The Small Business Assistance Corporation in Savannah, Georgia, initiated the start of a six-week program designed to provide small business owners with insights and strategies for empowerment.

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

“While your logo is a component of your brand, the identity of your brand actually includes everything, visual and verbal, as well as your behavior,” she shared. “It consists of anything that can connect your brand to your ideal customer.”

This was the introductory message for the series dedicated to helping small business owners remain competitive and achieve growth. News 3 interviewed Alaina Parks, who participated in the event. “Currently, I already have an established brand, complete with a logo,” she said. “However, I am eager to elevate 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.”