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For any business, it is common to commit mistakes. It is also often common to rectify these mistakes with appropriate steps at the earliest. But the price of all mistakes is not same. For a developed business with an established market, mistakes may not affect their brand image at all.
On the other hand, when it comes to startups and the companies that are just beginning with their brand campaign may find these mistakes fatal. This is precisely why start-ups to take mistakes more seriously when they can really affect their brand image.
Let us introduce here seven common branding mistakes that startups should avoid.
1. Not being able to create a definitive and immediate impression
Most startups do not understand the power of a business brand and accordingly take steps from the early days of their operation. How can you make your brand synonymous with the products or services you sell? For example just the way online payment service reminds you of PayPal, how can your product similarly refer to your brand?
For building such a definitive and immediate impression with your business brand you need to build a rigorous web presence. Building a solid and strong brand identity will also have its positive effect on the search engine ranks. When heating search engine ranks are important for businesses to make their business offerings discoverable it is the brand that makes a crucial part of it.
2. Trying to please everyone at the same time
No business can actually please everyone unless it becomes a phenomenal brand like Google or Facebook. It is particularly true for startups and small companies. They have limited resources, too many budget constraints, lack of talents and manpower and above all, lack of experience. With the limitation on every front, they just cannot afford to make a big stance to address the millions.
They have to offer something within their capacity and so they need to serve a target audience with their offerings. When a business tries to please everyone they actually fail to create interest in their business Brent. This is why it is important to make your voice heard within a selective audience rather than everyone in the wide open market.
3. Duplicating the competitors
Many small businesses and startups when starting with their website and the digital campaign they just follow the footprints of their competitor brands and they end up creating a website or a mobile app or a social media page for their business which look similar to their competitors.
In spite of offering really unique and never before quality in your products and services, you feel to create an impression with your business brand just because of offering the similar look and feel like your competitors.
4. Consistency in branding elements
What are the typical elements that constitute a business brand? Is it just the logo or the packaging of the products, the user experience of the website or a mobile app or the overall impact of a business through myriad avenues and variety of channels? We can presume that the last one is correct. This is why consistency in all brand elements in respect of appearance and brand message is truly important if you want to create a lasting impression on your audience.
If you are going to build a new mobile app for your business it cannot look completely different from your existing website. Similarly, with the new design of your website you just cannot change everything from the previous version. The typical elements that your audience usually connects your brand wheat should remain constant and unaltered.
5. Lacking a compelling presence on social media
For making purchases buyers depend on social media reviews, comments, and business contents more than ever. Naturally, businesses all find it crucial to make a robust social media presence. Startups in spite of having their own social media business page are not regular and frequent with their contents and brand promotion.
Make sure you participate frequently in social media conversation. Secondly, create a where righty of social media posts with the right mix of video image text animation graphics and text content representing your brand story and business offerings.
Remain engaged with your audience with frequent comments and responses to the audience. Run promotional campaigns and try to stand out from the rest with innovative campaign ideas. Take help of automation tools like Hootsuite for frequent social media posting.
6. Lacking solid content strategy and frequent updates
For any business website, it is important to stay alive with frequent content updates. When you publish contents regularly you automatically create bigger chances to be discovered by the organic traffic searching related keywords across the search engines.
There is no better way to create a loyal audience who look up to your brand than by delivering unique and relevant content rich with helpful information and insights. To make your content strategy help your business brand here are some effective tips.
Publish text content that is quickly scannable and engaging for the low attention span of the mobile audience. When creating rich media content, take care of the file size so that they do not put a hindrance for the page loading speed. Instead of offering a large volume of the text offers a mix of contents with visual playing a predominant role.
7. Not taking the help of analytics and metrics
Finally, you need to evaluate the engagement of audience with your brand frequently and you can only do this with the help of analytics and metrics. For both the mobile app and website frequent evaluation of the user metrics is important to detect the hindering elements and create a plan for improving the digital presence of the brand.
In the case of social media also frequently take note of user metrics the volume of visitors and the metrics contents that are enjoying more popularity over others. Analytics and metrics help you perfecting your content strategy from time to time and gain more discoverability and traction.
To conclude,
Startups are more prone to branding mistakes than the big companies. It is also them who suffer from these branding mistakes most. For any start up remaining alerted and responsive to the audience engagement is the most important thing to make their brand shine through.
Related Read: 6 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make That Can Silently Kill Your Startup !
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by the mentioned authors. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the authors of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
About The Author:
Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO at Nimblechapps, a fast-growing iPhone application company. The current innovation and updates of the field lure him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.