4 Mistakes Brand Builders Should Avoid
It's very easy to make mistakes as a business, and if you;re building your brand from scratch, there are some obvious mistakes to avoid.
Brand builders have one big advantage their predecessors weren’t able to count on as recently as two decades ago: analytics, which makes numbers-based, predictive marketing much easier than ever. Of course, numbers are just one thing; the way your company interprets and uses them to sharpen or even completely change your branding strategy matters as much as the data itself. If you are in the brand building business, make sure to use technology to best advantage and avoid the following newbie mistakes.
1. Sticking Exclusively to Quantitative Analytics Systems
When your business is new, you will be using quantitative and qualitative analytics to assess whether or not your brand logo, image, website, etc. appeal to your targeted audience. Quantitative systems can assess your brand vitality, loyalty, and other attributes your brand should contain. Qualitative research will involve more active work from your marketing team, since they will need to connect with your target group through interviews, polls, and other means of discovering key attributes your brand can improve on.
2. Taking a Casual Approach to Social Media
If you are a new business, most of the social media content put up by your marketing team may be created in-house. If so, they should have key equipment such as computers, video recorders, and audio equipment, to capture quality image and sound. Blurry images, poorly edited video, and content that does not fully reflect the ethos of your brand – are best not uploaded at all. Social media is all about telling your story, but ensure your team has the right equipment to do so.
3. Spreading Yourself Too Thin
From the outset, you should know the age, lifestyle, and values of the audience your business success will stand on. This will ensure your expenditure on social media, graphic design, and website design, will obtain an optimal ROI. You will need to carry out extensive geographic, demographic, and psychographic research. This will enable your branding team to work in a more focused, but also a more inspired manner, since your team will know exactly whom they are seeking to inspire.
4. Making Too Many Changes
If you have a brand your audience identifies with and is loyal too, don’t change its pillar – like its logo or colors – just because it is time to make change. ‘Don’t fix what isn’t broken’ is a useful adage when it comes to branding. Do you recall the time that Coca-Cola changed its popular formula to match Pepsi’s sweeter recipe? This less-than-inspired change was quickly dumped when brand sales began to plummet. Know who you are and don’t change the cornerstone of your identity; this applies as much to your product itself as it does to your branding.
When it comes to creating a successful branding strategy, information is everything. Undertaken quantitative and qualitative research into your target audience and really hone in on them when you create your logo, website, social media campaigns, etc. Once you hit on a winning formula, change only what you need to. You want your company to be a standard bearer that is innovative and sensitive to trends, but you should never lose sight of its very essence – your target group.
