6 steps to building a successful small business, from brand identity to customer loyalty

• At a recent event about small business, experts advised that having a clear vision is the key to a successful brand.
• A strong brand identity and effective marketing strategy depend on connecting with customers.
• The conversation was part of Insider's event "Marketing for Small Business," which took place on Tuesday, April 25.
• Click here to watch a recording of the full event.

This is the era of the small business. With marketing resources like social media, podcasting, and local advertising available at your fingertips, small-business owners' marketing opportunities are skyrocketing. 

At a recent event hosted by Insider and presented by Mailchimp, marketing experts shared insights into how small-business owners can leverage these tools. On the panel were Jamal Miller, senior director of product marketing at Mailchimp, Shane Pittson, vice president of marketing at Quip, and Tiffany Tolliver, founder and CEO of The EmmaRose Agency. They spoke with Jennifer Ortakales-Dawkins, a senior reporter covering entrepreneurship at Insider, as part of "Marketing for Small Business."

From building a strong brand identity to uncovering the best marketing tools, these industry experts shared a roadmap to growing a small business.

Start by building a brand identity

The panelists explained how crucial building a strong brand identity is to moving a small business forward.

"To stand out with your brand identity, you have to have a clear vision," Tolliver said. "What we're communicating is something bigger than trying to generate revenue."

Tolliver's best advice for securing your brand identity is to keep it simple and consistent. She said, "When you think of the really legacy-based, really easy-to-find logos, like Nike and Target and things like that, they're not changing up their brand identity often, they're making little tweaks."

Identify a core customer base

Another crucial step in building a successful business is determining the core customer base — the people who are loyal to the brand. 

Miller said, "There's often no better way to learn about your audience than to be very intentional about spending time with them. One of the things that we pride ourselves on at Mailchimp is being very close to our customers, setting up a lot of time to engage with them."

Establish trust through marketing

A component of nurturing a customer base is fostering trust between the brand and the customer. 

Pittson said, "With proactive communication, thinking about your emails, your advertising, your presence on organic social, be consistent. And if you're posting regularly and within a framework, then your audience and your customers are going to grow to increasingly trust you and come to you for that type of insight."

Identify your metrics for success

Tolliver maintains that each company's marketing metrics are going to look different.

She said, "The company needs to assess what success to them looks like in their marketing, because we all have different goals. So if I'm working with client A or client B, their metrics for success are going to be different, even though they could be doing the same exact thing."

The panelists gave examples of how to use tech to measure the impact of a campaign. Pittson said, "One of the early things we did was set up an if-this-then-that automation, anytime someone tweeted about Quip or about some of the product lines we were in, we had different Slack channels."

Miller said, "The key piece to automation is a connection between all of the different tools that you're using in your marketing tech stack, to ensure that when something happens in one of your channels, you can respond to it quickly in another."

Build a loyal community  

Supporting causes outside of the business has been helpful for Quip in building trust with its consumers. Pittson said, "Always take a minute to step aside and be opportunistic about some of those moments, and ultimately that authenticity is going to come through."

Starting with a clear vision and maintaining authenticity is Miller's top tip. He said, "Tiffany started us off with this idea of vision, kind of the extent to which you can stay grounded in your brand's vision, your brand voice, to maintain that authenticity, is always going to help win the day in terms of scaling with some sense of authenticity."

Tolliver said, "What a lot of my clients are facing right now when they are building their communities, it's not just looking at who they're serving in the realm of demographics, but the psychographics. People are dealing with a lot of things today and the dismissal or not having the awareness of that from your customers, at least in the service-based industry, is detrimental."

Put the customer first

Pittson advised reading reviews and allowing the customer to guide the small business' vision.

He said, "Ensuring that you're being led and directed and you're guiding your vision based off of the voice of the customer and the experience of the customer is always going to be a recipe for success regardless of what business you're in."