Sales are one of the most crucial parts of building a business, and often it relies solely on your brand. If the business doesn’t have the budget to create strong marketing campaigns, it will have to rely on one thing and one thing only: Building a brand.

Building a brand can be a daunting challenge. For many business owners who have built a successful company, this is no secret. Newer businesses are often taking on competitors with an established brand, meaning creativity and “growth hacks” are needed to successfully grow the brand amidst a competitive environment and ever-changing landscape.

How do you build a brand with no marketing budget?

The term “dancing alone” refers to the brave person that is the first on the dance floor. They generally don’t seem to care that they are the only one on the dance floor, but are happy to enjoy themselves. For example, we’ve all been at a party and seen someone get down on an empty dancefloor only to be joined shortly after by everyone else at the party.

Building a brand requires your business to be able to act independently of competitors, in both the communication of your brand and the execution of your service, make sure you are able to deliver the best service you can regardless of what your competition is doing.

Brand evangelists are the people who help build your brand for you. These are your repeat customers, who will come to you first and foremost. Creating them doesn’t take a lot of money to do, but it takes a concerted effort. Brand evangelists are made or broken in the little things, like politeness in your service, the ability to go the extra mile, or even if you lose the sale by suggesting the customer doesn’t buy yet. It’s about conveying honesty and integrity, while maintaining a good bottom line. One of the best example of brand evangelists is Guy Kawasaki’s adoption of Canva (canva.com), who loved the product so much he began to preach it at all of his conferences. Many, many canva users (including this author) came from this.

The secret ingredient to most great brands is in their ability to create and refine their processes for everything they do. Apple may have the ability to create great products, but I bet you didn’t know that the wood for the display tables they use to present their products on are sourced from a single farm in Canada. By creating and documenting processes for your business, you can start to establish your business’s identity.

Creating processes and refining them allows your business to create repeatable, and consistently high-quality products or services. At our business, we call it the Tim Tam approach. If you or any celebrity were to buy and consume an Arnott’s Tim Tam biscuit, we would be almost guaranteed that we would be eating the same delicious chocolate biscuit.

It is this consistency that creates repeat customers. As we have established, repeat customers allow you to create brand evangelists, and in turn brand evangelists will allow your business to “dance alone”, and not have to worry about what competitors are doing as you will always be one step ahead of the game. None of these things take a huge marketing budget to do, but they do require discipline and effort. Most of all, it takes courage to make consistent sales, but once you find them, the world is your oyster.