6 Common Branding Mistakes Businesses Make

Building a strong brand is critical to the success of your business. When you have a strong brand identity, you’ll be able to more effectively differentiate your business from your competitors and communicate the value you provide to your audience. This brand recognition can pay huge dividends over time, helping you build a loyal customer base, establish your business as a trusted industry leader and experience sustained growth year over year.

While effective branding is an essential step to get right, many businesses struggle with this important aspect of their marketing efforts. Often, we see the same branding mistakes being made when we begin working with new clients, and many of these mistakes undermine their ability to build trust and recognition with their customers. The following overview will help you understand the most common branding mistakes to avoid.

Inconsistent Branding

Inconsistent branding is one of the most common mistakes businesses make, and it can significantly impact your ability to connect with your audience. For branding to be effective, it must be consistent across all platforms where people engage with your brand. When businesses use different logos, colors and messaging across platforms, it creates confusion and makes your branding forgettable. Inconsistent branding can weaken customer loyalty and make it hard to grow your customer base over time.

To avoid this problem, you should create brand guidelines that clearly spell out all of the critical elements of your brand, including your:

Logo
Colors
Fonts
Imagery
Voice
Messaging

Make sure all content you distribute as part of your marketing strategy adheres to these guidelines. Regularly review your brand assets to make sure they remain consistent. If you notice inconsistencies with your branding, schedule a brief meeting with your marketing team to review the guidelines and reinforce the importance of consistent branding throughout your marketing efforts.

Neglecting to Define Your Target Audience

It’s understandable to want to cast a wide net when trying to attract new customers. However, creating a generic brand strategy that tries to target all demographics is a costly mistake that often prevents you from connecting with the specific audience that is most likely to find your message appealing. Instead, it’s important to precisely define your target audience and craft your brand messaging in a way that resonates with their specific needs, concerns and pain points.

To avoid generic brand messaging that falls flat and fails to resonate with your audience:

Conduct thorough market research to identify the demographics, interests, values, motivations and pain points of your target audience
Develop detailed customer personas that present the relevant information for your target audience in a way that is easy for your team to understand
Craft a brand identity that communicates the specific messages that will connect with this audience and resonate with their needs

Relying too Heavily on Design Trends

Leveraging the latest design trends can help position your business as modern and relevant; however, relying too heavily on these trends can negatively impact your brand over the long term. Design trends can be fleeting, and the most popular design practices today can feel dated a year or two from now. This can leave your brand looking out of touch once the trends change.

Instead of building a brand based on the latest trends, it’s best to create a brand identity that is timeless and will endure regardless of what’s trending at any particular moment. Then, you can adopt the latest trends that align with your core brand identity to maintain consistent messaging that still shows you’re continually moving with the times.

Poor Copywriting and Complicated Messaging

Many businesses focus on logos, color palettes and imagery when they create their branding. While these elements are important, effective content is just as critical to the success of your brand messaging, if not more so. Copywriting is an art and a skill that is worth investing in to ensure your messaging is compelling and clearly conveys your branding to your audience. When businesses cut corners on their copywriters, it can result in poorly written content and overly complex messaging that fails to convey a compelling brand story.

To avoid poorly written content and overly complicated messaging:

Invest in quality content marketing services
Focus on a primary message that distills the essence of your business and what makes you unique
Keep your messaging simple, yet impactful
Focus on the benefits you deliver to your customers rather than the features associated with your offering
Test different messaging approaches to determine what your audience finds most compelling

Ignoring Your Company’s Core Values

Your company’s purpose, mission and core values should be the primary driving force behind your branding. These items establish what your business stands for and plays an important role in your ability to connect with your audience. Ignoring your purpose and core values when creating your brand identity will result in disjoint messaging that makes you appear less trustworthy to your audience.

The most effective brands lean into their core values when developing the different elements of their brand identity, and they use this values-based messaging consistently across all the marketing channels that are part of their strategy.

Copying Your Competitors’ Brand Elements

For your branding to be effective, it must help you stand out from your competitors. Copying branding elements from your competitors will do the exact opposite – it will make it harder for your audience to distinguish you from the other companies in your market. This will weaken your brand recognition and make it harder to build a loyal customer base.

The best approach is to develop brand elements that are completely unique from the other businesses in your market. Make sure your messaging consistently showcases your unique selling proposition (USP) across all your marketing efforts so that your audience understands the value provided by your offering. When you have branding that is original and clearly conveys your USP, it will be easier to cultivate the loyal customers necessary for sustained business growth.

Webolutions Can Help You Develop Effective Branding That Grows Your Business

Developing a strong, compelling brand is challenging, but it is one of the most critical elements impacting the success of your marketing efforts. The best way to avoid the common mistakes discussed above is to work with an experienced marketing agency that can help you navigate the brand development process. This is where Webolutions shines.

We’ve been Denver’s leading digital marketing agency since 1994. Over the last 30 years, we’ve helped thousands of clients build cohesive, compelling brand identities that effectively convey what makes them special and unique. Our unique Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to branding will highlight your company’s competitive differentiation based on your core values, purpose, mission and specific set of core business strengths.

As part of our Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach, we’ll guide your leadership team on a journey to uncover the elements that make you different from your competitors. We’ll help you evolve away from focusing on your products and services, instead emphasizing the meaningful transformations you create for your customers and clients. We’ll use this information to develop a Brand Platform™ containing your:

Clearly defined core messaging standards
Key brand attributes
Brand voice and tone
Company core values and purpose
Unique and differentiating vocabulary
Overall content marketing topics
Brand imagery standards
Unique brand story

Your Brand Platform™ will form the foundation of all the messaging used throughout your marketing efforts, ensuring the consistent branding necessary to connect with your audience and build a loyal customer base that fuels sustained business growth.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

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Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin is the content strategist at Webolutions. He develops tactical content strategy recommendations and creates all content for clients to achieve their goals and elevate their success. With over 13 years of experience in content marketing, Andrew has the experience to write engaging content that conveys a client's brand story, builds trust and establishes thought leadership.Learn more about Andrew Martin.