Branding is a very important part of making your business successful because it creates an identity. With an identity, the customer has something to relate to or interact with to find some mutual common ground. On average, it takes around five to seven impressions before a person remembers your brand.
So imagine not having any branding or a poorly thought out brand image? The likelihood of getting the recognition you deserve for the company’s hard work is going to be diminished to some extent. With that being said, there are certain steps that you can take as a business to help boost your brand awareness.
However, there are mistakes that can be made along the way, so if you’re trying to help build brand awareness in the best way possible, here are five mistakes to avoid.
1. Being too broad when marketing your brand
Although expanding your horizons might be good in some respects, when it comes to marketing, it can have the opposite effect. When marketing your branding, you want to be careful in choosing the right audience to target your marketing to. If it’s too broad and you’re trying to cater to everyone on planet earth, then chances are, it’s not going to be effective.
A better way to do it instead is by focusing on your target audience. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then it’s important to figure that out before spending any money on marketing. Otherwise, it’s likely to fail in providing results or be fruitful in targeting your audience successfully.
In order to spot when you’re being too broad in your marketing, consider these tips:
- Your audience range is very diverse.
- There’s no common or mutual ground in your targeting.
- You can’t detail your target audience specifically.
- The marketing campaigns are receiving a negative or confused reaction from those receiving them.
A few good examples of targeting your audience would be to track your audience via analytical platforms like Google Analytics, conduct market research, or look at the existing data that you have on your customers if any. By marketing to your audience, you’re likely to see better interactions with your campaigns and advertising in general.
2. Not tracking or monitoring your progress with brand awareness
For small businesses, the cost of branding can cost anywhere between $5,000 and $30,000 per year. This is only a guideline of how much each individual element of branding can cost. When it comes to your marketing budget, a rule of thumb is to spend around 5% of your business turnover on marketing.
So, all in all, that’s quite a hefty sum of money that businesses will spend on marketing and branding their business. With that being said, you don’t want that money going to waste, but many businesses can do so because of not tracking or monitoring any progress that’s been made. When you measure brand awareness, it can help make informed decisions for future campaigns.
All the effort and money spent in boosting your brand’s awareness should be monitored and tracked closely. It can help you know what’s working and what isn’t, so you can change and tweak your marketing campaigns to perform better.
Branding your business and promoting your brand is a long-term strategy and one that, for some businesses, can take longer to establish than others. The goal to achieve strong brand awareness is loyalty. Loyalty from your customers can do wonders for your business and its presence both offline and online.
There are some great tools that you can use for tracking your efforts, including BrandMentions, Sproutsocial, and Semrush, to name but a few. Here’s a little bit of information about each tool for reference.
BrandMentions
BrandMentions is a tool to monitor everything that’s being said about your company or product across the channels that you operate on. It can monitor your brand’s performance whilst providing instant alerts whenever your brand is mentioned.
This is a tool that allows you to not only attract and acquire customers but also retain them, more importantly.
Sproutsocial
Sproutsocial, in its broader definition, is a social media management tool. However, this one is effective in providing the features necessary to listen to what your customers are saying about your brand. Not only does it find valuable intelligence like competitor insights, but it can ensure your brand evolves with your target audience as they grow.
Semrush
Semrush is a leading platform when it comes to SEO, and there are many great features attached to it. In relation to monitoring your brand, it can help track your rivals’ online mentions and track your own social media presence too.
3. Using data or results in the wrong way
The data or results you collect from your marketing efforts can be used in the wrong way. How? Well, if you focus on only the positive results and neglect to address the negatives ones, then those negative results or campaigns are going to be the thing that stunts your growth as a company.
It can be handy to look at the positives but ensure your marketing team is looking at where things have gone wrong. There is likely going to be some fluctuation in the success of your brand awareness, but if one campaign is highly successful and another falls dead in the water, then there will be a reason for it.
There may be many reasons for a negative result to your marketing, and this might be your brand being too new and not having enough loyalty yet amongst your following. It could also be a case of your market research being a little off-kilter, so assess your results and make sure you spend time correcting where things went wrong.
It’s much more beneficial spending time on your weaknesses and improving them than relying on what’s successful and working.
4. Spending too little on brand marketing
In the same way that you can overdo it when it comes to brand marketing, you might also not spend enough. This isn’t just financially but also in time and effort. So when 43% of customers spend more money on brands that they’re loyal to, it pays to invest money, time, and effort into brand marketing.
Those brands that have become household names have not done so overnight for the most part. It has to be said that in some cases, new businesses have achieved faster success in becoming a household brand due to the online world. However, it’s important to invest as much as the business can when it comes to marketing both financially and with whatever resources are available.
The more you allow for brand marketing and brand awareness in general, there arises more opportunity to scale up the business. For many companies, it’s better to sacrifice your growth as a business than to risk the progress being made on your branding. Even though business growth is important, it’s the branding of your business that can grow it anyway.
If you don’t have an in-house marketing team or the resources in-house to work on your brand’s marketing, then you can always consider outsourcing it. Outsourcing can be a great way to help fulfill work that needs to be done without sacrificing the progression of your business. It also tends to be a lot more cost-effective.
5. A lack of consistency
Consistency is a big one when it comes to branding. This can often be caused by budget cuts within a company, but sometimes it can be down to poor productivity within the workplace. As you become consistent with the marketing you provide to your audience, it helps to build that elusive brand loyalty that you’re after.
If your content suddenly stops, then what percentage of your audience is going to be actively engaged and on the lookout for your business? Stick to what works instead of trying to tweak and change something that might not even be broken. When something works, keep it going until its performance drops too much.
Rebranding is sometimes necessary but only if being consistent with your content isn’t having the right level of impact that you’re after. Automation is proving to be highly successful for many brands nowadays because it means you can schedule content without needing to hit publish manually.
Some great automation platforms for marketing that are worth trying out are HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Autopilot. Automation is definitely very beneficial for saving a lot of time and resources that could be spent elsewhere in the business. A lot of these platforms are also free to use, which can be helpful for smaller businesses and startups that have limited funds available.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to building brand awareness, have patience. In this digital age, getting recognized is a long battle and one that some businesses take years to craft. Trust the process by doing the market research in order to discover your audience. Be consistent, invest and monitor your progress so that you can continue to refine and better your marketing efforts for your brand.
Author Bio: Natalie Redman
Email – natalieannredman92@gmail.com
Freelance writer for many clients including Skale, Natalie has two years of copywriting experience. Natalie has a wide range of experience copywriting for web pages for businesses across many industries. She’s also an owner of two blog websites and a YouTube content creator.
