5 Professional Branding Strategies For Your Home Business
One of the great benefits modern technology brings is the ability to run businesses from home. It’s been an especially big benefit for working mothers around the world; the digital landscape now makes it possible to have a successful career while spending time at home with your children.
As a consequence, you see various home business ideas that are perfect for busy mothers - yet most of these businesses run into a similar problem. Being based at home has plenty of lifestyle advantages, though it tends to make your business seem less professional. There can be a somewhat unfair view that your home business isn’t a “proper” business because you’re not working from an office or showing off a conventional business address.
From there, it’s potentially harder to pick up clients because of the perceived lack of professionalism. You start to wonder if a home business is ever worth it because of this unfair misrepresentation of your brand, but there’s really nothing to worry about. The right branding strategies will transform any home business into an authentic brand that oozes professionalism. It’s also not hard to turn around the professional perception of your home business - the marketing/branding ideas below prove how easily you can change perceptions.
Come Up With A Genuine Business Name
Home businesses are set up for failure from the beginning due to terrible business names. You need to conjure up a proper business name to make your business appear professional to outside eyes. Avoid names with puns in them, or pointless location-based names like “London Marketing Agency”. Stuff like this looks awful and discredits your brand before people learn more about it.
Frustratingly, figuring out a name for your business is one of the hardest steps out there. Look for inspiration online and don’t be afraid to use ChatGPT or other AI tools to come up with suggestions. You need something that sounds professional, does a good job of indicating what your business does and aligns with your key values.
Design A Unique & Modern Website
You’ve established a professional business name, and now the next step involves creating a presence for your brand online. This step is where lots of home business owners falter - and it can normally be pinned on impatience.
Look, you’ve come up with a business idea and you’re excited to set the wheels in motion. You want to get things up and running ASAP, which means you need to create a business website. All it takes is a quick online search to show you there are many ways of doing this. More often than not, you pick the quickest way: using pre-designed website templates from sites like WordPress or Wix.
There’s nothing wrong with using web design platforms like these, but you must ensure your website ticks the following boxes:
It should be as unique as possible
It must look modern
It has to be easy for people to use
It needs to work on mobile devices
To reiterate, web design platforms can help you tick these boxes, though the uniqueness may be difficult if you’re using pre-built templates. You don’t want your website to look too similar to others out there, especially competing businesses.
Keeping that in mind, the best idea is to work with a proper web designer or web design agency. They can design a custom-built website from scratch that gives you something genuinely unique. It helps your website stand out, and the killer design adds to the professionalism of your brand and will turn heads for the right reasons.
Get Professional Business Contact Details
It goes without saying that you should deploy multiple marketing strategies to push your business as far and wide as possible. You want your target audience to visit the site, which means setting up SEO campaigns and the like. Eventually, people will land on your pages and look at what you do. The web design gives them hints that you’re a professional and credible entity, but this all comes crashing down when they click the “Get In Touch” button and see your contact details.
It could be said that this is the biggest thing that turns people away from home businesses. You’re mainly looking at these two problems:
Using your home address
Listing a standard email
To be fair, the home address is more egregious than a standard email. You may also be wondering what we mean by a “standard email”, but we’ll get onto that in a moment. For now, know that using your home address is an easy way to turn people away. It looks incredibly unprofessional, and people have this strange subconscious bias towards people working from home. It comes down to trust: many clients feel they can’t trust someone who works from home because it seems unprofessional. They’d rather choose a business with a proper office and professional address.
Well, you can have the best of both worlds with a virtual office address. It lets you rent an address in a proper business location, which makes it look like you work from there. Leads see the address for a popular London business hotspot, and your business instantly goes up in their estimation. Does this make a lick of sense? Not really, but the simple presence of a business address sways so many prospects into becoming clients.
What about your email? A “standard” email is anything that a regular person has. It’s your gmail.com or outlook.com emails that you obtain for free. Some prospects won’t notice or care about your email, but others look upon it as an indication of unprofessionalism. A tad harsh, perhaps, but you can avoid this by paying for a proper business email address. It looks better as you can have a custom address that ends in @yourbusinessname.com.
Create Professional Headshots
There’s something suspicious about a business that doesn’t tie any people to its brand. If your website doesn’t include any images of yourself, then it’s hard for people to trust your company. They want to feel like they’re engaging with a human being instead of a faceless corporation.
So, to start, headshots of any kind are beneficial. Looking further ahead, there are definite benefits to having professional headshots, especially when we’re talking about home-based businesses. Sticking a selfie of you at a desk in your kitchen on your site won’t generate feelings of trust or credibility to prospective clients.
You need to have headshots that display you in a professional manner. You want to look like a proper business boss; radiate confidence and make people think “Ok, she’s legit, I can trust this business”. Either pay for professional headshots from a photographer or use AI to alter your existing selfies. Lucidpic lets you do this by uploading selfies from your camera roll and then instructing the AI to edit them professionally. You can tell it to show you behind a desk or in a nice office, and it’ll conjure up great results.
Now, you can display your professional headshots on your website to bring more authenticity to your brand. It shows people that there’s an actual human being involved while also establishing some excellent professionalism because you’re in a suit or looking like a genuine boss.
Host Any Client Meetings In A Quiet Setting
Not all home businesses require client meetings, but many will. This presents a key challenge in your bid to make your business look professional, particularly if you’re hosting a consultation that determines whether someone pays you for your services. Whether it’s a video call, a standard phone call or a face-to-face meeting, you need to conduct it in a quiet setting without any distractions.
You can’t be on the phone to a lead with your kids screaming in the background or Peppa Pig blasting out from the telly. If you don’t need to meet face-to-face, then set up a quiet work area in your home that’s free from all distractions. The perfect solution is to convert a spare room or garage, but you’ll have to make do with what you’ve got. For video calls, make sure there’s a professional background instead of your washing hanging on a dryer.
Those of you who require face-to-face meetings can make better use of the virtual address you purchased. Many virtual addresses come with perks, such as the ability to go and use proper meeting rooms. You can book a meeting at your virtual office and head down there to create the utmost professionalism for your brand. Also, there’s no reason you can’t head to virtual office locations or book any local coworking spaces/meeting rooms to carry out video or phone calls. It means you have to leave the house, but if the options are close by, then they’re worth trying.
At the end of the day, a home-based business can be as professional as any other business. Don’t let people’s unfair preconceptions of your business get in the way of generating clients. Implement the branding strategies in this post to transform your small company and make it look like a credible enterprise, all while still running it from home.
