Our first infographic is for you, small business owners, to provide some background on why building a brand for yourself is so important and a few things you can do to start building it online. Before we started Planning Pod, we helped small businesses (and a few large ones) better define and communicate their brand positions, and we wanted to share some of our knowledge with you, our fellow small business owners.

Enjoy, and feel free to repost this on your blog or site by cutting and pasting the code here into your Web page:

<a href="http://www.planningpod.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://jeffk11.sg-host.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/08/buildingsmallbizbrandonline-1.png" alt="Small Business Branding Infographic from Planning Pod"></a><p>Building a Small Business Brand Online - An infographic from the team at Planning Pod - the online <a href="http://www.planningpod.com/" target="_blank">business and project management software</a> app for running your small business.</p>

A couple of things that really stood out for us as we compiled this graphic:

85% of consumers choose an known brand over an unknown brand when making an initial purchase – We thought that price or packaging would have a bigger sway, but apparently brand awareness trumps either of those.

60% of consumers consider it very risky to buy a brand that they have never heard of – It’s not surprising how powerful familiarity is, but what makes this stat interesting is that mere familiarity makes people think that something is less risky, even though more than a few familiar things over the last several decades (like Enron stock or Ford Pintos from the early 1970s) have turned out to be very risky.

22% of social media users bought a brand because a friend liked or followed that brand – You may think this is low, but the fact that 1 out of 5 social media mentions directly influence a buying decision is huuuuuuuuuuge. If you’ve ever worked in marketing, you know how big this number is.