Affordable branding: 14 easy steps and strategies for businesses on a budget

Affordable branding can seem like an impossibility for small businesses and new entrepreneurs. After all, building a brand strategy requires a lot more than a logo. You need to conduct market research, create your visual identity, define your brand’s personality, and so much more. 

When you’re struggling with a limited brand budget, it’s easy to push your branding package to the back of your shopping list. You might assume that great branding is something best left to the Nike’s, Apple’s, and Google’s of the world. 

Unfortunately, the truth is that great branding is just as important for small business owners as it is for major enterprises. A strong brand is the key to capturing the attention of potential customers, guiding your marketing efforts, and unlocking ongoing revenue.

While larger companies might have bigger budgets to spend on branding, that doesn’t mean you can’t get started with less capital. All you need is the right strategy to make the most of your budget.

Here’s your guide to mastering affordable branding. 

Is affordable branding possible?

As a leading branding agency, we’ve worked with companies large and small to develop outstanding identities. Not every company we support has the biggest brand budget. While you can’t really build a strong brand identity for free, there are plenty of ways to keep costs low.

Many organizations automatically assume that building a powerful brand will cost thousands of dollars. Although you will need to continue investing in your brand over time to ensure you stand out from the competition, you can start building the pillars of your brand without breaking the bank.

The key to success is usually working with an expert, and creating a comprehensive strategy for how you’re going to build brand awareness, and elevate your brand name, without a huge budget.

It’s also worth remembering that every penny you invest into your brand does pay dividends.

For instance, 46% of customers say they’d pay more to purchase from brands they can trust. You can’t leverage that trust without first connecting to your customers with a compelling brand.

Additionally, developing a consistent brand gives you the tools you need to increase revenue in the long run. More than two thirds of businesses say consistency in branding has helped them boost their revenue by 10% or more. 

The truth is great branding does cost money, but you can still build a quality brand on a budget, and earn a significant return on your investment over time. 

Mastering cheap branding: 14 tips for affordable branding

So, how do you get started with affordable branding? When potential clients come to us with limited budgets, we focus on one thing: strategy. Careful planning is how you ensure you’re using the brand budget you do have as effectively as possible. 

Here are some of our top tips for reducing the overall cost of your branding efforts.

1. Collect extensive customer insights

A great brand should always resonate with your specific target audience. This means market research isn’t something you can afford to cut corners on when building an affordable brand. However, there are ways you can keep costs relatively low. 

Start by using free resources to learn as much as you can about your customers. Check out your competitors, and the content they produce. Examine market reports available for free online, and use free demos of tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush for extensive research.

Conducting surveys and customer interviews is another low-cost way to collect insights about your potential customers, without spending a fortune. For small businesses, we often recommend focusing on a specific niche, rather than a wider audience. 

The more specific your chosen niche, the less competition you’ll have, meaning you don’t necessarily need to spend as much to stand out in your industry. 

Once you’ve collected as much information as you can, use free templates to design user personas, outlining your customers’ demographics, attitudes, pain points, and behaviors. 

2. Define the core elements of your brand

The more you know about your brand and what you’re trying to accomplish, the easier it will be to create a brand that sends the right message to your customers. 

Whenever we start building a brand package for any brand, we always dive into the following factors:

• Your mission: What do you want to accomplish beyond making a profit? For instance, Tesla wants to improve the world’s access to sustainable energy. 
• Core values: Which values will guide your business? Are you focused on innovation, compassion, excellent customer service, or something else?
• Your differentiator: Why should customers choose you over the competition? What do you do differently, or better than other brands?

A comprehensive competitor analysis will help with this process, helping you to understand the leaders in your industry, and how you can position yourself in the market. Once again, there are free tools that can help you with competitive analysis.

SEMRush offers a free trial that can give you an insight into your competitor’s keywords, the content they rank for, and other useful data. 

3. Create a strong brand personality

Once you have a clear idea of your ideal customers, and the core components of your brand, the next step is to build an engaging personality. A strong personality can give even the smallest, most budget-conscious brands a significant edge over the competition.

Look at companies like Dollar Shave Club or BrewDog. They entered their respective markets with very little initial capital. However, they generated hype and brand awareness by using humor to connect with customers on a deeper level. 

Think about how you want your company to be remembered. What can you do to connect with your target audience’s emotions. Creating editorial guidelines can be a great way to ensure your brand’s personality shines through all of your marketing strategies.

4. Pick a memorable brand name

When you’re first getting started as a new brand in any industry, a few things will boost your chances of capturing and retaining your audience’s attention. Your name is one of them. It’s not just the title you put on your business cards, or website. 

Your name is one of the first things that ensures your customers will understand your brand and what it stands for. It should provide a deeper insight into your values, purpose, mission, and personality.

Look at Tesla, for instance, its name is based on one of the best-known scientific pioneers in history. If you’re struggling to come up with naming ideas, you can consider using free name generators for extra inspiration, although we’d advise against relying on these too much.

Remember name generators can only deliver basic options for naming, and most won’t be able to show you if a name has already been taken by another brand. 

5. Build the foundations of your visual identity

Similar to your name, the visual elements of your brand play a strong role in how well you’ll connect with your target audience. To get the best results, we’d usually recommend working with a professional designer. However, you can start developing ideas for free, with online tools.

Digital mood boards are an excellent way to start arranging ideas for how you want your brand to look and feel. You can use them to showcase competing brands you’re interested in replicating, typography choices that will resonate with your target audience, and more.

You can even use tools like Coolors to generate potential color palettes and schemes. Remember to think carefully about color psychology when selecting shades to represent your brand. Each color says something unique about your business. 

This initial work will give you the foundations you need for a comprehensive brand style guide. Plus, it can reduce the cost of future projects, by giving the graphic designer you work with more direction for designing logos and other assets.

6. Create an affordable logo

Logo design can be one of the most expensive parts of building an effective brand. Just like building other visual elements for your brand, we do recommend working with an expert here. However, if you’re low on budget, you can start creating basic “placeholder” logos for free.

There are plenty of simple free logo generators out there, that allow you to create a simple design using pre-made templates and fonts. Alternatively, you can choose your ideal typeface, and use that to create a straightforward wordmark logo. 

Typically, these low-cost logos won’t serve your brand forever. You’ll need to upgrade your visual identity over time to ensure you’re making the right impact on your audience. However, you can use your placeholder logo as inspiration to help your logo designer in the future.

Make sure your logo highlights the core elements of your brand identity. The typefaces, colors, and even shapes you use can tell your customers a lot about your business. 

7. Build a compelling website

Similar to logo design, building a website can be an expensive process. However, having a website of your own is crucial in today’s digital world. It’s the key to connecting with loyal customers, and teaching new potential consumers about your brand.

In the past, building a website used to be a complex process that required extensive technical knowledge, and a lot of funding. Today, however, anyone can design a website with minimal upfront cost. There are plenty of affordable tools out there to help you.

You can design a company website in WordPress, and only pay for hosting and your domain name. You could also use hosted platforms like Wix, or Squarespace. These tools come with great templates to get you started, as well as built-in marketing and business management tools.

When developing your website, make sure every page reflects your consistent brand identity. Use the same brand colors and logo across your site, and remember to draw attention to your brand’s personality, story, and history, to connect with your customers.

It’s also worth investing in some backend search engine optimization strategies, like ensuring your pages load quickly, and adding keywords to your meta descriptions, tags, and URLs. 

8. Explore low-cost marketing ideas

Part of developing an effective brand is ensuring you can connect with your customers on the right channels. Your brand colors, name, and logo won’t have much of an impact on your company’s growth if you’re not sharing them with your audience.

When building your marketing mix, explore options that have lower initial costs, and higher returns on investment. For instance, email marketing is an excellent way to connect with and nurture your target audience, without spending a fortune on comprehensive marketing activities. 

Local businesses can also explore traditional methods of marketing, like appearing at industry events, or trade shows. By far, one of the best low-cost marketing strategies is content. 

Content is the most cost-effective way to demonstrate thought leadership, connect with customers throughout their buyer journey, and earn consumer trust. The key to success is creating the right content. Take the time to research what your customers are talking about.

Use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to find high-volume, low competition keywords you can rank for, and respond to customer queries you find on Reddit and other social platforms.

Make sure all of your content draws attention o your brand’s mission, and personality, by creating a comprehensive editorial style guide. 

9. Take advantage of cheap branding and marketing assets

We’ve already mentioned that there are plenty of free tools you can use to create color palettes, business names, and basic logos. However, there are also some fantastic tools out there that can elevate your brand and marketing efforts in other ways.

For instance, if you don’t have the cash to invest in professional brand photography, take photos with a high-quality phone camera, for authentic behind-the-scenes insights into your company. Use stock sites like Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, and Unsplash to add visual interest to your blog posts and content.

There are even free keyword tools out there, that can help you to determine what kind of content you should be writing to improve your position on the search engine result pages.

If you’re investing in email marketing, you can leverage tools like Brevo, which offer free plans to beginners with support for up to 300 emails per day. 

10. Leverage social media platforms

Social media can also be an incredible tool for both affordable branding and marketing. The right social platforms can give you an excellent opportunity to highlight the unique components of your brand, even if you don’t have your own robust website. 

To begin, find out which channels your customers use most often. B2B brands might focus on LinkedIn, while brands targeting younger customers might choose TikTok and Instagram.

If you have content creators in your team already, you can run social media campaigns with minimal effort or expense. You can even use tools like Canva to create visual templates for your posts. 

When leveraging social media, make sure your team are following your brand guidelines, using the same colors, visual elements, and personality across all posts. It’s also worth paying close attention to which of your campaigns capture the attention of your target customer.

Most social media platforms allow companies to access free insights into everything from engagement levels, to impressions, which can guide your decisions on how to use your marketing budget.

11. Consider low-cost partnerships

Even if you have excellent marketing materials, and a great visual identity, it can be difficult to stand out in today’s cluttered marketplace with a low budget. Customers are less trusting of new products and services that they haven’t heard of before. 

A good way to give yourself an edge, without spending a fortune, is to think about partnering with other brands. This doesn’t necessarily mean working on a co-branding campaign. You can approach a range of complementary businesses with different ideas to elevate your brand positioning.

For instance, you might work with another non-competitive company to run a promotional contest, which gets people talking about your business on social media. You could consider offering services to other companies in exchange for their support with marketing strategies.

Another option is to consider working with micro and nano influencers that have a pre-existing connection with your target market. These influencers can add credibility to your business name, and drive new traffic to your social channels and website.

12. Double down on customer experience

The great thing about branding is that building an effective brand isn’t just about designing an impactful logo, or creating amazing product packaging. Your brand is a culmination of everything you do to stand out to your target audience. 

That means the customer experience you offer has an impact on your brand identity too. The more you invest in delighting your customers, the more your brand equity will grow. 

Delivering excellent customer experiences, such as rapid responses to customer questions, or step-by-step assistance in choosing the right product leaves a positive impression on your target market.

It doesn’t just help differentiate you from your competitors, it paves the way for greater brand loyalty, and can even turn customers into advocates for your brand. Studies show 72% of customers will share positive experiences with 6 people or more. 

As well as giving you access to free word of mouth marketing, delivering amazing customer experience also helps you to retain customers, and improve customer lifetime value. It can even give you resources for your marketing materials, like reviews and user generated content. 

These insights from real customers can elevate your social media posts, and give you more credible content to share on your website. 

13. Experiment with innovative marketing tactics

Similar to branding, most people assume that innovative marketing strategies will be overwhelmingly expensive. However, there are actually a lot of low-cost methods you can experiment with. If you’re targeting customers in the B2B industry, for example, events are great for building relationships.

But you don’t necessarily need to host an expensive in-person event. There are plenty of platforms that allow you to host unique online events and webinars for a fraction of the cost. 

If you want to get started with podcasting, you can consider asking to be featured as an expert on other podcast series before you begin your own. 

Other methods include:

• Running video marketing campaigns on YouTube or TikTok, rather than paying for a television ad placement. 
• Use guest posting to expand your brand reach, instead of paying for a placement in a local news publication.
• Run digital display or Meta ads instead of paying for billboard advertising, or placing your brand logo in local areas.

14. Constantly learn, test, and evolve

As mentioned above, affordable branding is possible, but it requires careful planning and strategy. The only way to ensure you’re spending your brand budget on the right tactics, and using your marketing dollars effectively, is to gather data. 

The more time you spend learning about your audience, by reading reviews, analyzing the competition, and conducting research, the more effective your branding and marketing strategies will be. 

The more you track the metrics and KPIs of your email, social media, and content marketing campaigns, the easier it will be to optimize your marketing budget. Commit to constantly gathering as much data as you can about your brand impact, customers, and marketplace.

At the same time, make sure you’re staying up to date with the latest trends and evolutions in your industry, so you don’t fall behind the competition. 

Make the most of your brand budget

Developing an affordable branding strategy can seem complex. There are a lot of different factors that can eat into your brand budget, from logo design to your marketing campaigns. 

However, telling an effective brand story, and developing a strong presence in your chosen industry doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. With a little creativity, the right strategy, and dedication, any business can build an effective brand on a budget.

In fact, we’ve seen countless smaller companies achieve incredible results with limited cash. We’ve even helped cash-strapped non-profits shine. 

If you need help with affordable branding, contact the team at Fabrik today, to see how we can help you thrive, without breaking the bank. 

Fabrik: A branding agency for our times.