Are You Making These 3 Branding Mistakes?

Branding is one of the most important components of a business. It’s what people see, what they know, and what they associate with your name and work. 

Developing a successful brand takes a lot of time and planning to ensure everything aligns with who you are. Every element of a brand, from language and tone to visuals and design, should come together to form one clear picture of your overall identity.

Not only does a strong brand tell a compelling story, but it can also increase your customers’ loyalty, stimulate engagement, and help build trust. A weak brand, however, can stop your growth in its tracks.

Boombox can help you to avoid that. Let’s look at 3 branding mistakes and explore ways to avoid them.

1. Not targeting the correct market/audience

Knowing your target audience is key. Every business has a specified audience that can most benefit from their products and services, and it’s important to speak to them directly and intentionally.

Casting a wide net to reach anyone and everyone is not likely to reach anyone at all. By misunderstanding your audience and overgeneralizing your message, the people that should hear your message may hear it and not even recognize that it’s for them. You won’t be able to create successful marketing plans without defining and targeting the correct audience.

You are probably thinking: How I can find the correct market/audience for my business? Here are some steps to help you do that.

1. A good first step is to ask questions: Who will be using my product/service? Who will be interested in what my business offers? Who are the people that are already using my product/service? Is there overlap between these people? What qualities do they share?
2. Conduct market research to gain industry-specific insights. Is there a need or inefficiency in your industry that you can help solve? Identifying existing gaps can help you build a strategy that speaks to your audience’s immediate needs.
3. Analyze your competitors. Once you see how other brands are reaching the same or similar audiences, you can differentiate your approach and engage with your audience in a fresh way.
4. If you have a wide range of people you can market to, create personas for each sub-audience. This can help you speak to the varying needs of different consumers.
5. Identify and understand who isn’t in your target audience. Knowing who you aren’t speaking to is just as helpful as knowing who you are speaking to. If an ad or campaign seems more aligned with who isn’t in your audience, you can more easily determine what to change in order to reach the correct group.

2. Being inconsistent in implementing your branding

Having a consistent brand across all platforms helps your business establish recognition value and foster trust with your audience. It also helps maintain a clean and professional look no matter where your brand is being seen. An inconsistent brand can make everything from your identity to your message seems disjointed, and people may not even recognize that different ads are coming from the same business.

To have consistent branding, you first need to establish brand guidelines. The guidelines should iterate and display how to properly use the visual identity and the brand voice. This will help your messages cohesive through all mediums, including print, web, and social.

3. Relying on trends

Every year, month, and week, we see trends changing and going viral. The masses flock to them because it is the next big thing.

You may think you should follow every trend of how much engagement they’re currently generating. But you have to remember that trends are popular only for a moment and will change again…and again…and again.

Following and relying on trends can be detrimental to your brand, since constant changes will result in a lack of cohesion. You can still participate in trends, but do so wisely and whenever the trend can be used to amplify your brand values or voice.

If you found these tips helpful, check out the rest of our blog for more insights into branding pitfalls and improvement strategies.

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