Well, we have come to the final installment on Effective Branding for Small Business Made Easy Series. I hope you’ve enjoyed your lessons and learned a lot about creating a solid brand for your business.
In this final article we are going to touch on some of the most common branding mistakes - so you can avoid making them & use branding effectively to increase your sales.
As we know, branding is more than just a pretty logo. It’s about creating a seamless experience for consumers so that they will know, like and trust your business the instant they see it.
Remember your brand is your promise to consumers that you can meet their expectations. It's important that you build it carefully, deliberately and be prepared to invest a lot of time and effort maintaining it.
Audience
One of the biggest mistakes I see when it comes to effective branding is the failure to understand your target audience.
Before you begin branding or selling anything for that matter it’s important to have a good understand of what type of audience you're speaking to. Take time to get to know them, understand their problems, their wants, needs, the places they like to hang out, the brands they follow. Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, branding and messaging will be much easier.
Competition
Failure to research the competition is another big mistake. This is especially important if you are a new business. Researching your competition will help you get understanding on what established businesses in your industry are doing right and what they’re doing wrong. It will also help you see opportunities that will give you brand an advantage.
Look at their products, services, websites and social profiles. Pay attention to their target audiences. What are people saying about them? What can you do better?
Feedback
Taking feedback from the wrong or limited sources can cause a lot of damage to brand campaign. Consumer feedback is very important and should be leveraged to boost your brand but it’s important that you take feedback from the right sources.
Every business owner wants great feedback. It’s our natural instinct to only want to focus on the good things, but limiting our sources to only positive feedback can actually cause more harm than good, because it won't help you set measurable and appropriate goals.
Inconsistency
We’ve talked a lot about brand consistency in previous articles because it has a huge impact on your business. Consistency helps raise awareness, loyalty and credibility. If there are inconsistencies in your brand consumers will become confused and lose trust. The more consistent you are with your image, promotions, communication and every other interaction you make with your audience the stronger brand presence will be.
Building and managing a brand isn’t always an easy thing. There are many businesses that think a brand is something you establish and then it takes care of itself. Unfortunately, this is never the case.
If you want your business to be successful you must be ready to adapt to the constant changing needs of the market and you should constantly improve and refine your brand to provide better quality and consistency for your customers because ultimately your success depends on them.
As we close this final installment of Effective Branding for Small Business Made Easy Series, I sincerely hope that you’ve learned a lot about how to brand your small business and even though the lessons have come to an end I want you to know that you can still feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I’m more than happy to help.
I help Small Business with Big Dreams to achieve their true potential & much awaited growth. If this is useful for you and you’d like some help to position yourself or your business as an expert, or just need to put in place a predictive client generating strategy - just send me a message with the word 'PRIVATE' at mithun@mithunnarkar.com, and perhaps we can help you put together a strategy to achieve your dreams & targets as well.
Hope this has been helpful.
Talk to you soon.
Mithun Narkar
P.S. Don’t forget, I’m here to help, so if you have questions just ask!
The fastest way to reach me is here: www.mithunnarkar.com
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