4 Common Branding Mistakes You Absolutely Need to Avoid
In order to understand what to do (and also what not to do) with your branding, it’s important to understand what branding actually is. While branding includes visual aspects like your logo, typography, and color palette, it is so much more than that. Branding is created with your target audience and your business values in mind. Your branding makes you unique in your industry or niche and allows your target audience to recognize you instantly. With that in mind, here are four common branding mistakes I see all the time.
1. Developing Your Visual Branding Assets Without Establishing Your Business Values First
Before you even start thinking about colors, fonts, logos, and other visual aspects of branding, start with your business values and mission statement.
What is the purpose of your business?
What does your business believe in?
What social movements or issues does your business support?
How do you want to make an impact with your business?
What is your tagline?
What adjectives do you want your audience to attach to your brand?
Answering these questions will help you feel more grounded in your vision and give you more of a concrete direction to go in when determining your branding. Your business branding should be a reflection of your business values and mission statement. Your target audience should be able to tell (at least to some degree) who you are and what you do just by looking at your branding.
2. Designing Your Brand Without Your Target Audience in Mind
Your brand tells your audience who you are, what you do, and why you do it before they even meet you. It’s essentially like your online dating profile and based on your branding, your audience decides whether they want to swipe left or right (i.e. give you money or not). So if you’re designing your branding based solely on what you like and what you want, you may be missing out on attracting your ideal clients.
Think about your ideal client.
What gender do they identify as?
How old are they?
What’s their average income?
What hobbies do they have?
Where do they go most frequently?
And the most important one: what are their pain points?
Pain points are the problems or issues your target audience has that they need solutions to (ideally solutions that you provide).
Once you have your ideal client profile down, think about what attracts them. Look into color psychology. Think about what shapes would appeal to them. What fonts they would feel a connection to. Are they looking for a more modern brand or a more traditional one? More feminine or more masculine? Serious or fun?
By determining your target audience, you’ll have a much more concrete understanding of what they’re looking for in a brand. Then you can take that information and create a brand that really attracts them and resonates with them.
Here’s an example on how narrowing down your target audience can help you develop your branding:
There are two fictional companies - Lunar Apothecary and The Crone’s Cauldron. Both companies are apothecary shops where customers can come in and purchase pre-made blends of essential oils or herbs or create their own blends. The Lunar Apothecary’s target audience is younger women in their 20s to 30s who are new to essential oils. The Crone’s Cauldron’s target audience is older women in their 40s to 60s who know what they’re looking for and what they want.
If I was creating the branding for these two companies, I might go with lighter, brighter colors for Lunar Apothecary with a fun, swirly font and a logo that’s cute and modern. For The Crone’s Cauldron, I might go with slightly more muted or even darker colors, perhaps a more traditional serif font, and a logo that’s more classic and trusted.
With those parameters, I decided to make the branding kits for those two companies so you could see the difference.
The brand kit I designed for the fictional company Lunar Apothecary.
The brand kit I designed for the fictional company The Crone’s Cauldron.
Granted, I only gave myself half an hour on each one to create the branding kit, but I think it illustrates how your target audience can - and should - influence your branding.
3. Inconsistency Due to Lack of Concrete Brand Guidelines
The biggest mistake I see by far is inconsistency in branding. Businesses using different colors, different fonts, and sometimes even different logos for their social media posts, business cards, websites, etc.
A lot of that is from not having a concrete brand guideline to follow. Which usually happens because the business started designing their branding without thinking about their values or target audience.
When everything matches, it makes your brand much more recognizable and identifiable. It allows people to see a specific color or a specific font or even a specific shape and think of you.
I understand that you might update your website to a new look and still have business cards with your old style on them and that business cards are expensive, but I promise it’s worth it. Keep your branding consistent across all your social media profiles, your website, and any physical marketing (like business cards or flyers) consistent.
Change and growth in business is good - necessary, even - but changing your branding every few weeks just leads people to see you as unreliable and inconsistent.
If you’re struggling to stick to your branding because it just never feels quite right to you, I can help. We’ll do a deep dive into your business values, target audience, and what kind of energy you’re looking to put out there so you can start attracting your ideal clients and actually be in love with your branding.
4. Lack of Proofreading and Editing
Spelling, punctuation, and grammar matter. A lot. Take the time to proofread your social media posts, blog posts, website copy, etc. before publishing it. A lack of proofreading and editing could severely damage your business, especially if you’re trying to market yourself as someone who is reliable, professional, and detail-oriented.
Editors can be expensive, but there are a lot of great apps and websites out there that can help you write better and more readable content. Sometimes all it takes is to step away from your writing for an hour or so and then go back in with fresh eyes. You could also try copying and pasting it into a different format or changing the font color. There’s actually some psychology behind typos and why we make them. If you’re constantly catching typos after you hit send or post, I’d recommend taking some extra steps before you post something. It takes more time, but it creates higher quality content.
There are some brands that can get away with using “internet speak,” but for most businesses, I’d recommend writing full sentences and using correct grammar and spelling.
Have you made any of these branding mistakes? What helped you develop your branding?