our FREE quick Brand Archetype Questionnaire.

You can also have your team take it. If you are a solopreneur consider asking a few people who know about your business (significant other, best friend, a client or two, etc.)

You get your results immediately. You get a list of the 12 archetypes in order based on your answers. Compare your answers to your team. Are the results all over the place? Or are your results similar to your colleagues or friends? Probably all over the place if you have never thought about your brand like this.

That is ok. We will dial it in.

Sometimes a person will look at their results and the top Archetype automatically resonates with them and they decide on that one. Most often, they like a few, discard a few, and still can’t make up their mind. Or the team has differing opinions. This is normal.

Cost for the Questionnaire: FREE

STEP TWO: Schedule a Brand Discovery Session with Zeedia Media

In 90 minutes or less in a strategic brain-storming process, we will guide your team to determine which archetype works best for your business and why.

We can do this in person or remotely.

Cost for the Discovery Session: $200 (plus travel expenses if you want a Zeedia person on site.)

STEP THREE: Infuse your new archetype into everything you do.

This does not happen overnight. But it does get easier the more you do it. You will get to the point where you see it in everything you do. That is when you know you’ve dialed it in.

This usually takes 3 -6 months. You can do it yourself. Our Brand Archetype for Business Book provides guidance and tips on how to do it.

You can also hire Zeedia Media to help you. We can get you started, we can help you through it all, or we can be on standby when you need us. It all depends on your budget and your time.

Cost: Varies but can fit in your budget.

Ready to Get Started?

You can find the Brand Archetype Questionnaire HERE.

You can learn all about the 12 main Archetypes, including SWOT analyses, examples of brands using each one, and more at our BrandArchetypes.Com Website.

You can schedule a FREE 15-minute Zoom Call with Zeedia Media to ask all of your burning questions.

You can buy our book HERE

What is Zeedia Media’s Brand Archetype?

We are glad you asked. Zeedia Media is the Outlaw Archetype. We are rebels. We are edgy. We do things differently. The emotion we provide is a sense of FREEDOM. Outlaws have freedom from the constraints and burdens of normal everyday life. They make up their own rules and they take risks.

We offer you the FREEDOM from the burden of Marketing. We make it easier. We create BOLD brands for BRAVE businesses. We give you your time and freedom back to concentrate on what you do best – your products and services  – without having to be stressed out about marketing. Isn’t that nice of us? See – outlaws can be nice, but we can badda$$ too!

Contact Zeedia Media today and take your brand to a whole new emotional level.

Your Brand Deserves This!

PSST! Check out info on the 2025 Michigan Marketing Outstanding Brands Summit! You don’t want to miss it!