17 Jun 5 Bad Brand Marketing Habits to Avoid
Branding your business is an art as much as it is a marketing strategy.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to brand marketing—it depends very much on your business and the personality you’ve chosen for your brand. However, like all arts, there are bad habits you should avoid to maximise the potential of your branding efforts.
Here are the five bad branding habits you should avoid!
1. Using an unrelated business name
It might be tempting to choose a name that is unrelated and unique—like ‘Apple’ which has nothing to do with technology—but as a small business, brand names that are not informative or obvious don’t work well.
Choose a name that matches your brand, especially if you’re a small brand or if you’re just starting out. This doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with the spelling or combine existing words to name your business. One of our clients, Skinlicious, is a good example of this. Notice how they’ve used the word ‘skin’ and part of ‘delicious’ to allude to the fact that they’re a skincare brand.
2. Typos and grammar errors
Typos and grammar errors are extremely unsightly for customers and make for awkward branding. They make you appear unprofessional and lazy—and that’s bad news no matter how you’ve decided to brand yourself.
An occasional grammatical mistake might slip past even the strictest editor, but you should still try to avoid as many of them as possible by proofreading any piece of text you write. Make sure to read through text after graphics are added, because that’s when unintentional typos tend to pop up.
3. Marketing to new customers only
When doing any kind of marketing, it’s tempting to put more emphasis on expanding your customer base instead of appealing to your existing customers. After all, that is the logical way of increasing your sales. But the biggest benefit of brand marketing comes from compounding customer loyalty so that they’ll help you market via word of mouth.
So instead of reaching out to a non-customer target audience, work on polishing up your customer service and treating existing customers like VIPs. Build relationships with these people and make it easier for them to say good things about you to their friends and family. It’s more effective marketing than any explosive graphic or viral video you could make yourself.
4. Focusing on prices
Although cost is essential information that customers need before making a purchase, try not to use this information when brand marketing. Prices tend to distract customers from the problems your brand is helping to solve and the value you bring.
Share your brand’s vision with your customers instead of featuring prices in your marketing materials. Brand marketing is most effective this way.
5. Resisting market changes
Finally, never be inflexible about making changes to your brand. As you get to know your customer base and understand their needs better, you’ll have to adapt your brand to meet their needs better. If you refuse to do so, you might end up becoming redundant as the market changes and trends change.
Not every change needs your attention, but if these changes affect the value you provide customers, then you should take action.
This doesn’t mean you have to change your brand’s personality or rebrand yourself entirely, but sometimes, you might have to switch marketing platforms and produce different types of content in order to keep up with your customers and the values of your brand.
Need more advice on your company’s brand marketing strategies? Contact us for more branding help.
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