The most common branding mistakes made by marketers
Online marketing is a complex activity. Besides the quick advancements of the digital environment, technology is rising at great speeds. Nowadays, everyone has a phone that can access the entire web database. That is why the online medium is the best environment in which businesses can promote their products to an almost infinite number of interested customers.
However, there are some big yet very overlooked differences between pure online marketing strategies and other offline marketing schemes that somehow connect with the online ones.
When it comes to starting an online brand, there are many things that can go totally wrong. Lots of mistakes to avoid, lots of challenges to overcome, and most importantly, lots of important decisions to make; these are the aspects that are challenging every marketer, entrepreneur, or small businessmen who will try to promote his or her business in the online sphere.
In today’s post, I’m going to share some of the most common mistakes that marketers do while trying to establish and grow their brand presence online.
Instead of falling into the same pitfalls, better start noting down everything you find relevant for the future. Don’t commit the same mistakes as many marketers did, and you’ll find your brand progressing at the fastest speeds. Let’s get right to it.
1. Failing to Properly Optimize Your Brand’s Online Presence
It doesn’t matter what your business is about. As long as you want to promote it online, there are certain “big factors” you need to take into consideration:
Your SEO Strategy
Every big brand has an SEO strategy in place. After all, you don’t want to pay for all the traffic and for sure you’d make good use of some free, organic traffic. Here’s where many marketers go wrong: they understand that they absolutely have to place their websites in the SERPs, however, they get stuck with other marketing strategies that might now benefit them in the longer run.
When you launch a new brand presence, search engine optimization should be the first in your mind. First, take care of the on-site optimization, and then proceed with the offline one.
Your Social Media Presence
Social media is huge right now. Everyone’s spending time on at least one social network, and you can probably find every type of customer you can imagine. All in all, social networks are the most frequented online environments that are visited by our future customers.
You need to properly display your brand name throughout more social networks. Build professional pages and optimize them as well as you can. Once you’re all set, you need to offer your target audience personalized, valuable, and consistent content that either solves their problems or helps them satisfy needs.
Website User Experience
Some websites can even give you headaches. You keep waiting for pages to load, you fail to find important details, and the overall user experience they’re offering is unbearable. Well, that’s one of the frequent mistakes that you must avoid.
When you welcome a potentially interested customer, you want him to feel like at home. Do your best to improve his experience, and your brand’s reputation will go up.
Some websites can even give you headaches. You keep waiting for pages to load, you fail to find important details, and the overall user experience they’re offering is unbearable. Well, that’s one of the frequent mistakes that you must avoid.
When you welcome a potentially interested customer, you want him to feel like at home. Do your best to improve his experience, and your brand’s reputation will go up.
Some websites can even give you headaches. You keep waiting for pages to load, you fail to find important details, and the overall user experience they’re offering is unbearable. Well, that’s one of the frequent mistakes that you must avoid.
When you welcome a potentially interested customer, you want him to feel like at home. Do your best to improve his experience, and your brand’s reputation will go up.
2. They Don’t Have a Pre-Marketing Strategy
When you’re launching a new brand, your primary goal is to improve the awareness of the public. You want your name to be heard by as many potential customers as possible, therefore you must think of some pre-marketing strategies that will aid you with your goal.
If a product or a brand has some buzz before its launch, it’ll gain a lot of momentum. During your launch days, you’ll probably sell your products more than you’ll do in the next following months.
Implement some pre-marketing strategies like discounts, exclusive spots, and other opportunities that people can seize right before your launch date. Do not neglect the pre-marketing process; you’ll feel sorry for it later.
3. Not Defining a Specific Target Audience
There are many causes for which businesses and products fail to work. However, one of the most serious mistakes you can commit is failing to establish a specific target audience for your brand. Your target audience should be narrowed down to a “target persona.”
Once you figure out who your ideal target customer is (target persona), you can start crafting your content, your marketing strategies, and your product or service personalization according to his or her needs and problems.
4. They Neglect Networking
Resourcefulness is the most important quality that an entrepreneur and marketer can cultivate in time. You’re resourceful when you know different people, when you know where to look when you encounter problems, and when you understand that almost every issue can be solved through one way or another.
In the online marketing business, networking plays a huge role in the establishment of new connections and relationships with other individuals and businesses. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the best platforms to look for connectivity with like-minded professionals, so if you haven’t started, do it right now.
5. The Brand Isn’t Product-Specific
When you think of Coca-Cola – what do you see? Most people will immediately see the bottle of black coke, maybe even cold as ice. Yet, Coca-Cola is a giant corporation that owns much more products and spreads across more industries. They have succeeded to gain this incredible popularity because they focused their branding and marketing efforts on one product only: the ever-lasting Coca-Cola bottle of juice.
If you want your customers to remember your brand while presenting it online, you need to make it product-specific. Emphasize the benefits that your products and services offer, and make it easy to remember. The simpler, the better.
6. They Fail to Send Out a Clear Message
What’s your brand’s unique value proposition? Is it something that really stands out? Is it something that oversteps the benefits of the competition? If your answer is a clear “yes”, you can even skip this point. But, if your brand’s message isn’t that well-established, you might have a problem.
You see, every consumer wants to know what he’s getting from the deals he’s making. After all, he’s trading his most valuable currency for something productive in return. How can he come to you if your brand’s promise isn’t clear, satisfying, or helpful?
The answer is simple: he just won’t. He’ll find another brand that’s offering something better than you. The problem doesn’t lie in the quality of the products, but rather in the way marketers present them. Put your product in the best possible angle and it’ll sell!
7. The Brand Name is Hurting the Business
Here’s a subtle thing that can go wrong. The name of your brand will stay forever, and you just can’t turn back. That’s why sometimes figuring the perfect brand name is one of the most challenging tasks when launching a new brand online.
A good brand name is easy to remember, easy to spell, and easy to associate. The association part is definitely important, as that’s how the human mind works; it gathers information through experiences, and then it links that overall perspective of something to an object, person, or feeling.
For example, Skittles has succeeded to spark representations of bright colors and rainbows in most of their consumers’ minds. Whenever you think of Skittles, you see a variety of colors along with the small fruit-flowered sweets that taste extremely well. Moreover, the product name is easy to spell and easy to remember. After all, they’ve matched the necessary criteria for being remarkable.
8. They Fail to Be Consistent
The majority of brand launches fail because they fail to be consistent with their activity and promises. A blog that does no longer provide new content will die. It’s the same with your brand. You start with a promise, you enter the market, you make yourself visible, and then you’re on. Your activity needs to continue no matter what!
Hannah Watson, Coordinating Online Marketer at Aussie Writings shares her perspective over the consistency issue that many marketers and brands fail to address:
“Once you launch your brand, there’s no turning back. A “short break” from work might represent the company’s final stop. If you look closely, every successful big brand has maintained its consistency throughout time. Clients expect stability, they expect updates, and they expect to see motivated people behind the products and services they’re leveraging on a consistent basis.”
Takeaways
Never expect your job to be easy. After all, what you’re trying to accomplish is to become an authority in your niche market. Most consumers want to deal with the best companies, therefore you’ll encounter a lot of competition along the way.
Obviously, that shouldn’t be of any concern to you, as your brand is unique and can be marketed in even more unique ways. Keep your head up and always look for solutions instead of blaming what happened. You’ll always have problems. Yet, the way you approach them and solve them is what truly differentiates you from the rest.