Branding can be incredibly beneficial for businesses, but there’s a lot more to building a successful brand than designing logos and conjuring up straplines. If you’re worried that your branding is weak, or you feel like you’re selling yourself short, here are some of the most common mistakes businesses make and some tips to ensure you reap the rewards of effective, customer-focused branding.
Drab, dull, uninspiring visuals
Humans process visual data up to 60,000 times faster than text, so it’s no wonder logos play a key part in forming positive or negative first impressions. Your logo is often the first thing people see, and it can make or break you. If your logo is drab and uninspiring, it’s not going to have the desired effect or impact. You want people to see your brand logo and want to find out more about your business and what you sell. Entice customers and pique their interest using bold color schemes and unique, attractive designs and images. Make sure you stand out from the crowd and choose an image that reflects the business and correlates with the target market. In addition to designing an eye-catching, alluring logo, it’s also beneficial to use the appeal and traction of visuals as part of your wider branding and marketing campaign. Posts that contain images and video clips are shared more frequently than text. Twitter posts with images receive 150% more retweets and Facebook engagement increases by over 50% for posts with pictures or video clips.
Confused messages
Branding is all about giving your business an identity and showcasing its originality and uniqueness. When you’re building your brand, you want to spread clear messages and make it very easy for customers to understand what you’re selling or offering and how you can benefit them. Sometimes, if you don’t have a strategy, or you’re not quite sure of the message you want to get across, branding can be confusing. When you see a logo or a strapline, for example, you want the customer to be able to tell you exactly what the business does in a matter of seconds, rather than asking a series of questions trying to establish the answer. All the content you share, the visual data you post and the marketing materials you utilize should relay a consistent message.
Disconnect between your branding and the product or service
When drawing up a branding strategy, it’s crucial to focus on the target market, but you also need to make sure that everything you do is relevant to your business and the services or products you sell. Adopt an approach that suits your company. A toy company should have a very different voice to a bank or a law firm, for example. If there’s a disconnect between your product and your branding, this will confuse the message and it may mean that your customers have a skewed impression of your business. If you’re promoting mortgages or legal services, for example, you don’t want to come across as a fun, friendly, quirky brand. You want people to trust you and think that you are professional, reliable, and dependable.
Ignoring customer feedback
Your customers should always be your number one priority. If you’ve conducted market research or you’ve asked clients for feedback, don’t ignore comments or gloss over negative reviews. Research can prove incredibly valuable when creating new logos and designs and sharing posts on social media. If you don’t get the reaction you were hoping for, and people are confused or indifferent about a particular image or a type of post, utilize this feedback to make improvements.
Lacking focus
If you’re looking to showcase your brand and reach out to customers, it’s essential to have a focus and to establish clear objectives. What are you trying to achieve via social media or a revamped logo or packaging design? If you have a goal in mind, you can concentrate on making it happen. You might want to expand your market to attract different demographics or make your brand more visible online, for example.
Branding can have an incredibly positive impact on a business, but mistakes can be costly. If you’re on a mission to create a strong brand, consider whether you may be making these common errors and rethink your strategy. Focus on delivering consistent messages, use eye-catching, attractive images and logo designs to create good first impressions, use feedback and make sure your branding campaign takes both your target market and the type of business you run into consideration.
