While running a small business, even the smallest of details can make or break your venture. This also holds for product packaging, where a well-designed plan can translate to heaps of benefits, while a go-with-the-flow approach can spell disaster in bold letters.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult to make your product packaging the star of the show and create a positive buzz for your brand. To help you learn how to achieve this feat, here’s how you can maximize your small business packaging.
Set Your Budget
It’s a common practice to meet your budget while shopping for personal items. This also applies to controlling your spending while procuring materials for your business. That’s why it’s no surprise that product packaging has you walking a similar path.
Here, you can start by setting a budget that helps you give your packaging the attention that it needs, all without pushing the boundaries of your funding. This lets you take care of important packaging aspects without breaking the bank.
Perform Standard Packaging Tests
Speaking of important packaging factors, performing activities like drop tests and vibration tests can help you ensure that your packaging materials can uphold the stress of shipping and handling, as well as environmental challenges.
If your small business sells perishable goods, you can include programs like accelerated aging tests to see how well your product holds its integrity in certain settings. This can make your product packaging a functional part of your business that takes your product quality to another level.
Check Out Your Competitors
While designing your product packaging, you should know what your products are up against on the shelves. With solutions like a conversational research platform, you can see what your target audience thinks about your offerings and how they hold up to your competitors.
This lets you develop your packaging in a way that makes it go head-to-head with your competition while also having the chance to surpass them in many situations. In turn, this step remains crucial to enhancing your packaging.
Learn What Your Audience Wants
Similar to performing market research for your competitors, you can also deploy some efforts to learn more about your audience. This can be an incredible way to tap into valuable insights for your target market and see what types of actions can draw them towards your products.
From there, you can use various tips to increase your brand awareness through your packaging. This can include strategies like recyclable packaging and printing giveaway codes inside your boxes.
Explore Creative Ideas
Once you have learned more about your target market, you can be more confident in exploring creative ideas for your packaging. For example, if your competitors ship their products in square boxes, you can try to go against the tide and try out different shapes for your packaging.
By using the data that you gather from your market research tool, you can see what types of changes hold the most promise for your brand and could set it apart from others.
Make Your Packaging Reusable
This tip should be obvious, but many business owners overlook it at times: Choosing reusable product packaging is one of the best ways to maximize its impact. This brings you to solutions like glass jars that double as kitchen storage and wooden boxes that can make for excellent display pieces.
This can make your brand more attractive to those who want to follow suggestions for becoming good citizens and reducing their burden on the environment.
Embrace the Boldness
To make your packaging stand out from the crowd, you might want to make some bold design choices. This includes the use of bright colors and unconventional materials in your packaging.
Besides using your in-house marketing personnel, you can also enlist the services of a branding agency to create a uniform vision for your brand. This can help you develop fantastic packaging that is also in line with your business’ identity.
Through these tips, you can breathe new life into your small business packaging. By making your packaging more appealing to your audience, you can also increase your sales and create a positive image for your brand.
