As a company owner, protecting and strengthening your brand should be one of your top priorities. This is because your corporate identity plays various vital roles that will serve you as you grow your business.
Your brand represents you and your products or services. It also tells people what your company is all about and enables your audience to know what to expect from you. Additionally, your brand helps promote recognition.
A strong brand will also guide all your marketing efforts and point them in the right direction. Moreover, it will help you stay focused as you work on achieving your business goals.
Lastly, an established brand will also give your team motivation, direction, and a sense of pride.
Because of these reasons, having a well-thought-out brand strategy in Dubai is a must if you want to run a successful business and sustain its growth.
Making the Most of Your Branding Efforts
No matter how much you carefully plan and implement your branding strategy, some simple mistakes can cause your investment to go to waste. Worse, these errors may negatively affect your brand.
If you want to maintain and continue building a strong brand, avoid these branding mistakes:
1. Failing to highlight your value proposition and distinctive qualities
Since your brand represents your business and everything you have to offer, you must ensure that it effectively communicates what makes your company, products, or services valuable to people.
Because of this, you can’t afford to be lax about what you put on your website, promotional, and other company reading materials. You have to highlight your logo tagline, mission statement, and other elements that define your brand to avoid immediately losing your audience as well as your potential customers.
Additionally, do not forget to highlight everything that makes your brand unique and special. By doing so, you will pull in more of your target audience and keep their loyalty.
2. Inconsistency among different media
Consistency is an integral part of branding. If your website’s color scheme, fonts, and voice differ from the official ones you use on your print materials and social media posts, you will confuse your target audience.
To avoid driving away your potential customers, make sure your company visuals match across all platforms. These include your website, social media accounts, ads, and other print materials.
To ensure cohesion among your various platforms and channels, create official company brand guidelines. This guide should include your preferred colors, fonts, voice, logo usage, and other essential branding elements.
Additionally, make sure everyone follows this guide so that your business stays consistent and always looks professional.
3. Poor customer service
Selling complicated products or offering a service that requires customers to get in touch with you can often be challenging not only for your business, but for consumers as well. You have to ensure that everyone who reaches out to you gets help with their issues completely and quickly.
Failing to do so, and being unable to acknowledge receipt of their questions or concerns, will cause your brand to be associated with difficulty and frustration. And this will do nothing good for your business.
To maintain an excellent brand reputation and strengthen it, make sure people view your business as helpful. You can do this by providing excellent customer service to everyone who needs assistance or reaches out to you.
Install a live chat option on your website to provide users with easy access to customer service. Make sure you and your team respond to emails and messages immediately to let consumers know that you value them.
4. Failing to research the competition
Whether you are starting a new business or you already own an established one, knowing what your competition has and what they are doing is always crucial.
When you neglect to study your competition, you won’t know what strategies they are following that enable them to stay on top. You will also have no idea which changes or updates to implement on your products or services so you can remain competitive in the market.
By doing research on your competition, you will understand what thriving businesses in your industry have done to stay on top. You will find out where they succeeded, where they have failed, and where you can give your brand advantage.
5. Piggybacking on all trends
Today, there is always something trending and everyone wants to get in on these latest trends, even businesses. Although getting on the bandwagon offers some advantages, this is not true all the time.
Since trends come and go, you have to pick only the best ones to jump on. If you piggyback on everything that is trending, your business will get lost in the tide. There is a great chance that you will fail to use them to your advantage as well.
As such, it is vital that you ride only on trends that you are sure will give you back invaluable returns.
Whether you are running or starting a business in a competitive market, put creating an effective branding strategy on top of your list of priorities. By doing so, you will guarantee the growth, stability, and success of your company.
AUTHOR BIO
Stuart Harris is the Creative Director at Yellow, a Dubai branding agency, digital partner and advertising company working with progressive businesses to build bold, meaningful brands.
Now that you know what you don’t have to do, it’s time to know what you have to. Mr. Tej Kohli’s official blog. #TejTalks can enlighten you about the process, techniques, and strategies regarding branding and marketing.
