SAVANNAH, Ga. () – The Small Business Assistance Corporation hosted the kick-off of a six-week series aimed to empower small business owners with strategies and personal insight. 

Speaker Megan Kranzler, a brand experience designer, said branding is not just the face behind your business, it’s the fuel behind your sales.

“Your logo is part of your brand but your brand identity really encompasses everything, visual and verbal and even your behavior,” she said. “It’s anything that basically can connect to your brand, to your ideal customer.”

That was the kick-off message for the six-week series to empower small business owners to stay competitive and grow. News 3 spoke to Alaina Parks who attended the event. “So right now, I already have a brand, I have a logo, I have things that are established,” she said. “However, I want to take it to the next level.”

For Parks, that means sticking to her core values.

“It gives me the opportunity to plan this out,” she added. “This is my own development, right? So, I’m going to take these things that I learned at these workshops, get impactful, get back to the office, brainstorm with my team, develop.”

Brand trust and building a sense of community is a topic that stood out to Dwayne Marshall.

“I learned about brand persona, how businesses are going about identifying their brand and marketing that to the community,” he said. “It’s bigger than your logo, bigger than your website, bigger than the name of your business. What’s your brand identity and how do you resonate that throughout the community?”

He continued, “So being that I work for a loan fund that funds small businesses, many of them are trying to figure out how they brand and market their business to the local community. This was an opportunity for me to get intel. So as I meet those businesses that we may find, I can teach them about some branding techniques that they can implement within their strategies.”

The organization’s next meeting will be June 11 from noon to 1 p.m. The theme is ‘Run your business, don’t let it run you.’

“Start with what you can. If you can’t afford to hire a bunch of professional services right now, that’s fine,” Kranzler said. “Just start where you can and get started because that’s usually the biggest barrier that holds people back, just that getting started.”