It happens to best of us. You think you’ve done it all right, that you have this marketing stuff down, but something still just feels a bit off. You’re not getting the same business you used to or the customers you’re getting don’t seem like the perfect fit. You feel stuck. While some situations are out of your control, remember that there are always ways to adapt your strategy. Here are a few common branding struggles and how you can overcome them.
Struggle #1: Your Brand Has Gone Stale
You’ve got your logo, colors and fonts all in order. You have set brand standards. You were getting good response before, but now your audience is giving you a collective yawn. It’s time to freshen things up.
This is a mistake even folks with design backgrounds can fall into. While consistency and repetition are important for brand recognition, there also needs to be room for creativity and variety. Fortunately, in most cases you don’t have to start from scratch if you’re content is feeling a little rusty.
How to Fix It: If you get stuck on the same old content, it’s time to for some creative brainstorming. Think about what your brand stands for and who your customers are. While your brand standards should still remain in place, they shouldn’t be so rigid that you can’t produce new content that aligns with your overall brand. Remember a brand is more than your logo, fonts and colors – it’s more like a persona, an array of traits that make your company memorable. Think of new creative ways to sneak in your color scheme, keep tweaking your message, and you’ll soon be on your way to creating fresh content that doesn’t bore your audience.
Struggle #2: Your Brand Isn’t Being Seen (By the Right People)
This can be one of the toughest struggles to overcome. If you don’t have enough business coming your way, you’ll first need to identify the root of the problem. Everything about your brand could be on-target, but if your message doesn’t reach the right people, it’s not going to be very effective.
How to Fix It: This is an opportunity to review your marketing plan and evaluate your brand as a whole. If you haven’t already, make sure that every piece of marketing that goes out has a way to track it – whether its through analytics or a tracked follow up process for traditional media. Use data to your advantage to see what is working for your business and where the gaps are. If you can, enlist some people that you know that fit in your target audience to get an outside opinion of your brand, messaging and delivery.
Struggle #3: You Have Clients, But They Aren’t Your Ideal Clients
It’s not enough to just have people in the door. Working with too many clients that are not an ideal fit for your business can be costly, taking away precious time from finding your dream clients. In the local music scene we called these people our super-fans – the people who come to almost every show, rave about you on social media, and tell their friends “you gotta check this band out.” You don’t just want customers, you want super-fans.
How to Fix It: The first step is to identify who your super-fans are. These are the relationships you want to put extra effort into nurturing, so identifying them early on or even before they become your client is the best way to ensure these clients will keep coming back. If your biggest fans aren’t coming back, it’s a good idea to evaluate the reasons why. Consider offering extra perks or exclusive offers to clients who are likely to recommend your business to others.
If you aren’t finding your super-fans in the first place, then take a look at your branding and messaging. Is your brand speaking to the type of clients that you most want to work with? Try curating your social feeds to focus in on the people you want to work with more. While you might feel pressured to put any and every project on your social feed, this could hurt your business more than help. Consider leaving your less-than-stellar projects off, so you can focus more on the work you love.
Struggle #4: You’re Too Much Like Your Competition
The last problem in our list is pretty straightforward. If there are a lot of brands in the area selling the same products or services as you, what makes your audience choose you over someone else? Does your brand stand out from the crowd?
How to Fix It: If you are in a highly competitive industry, take a look at what your competitors are doing. However, instead of looking for inspiration about what you should do, look for inspiration about how you can be different. Don’t get too caught up in the trends of the industry (if it’s already a trend, that means you arrived late to the show). You should also dig deep into the reasons why you started your business and what made you passionate about it. Most often, your uniqueness comes from communicating your passion. Find those little things that make your brand special, and you’ll stop sounding like a generic “script” set by everyone else in your industry.
-Sara E. Jones, CEO & Co-founder, RadBot Video
P.S. Need help with creative ideas for your brand? Send us a message – we’d love to chat! (info@radbotvideo.com)