In today’s competitive marketplace, branding is integral to the success of any business. In such a crowded market, you need to make sure that your business stands out from the rest, and is instantly recognisable to prospective customers. However, although branding is so important, lots of businesses make silly mistakes when creating a brand for their business. Although they may seem like small errors to make, they can actually have a dramatic effect on your brand and your business. So, to help you get your branding right, here are two common branding mistakes and advice on how you can avoid making them.
1. Over-complication
You’re going to be using your brand to capture the attention of prospective customers, and as a way to inspire loyalty to your products or services. Therefore, you need to make your brand instantly recognisable, and provide a clear, simple message that your prospective customers can process easily. Lots of businesses make the mistake of overcomplicating their branding, usually by trying to incorporate too many elements into the design. You can avoid making this mistake by first coming up with a simple, clear message of what your brand is about before you begin designing branding templates. That way, you can start designing your brand with a clear message in mind, avoiding over-complication down the line.
2. Inconsistency
Effective branding is all about consistency. As a business, you must ensure that your branding is consistent across all forms of communication, including printed folded leaflets, flyers, brochures, and business cards, as well as all of your online presences. Consistency makes your business look professional, strengthens your brand, and makes your printed communications and webpages instantly recognisable to your customers. However, lots of businesses make the mistake of allowing inconsistencies to creep into their branding, whether that’s different fonts, colours, or layouts. In order to avoid making this mistake, your business needs to put in place a number of different processes related to branding. You should create a branding template document, which outlines the correct fonts, colour design schemes, sizes, and images to use for your branding. Then, you must ensure that your employees check their branded documents against this template sheet every time.
Colour Scheme for printing
If you want some more advice on your business branding checkout one of our previous blog posts: Branding and how to get it right.