You’ve worked hard to build your business and turn it into a successful brand. Now all you have to do is keep up the good work and develop your brand further. After all, the hardest part is over and now you can lay back and relax for a bit, or at least that’s what some people might think. But experienced entrepreneurs know that’s when the most challenging part truly begins.
Building a brand from scratch requires a lot of hard work and commitment, but maintaining your brand over the years and ensuring business growth can be even more challenging. When you’re a big brand with a large audience, responsibilities and pressure also increase as all eyes will be on you. Make one small mistake and the audience will remember it forever.
The last thing you want is to let all your efforts go to waste and ruin your brand’s image because of some basic mistakes that could have been easily avoided if you’d have been better prepared. So, let’s practice caution and learn about some of the most common mistakes that can affect your brand and how you can prevent them from happening in the first place.
Chasing too many rabbits
When brands reach a certain level of success and popularity, they can try to bite off more than they can chew. That’s how marketing campaigns that are all over the place and lack coherence are born. These poorly built campaigns become a series of unfortunate mistakes that can both confuse and irritate the audience, making them lose trust in your brand. Before you start creating a marketing campaign for your brand it’s important to set clear objectives and determine the best strategies to help you achieve them.
Ignoring UX
Living in a highly digitized world means that brands have to provide clients with a smooth and seamless experience across all digital platforms, and that implies placing a special focus on user experience (UX). Ignoring this aspect can cause your audience to move away from you and choose one of your competitors instead. So, make sure every brand touchpoint is consistent with the rest of your brand, to create a sense of connection and offer a smooth customer journey.
Lack of authenticity
On a similar note, brands that send out mixed and confusing messages through their marketing channels have a lot to lose. They can lose credibility and customers, and it’s a well-known fact that rebuilding trust and winning back lost customers can be a very long and complicated process.
Save yourself the trouble of going through this challenge by making sure that the messages you send to the audience match your brand’s identity. When you create an advertising campaign, you have to align it with your brand’s core values and beliefs, so that customers can understand who you truly are and what you stand for.
Take advantage of unpleasant events
Brands are expected to get involved in the lives of their communities and take a stance whenever a major public event happens, especially in the case of national disasters or emergency situations.
However, no one expects or forgives a brand that uses such situations to their advantage, in order to increase their visibility or earn a profit. As a brand, you can acknowledge these events respectfully and express your stance in a manner that is not offensive to anyone, not as a part of your marketing strategy.
Aggressive advertising
You know how too much of a good thing can turn into a bad thing? The same can happen with brand advertising. You can master the art of advertising and create the most interesting and appealing ads to promote your brand, but if you don’t know how to use these ads properly, all your effort will be in vain.
Aggressive ad campaigns can do more harm than good to your brand, and make your audience back away from buying your products and services. A much smarter approach is to use less intrusive ads that make a tempting proposition to your audience instead of almost forcing them to act in a certain manner.
Not performing proper research
A lot of businesses think that branding is as simple as choosing a logo and some catch phrases to use in their marketing campaigns, but they soon find out it’s much more complicated than that. And even after they manage to build their brand, they still forget about a very important aspect: research.
In order for a business to assess the health of their brand they have to examine the audience’s attitudes towards it, and this type of research is brand tracking. Without proper research, it’s next to impossible to maintain a consistent and positive brand image and retain customers.
Lack of variation
Consistency is extremely important when building a brand, but so is variation. And by variation we mean avoiding the excessive use of the same ads and other promotional methods when targeting the same customers. The audience can grow tired of receiving the exact same message over and over again, so you have to spice things up a bit every now and then. Alternate marketing strategies to avoid reportativity and keep things fresh and interesting for your target audience.
Trying too hard to be original
At the other end of the spectrum, we have brands that are trying too hard to be original and stand out from the crowd. While trying to differentiate yourself from the competition is a good thing, you have to be careful not to cross the line. The desire to be unique can make you lose track of who you are as a brand and lead to rookie mistakes. Try to come up with new and innovative ideas, but make sure to keep your brand voice authentic and always go back to the “why”.
All these mistakes that we’ve listed above can have a major negative impact on your business brand. Even if you are able to address the damages and recover, it’s still best to learn how to avoid these issues from the very beginning.
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