5 Online Branding mistakes to avoid

Creating a successful online brand takes hard work and commitment. Despite its many challenges creating a brand has many benefits including:
• Builds preference and trust with target markets
• Makes selling products easier
• Increases profitability when brand has high awareness
• Boosts emotional connection with customers and clients
• Increases customer retention
• Creates customer advocacy
• Positions a brand as an expert in the field
So, there are many benefits of building an online brand and it’s important to start early rather than later. However, many businesses make mistakes that affect their brand building efforts and here are some common ones which you should avoid:

1. Low advertising budget

One major error made by countless online brands is to set a low budget for their advertising and branding campaigns. This makes achieving marketing objectives almost impossible when there are insufficient resources to implement the online strategy and the tactics.

Also, budget should meet or exceed competitor budgets because they will be chasing the same customers and it’s important that you have the resources to promote your products or services.

2. Inconsistent brand messages

Inconsistent messages leads to dilution of your brand values and leads to confusion with your target markets. Wherever your brand is represented, whether that’s your website, social media platforms or in your advertising such as pay per click advertising, you should have a consistent brand identity that resonates with target audiences and positions your brand as the solution to their wants and needs.

Overall, you should stick to the promise that your brand makes. Whether that is always low prices or a quality premium service or whatever that is, you should maintain it in all communications.

3. Low quality brand identity

Your brand identity includes all visible elements of your brand such as your name, logo, tagline, colours, fonts, images and any other physical attributes. This is what target markets associate with your brand and it represents in a tangible way, the promise that your business makes.

However, some businesses take short cuts when creating their brand identity and will often create their own logo or hire an inexperienced designer to create an effective brand mark and logo. This requires expert help and it’s important that you hire a proven team of experts to help create all aspects of your brand.

4. Not securing domain names

When you create your brand and are ready to launch it to the world, it’s likely you will have registered the main domain extensions like .com and .net and your country level domain like .co.uk for the United Kingdom. However, you should register as many extensions as are available including .biz and .org so that you can prevent people from registering these names and setting up rival websites that will steal your traffic and customers.
Without securing all domains including close variants you risk losing traffic in the search engine results, especially when competitors rank high for the sites that they launch.

5. Not registering brand

Registering your brand name, brandmark and taglines should be one of the first things you do before creating all aspects of your brand. This ensures that you have exclusive rights to your brand identity and you can highlight this by adding the Registered symbol next to your brand on your website and in all communications. It also means you can take action against anyone who uses your brand without your permission.

Summary

Need help creating an online brand to take your business to the next level? Contact me to discuss your requirements and to find out how I can help you create a winning brand identity that positions your business effectively.