Did you know that 99.9 percent of businesses in the US qualify as “small businesses”? That may seem impossible, but considering that there are over 30 million small businesses listed by the United States SBA Office of Advocacy, it may just be a matter of perspective.
And the number is growing every year.
With that sort of competition, small business owners are constantly looking for ways to keep their venture not only afloat, but growing.
One of the most important — and often overlooked — aspects of helping your business to grow is your logo design.
Great small business logo designs accomplish a number of things:
- They make a good first impression
- They identify your business
- They build recognition and loyalty
- They build trust in your brand
- They enable consistency
Let’s get into these in more detail.
Well-Designed Logos Make A Good First Impression
This is especially important for a small business, and especially during the early days. Small businesses will thrive if they are professionally run and know how to connect with their audience, providing what is needed.
Unfortunately, many small businesses put their branding on hold, choosing to focus instead on the actual products they provide.
While quality products are important, the first step is to attract your audience so they can give your products a try. And if your logo isn’t a well-designed, accurate representation of your company, it may very well put people off from even giving your products the benefit of the doubt and trying them out.
As the saying goes, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. It doesn’t make sense to put your potential audience at risk by launching with a badly designed logo.
Fortunately, there’s an answer for that, even if you have no design experience and a very limited branding budget. You may choose to work with a freelance designer through a site like Upwork, which can help keep your budget in check. With a plethora of logo maker tools online, you’ll have a range of options for you to customize.
Your Logo Is An Identifier
The idea of a logo being your main identifier may seem blatantly obvious. After all, the majority of logos have the name of the business as part of the design!
But it’s more than just that.
A well-designed business logo conveys facts about the brand behind it — not just the name, but the type of brand personality that the business has, what sort of business it is, and the audience it caters to. Your logo may even indicate the products and services that you offer. For instance, the logo of a small family restaurant that features the town’s most famous hamburgers may have a graphic representation of a hamburger as the main focus of the logo. A small clothing store that specializes in children’s clothes may use the graphic of a toy, such as a top or alphabet blocks, to indicate the audience the store is geared towards.
Choosing your graphics carefully will help your logo to clearly identify your business, even if you don’t have the business name included as part of the design.
Logos Build Recognition And Loyalty
Along with stamping your identity everywhere, it is used, your small business logo goes a long way to building recognition and loyalty for your brand. How so?
The logo will give your customers something to connect to, making your logo synonymous with your business. That enables them to pick it out of the crowd of other logos, distinguishing you from the competition.
Careful choice of colors and fonts, and opting for a simple design, can both contribute to an immediately recognizable logo.
Loyalty to your small business comes naturally as your customers clearly recognize your logo and connect it with the good experiences they’ve had with your company. With each good experience, they will be more likely to continue to seek out your business, and a recognizable logo will make that process even easier.
Your Logo Builds Trust In Your Brand
Trust is a logical follow-up to building loyalty. The more they seek out your company, the more good experiences they have, the more they trust that your business will continue to provide what they want.
But building trust starts within your logo design. Part of what a logo does is make promises — it may promise a service, a location in which the company operates, or a target audience. Our examples used earlier can show us how this works. The restaurant, by using the hamburger graphic, implicitly promises that it serves hamburgers, telling the visitor what they can expect. The children’s clothing store, by using child-centric visuals, implicitly promises that it caters to children.
This is important to remember when designing your logo, in order to avoid promising anything that your business can’t follow through on.
And it is also an excellent tool for creating trust from the very first sight of your logo.
Small Business Logos Create Brand Consistency
A final key way in which a logo affects your small business is by allowing you to create consistency within your brand.
Logos are designed to be used — as the main identifier for your business, it belongs on every piece of marketing, on every page of your website, on business cards, on product packaging, and more. It also belongs on any branded material, such as your small business social media account. By using your logo across the board, it makes your branding consistent, as well as further contributing to the identification, recognition, loyalty, and trust already mentioned.
If you have a business, regardless of how big or small, it deserves a logo. And not just any logo, but a well-designed, accurate, unique identifier that helps to elevate your business and keep it growing and thriving.
Read more: How to Create a Great Nonprofit Logo