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Branding is essential to your marketing strategy – your brand is part of what separates you from all your competitors. And without clear, consistent, and authentic marketing, customers will look somewhere else to have their needs met. Our marketing agency specializes in helping our clients refresh their brand to ensure all of their marketing strategies communicate clear, consistent, and authentic messages to the masses.
Over the years of helping our cool clients grow, we’ve noticed many common branding mistakes. So we’ve put together five big branding blunders to help you with your marketing strategies. If you have any questions or want to talk about your own brand refresh, contact our marketing agency!
Website Design Problems
The design of your website must communicate your brand’s values. Failure to do so is confusing for your target audience.
Hopefully, you have a detailed style guide that includes:
- Acceptable fonts
- Colour schemes
- Visual guidelines
- What acceptable (and unacceptable) to do with logos
- background lighting
All of these items communicate your brand’s identity, so choose wisely and be consistent! You don’t want to differentiate yourself as an economically priced company, then use luxury colours like purple and gold on your website. It just doesn’t add up!
In addition to your website, all visual assets on social platforms should abide by your style guide as well. Consistency is key. How confusing would it be to go from your company’s light, fun and value-oriented Facebook Page to a dark and dreamy website. You’d probably be thinking, is this the same company? What’s going on!? It has the potential to turn customers away, so be consistent.
Copywriting Errors
Next to visuals, the copy has the most significant impact on your brand. When done correctly, it’s a simple way to show people what you’re all about!
Your comprehensive brand book should have guidelines on the voice, tone, and mood to convey on all written material. Consider including some of your brand’s favourite words to use too! Just make sure what you’re saying is true. If you don’t have a revolutionary product, don’t tell people that you do! This isn’t authentic marketing, and it will backfire.
Be clear, be consistent, and be authentic!
Failing to Differentiate
Why should someone choose you over a competitor? What’s your edge? This is what we call brand differentiation.
If you fail to differentiate your brand from your competition, customers have no reason to buy from you and will likely opt for another solution.
To fix this issue, our marketing agency advises you to find a distinguishing characteristic that separates you from the masses, and build your branding around that.
Many brands suffer from trying to please everyone as well. Trust us. This isn’t a great way to differentiate your brand! If you try to please everyone, you’ll gain no one. Instead, keep your target audience in mind when creating marketing materials. What are their needs, pain points, and how can you offer them a solution?
Our marketing agency creates buyer personas, which represent your ideal customer, their thoughts, daily problems, typical income levels, and more. Then, we create customized marketing campaigns to target these buyer personas. We recommend keeping your ideal buyer persona in mind to help you differentiate your brand.
Randomized Marketing Tactics
Throwing things against the wall to see what sticks is inefficient and costly. Especially when you’re looking to create PPC ads, these ads typically charge you when someone clicks on them, but that doesn’t mean they will become your customer!
A combination of keyword research, ad copy, landing page optimization, and custom-designed landing pages increases the chances of turning a click into a customer. This is one area our marketing agency has extensive experience.
Creating buyer personas also helps us when determining the best tactics for finding where your customers hang out online. We research what platforms they use, where they go to find information, how they interact with content, and much more to determine your perfect digital marketing strategy.
Failing to Ask for Help
If you’re struggling with branding, reach out and ask for help. You can even get a free consultation from our marketing agency to find out more about digital strategies and how we can help build your brand. Remember, branding doesn’t need to be tough – be clear, be consistent, and be authentic.
Did this article provide a fresh perspective?
Did this article strike a chord with what’s going on in your organization? Do give us a shout at 604.559.7509 and set up a discovery meeting. We would love to see if we can help.
Or, stop by our marketing agency in Vancouver⏤we always have chocolate!