Top 7 Online Branding Disasters and How To Avoid Them

There have been many London brands that have become extremely popular because of their branding strategy and techniques.

It can be difficult to get your brand known, but if you follow relevant techniques for your business, you can find huge returns on your investment.

Many start-up brands think they can start a brand from nothing, and some businesses don’t do their research and make huge mistakes which cause them to fail such as the following.

Table of Contents

1. Not understanding your audience

To have a successful business, you are going to need to understand and analyse your target audience. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you are going to seriously struggle to make a brand that they will resonate with. Understanding your audience’s needs, and nuisances will help you greatly in your branding journey. By understanding your audience, you will be able to create marketing campaigns that are targeted rather than having to create broad campaigns and waste money.

Here are some things to find out:

Age
Gender
Location
Education
Occupation
Salary
Family Status
Hobbies
Interests
Nuisances

2. Not understanding your business

Another mistake that is apparent is that many business owners don’t actually know or understand their business. Although it is essential to understand your audience, it is also important to understand your business so that you can show its value of it to your customers. There are so many areas that need attention to create the brand image that you want.

Examples of understanding your business:

Industry
Niche
Specialisation
Your products
Your Service
Values

3. Not understanding the competition

Worryingly, many businesses forget to do their research on their competitors. Now you have your customer profile ready, and you understand your business, it’s now time to move over to the competition. Your competition can be used as a great tool, so make sure you know who your direct, indirect and replacement competitors are. By knowing your competitors, you can see how you would like to differ from them which makes you unique and stand out. When doing your competitor analysis, pay close attention to the following:

The name of the brand
Competitor Unique Selling Points
Characteristics of competition (marketing tactics, audience, behaviour)

4. Poor Content Marketing

One way in which you can create a strong brand image is through content marketing, meaning one of the biggest branding mistakes is creating low-level run-of-the-mill content that doesn’t entice the client. Unfortunately, this happens all too often so many opt for hiring writing professionals, but even these get it wrong if you don’t know exactly what you want.

An example of this is hiring a freelance copywriter to get your homepage content created. But if you have not given them any information, you could have a piece of content that isn’t in your tone of voice and will result in the brand not looking consistent. Consistency across all platforms and channels is key when trying to create a successful brand.

5. Inconsistency

Inconsistency can seriously impact your brand strategy negatively and can harm your brand image. The brand image is all to do with giving your brand a personality and humanising the brand rather than just sounding like a money machine hungry for customers. Consistency should run through all platforms and channels including written content and visual content. If you have started a campaign with customer promotion ideas via social media, then this needs to continue in your emails and any other campaign for uniformity.

6. Limited Visual Branding

Now that the consistency is sorted, the next branding disaster that can be avoided easily is a website design that has little to no visual branding. The wording helps to give a brand a voice, but then the imagery is how you look which includes colour schemes, logos, HQ images etc. when you are thinking about your logo, check your competitors, we bet they have a unique logo that sets them apart from the rest of the competition, which you should be doing too. Simplistic is a good option as it sticks in people’s minds. Visual branding has a range of factors as it starts with your logo and ends at the footer of your website.

Things to ask yourself when creating visual branding:

What are the qualities of the brand?
Am I funny/serious?
What colours represent me?
What is my audience like?
What are they looking for?
What are their expectations of the industry?
What have your competitors done with their visual branding?
Do you want to follow the trends?

7. Poor Font Choices

The font is more important than you may think. There are two main components of visual branding. We would always advise working with a design agency in Liverpool or a London-based agency to help with this, as they will be able to bring your brand to life through the font, and it is actually a lot more important than many people think.

The first is of course the logo, but then comes the text, so it’s important to get the correct font. Text will be on your site, even if you are a photographer showing off his work as this could include infographic fonts, videos, explanations and much more. If you get the wrong font, your customers won’t be able to read the font. This is a huge error and is something to avoid, especially with your logo, so don’t use cursive.

So, avoid any of the above-listed branding disasters were possible to get your brand aligned with the big players.

Author Profile

Manuela WillboldOnline Media & PR Strategist

Blogger and Educator by Passion | Contributor to many Business Blogs in the United Kingdom | Fascinated to Write Blogs in News & Education I have completed a journalism summer course at the London School of Journalism and manage various blogs.