Top 5 Branding Mistakes Small Business Owners Make
Figuring out a brand strategy for your small business can be a HUGE task to take on - and easy to mess up.
And sometimes, it’s just hard to know whether or not your brand is making an impact with potential customers or not.
Maybe you keep switching between brand colors every few weeks, or maybe you are having a hard time building a community and following that is MAJORLY obsessed with your brand.
Whatever you are feeling, I know it can be hard - which is why I want to help bring clarity to your branding.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through the top 5 branding mistakes that I see small business owners make constantly - AND how to fix them - so keep reading to learn more!
Don’t feel like reading? Then watch the Youtube video below, where I walk through the tips in this post in video format!
Having No Clear Brand Identity
The first huge mistake that I see surrounding branding is not starting with a clear brand identity.
If you aren’t familiar with brand identity, it’s everything that makes up your brand - your brand message, tone, story, pillars, mission statement values, logos, etc.
A lot of small business owners tend to skip over this important step in their branding because they want to rush to get customers - or they think brand identity is just about having a fancy logo or colors picked out.
But having a brand identity creates an entire platform for you to connect with customers, create content easily, and build a consistent relationship between you and your customers - so this is truly one of the most important things you can build for your business.
If you are having struggle building your brand identity, I have just the freebie for you - How to Define Your Brand Personality and Identity - and you can download it right now to start learning!
Copying Your Competitors
It is SO SO easy to see branding, experiences, content, and more from your competitors work SO well with their audience that it’s tempting to want to copy what they are doing - but this is SO detrimental for you and your business.
Let’s just take the instagram and tiktok competition, for example:
TikTok blows up shortform video content.
Instagram gets jealous of their success - and shortly creates Reels, pushing them WAY more in the platform than the photo content that their entire brand revolved around for YEARS.
Instagram receives the opposite response - people actually got upset about Reels on Instagram because the brand has never been about videos, and now business owners are forced into a new content box on a platform that had been working for them for years.
In the same way, you don’t want to just copy whatever a competitor is doing - instead, focus on the parts of your business that are truly UNIQUE and how they set apart your business from others.
This could anything from a different client experience to a different brand tone (way of speaking to your customers) to even completely different offerings.
Whatever you do, focus on what’s different about your business and why that matters in your messaging - so people believe that what you have truly is better than what they’ve seen before.
Not Utilizing Storytelling
For thousands of years, we as humans have utilized storytelling as one of the top ways to connect, exchange information, and learn together - so why wouldn’t you also use the power of storytelling in your own business?
Storytelling is incredibly engaging and can capture the attention of your clients as well as build a true connection with them.
A lot of business owners focus so much on creating a good product or experience, but when it comes to marketing that product or experience, the messaging falls completely flat and just sounds like a newspaper ad.
There are a TON of ways you can utilize storytelling with your brand:
Tell the story behind how you got started and your passion behind your mission
Tell the story of your actual CUSTOMERS - through testimonials, conversations you’ve had, and successes that your clients experience because of you
Utilize fun and engaging analogies to explain a service or offering and its impact on customers - analogies are a great way to breakdown concepts for people
Storytelling can be difficult at first if you aren’t used to it, but it’s just like a muscle - you have to strengthen it, and you get better daily!
Not Focusing on Customers
The mistake that I am SO passionate about fixing in branding is not focusing your brand around your customers.
Here’s the deal: having a personal brand is a GREAT way to connect with your customers, but it doesn’t mean that your brand is just all about you.
People care a lot more about the information that you share and what you can do for them FIRST before they care about all the details about you - so you want to focus your brand FIRST on your customers, who should be the true hero of your brand.
You, on the other hand, are the guide in the brand, leading your customer’s to their version of success.
This concept is all from Donald Miller’s Storybrand process, which I recommend to ALL business owners if you are struggling with branding.
You want clients to be able to visualize themselves in your brand - this creates connection and brand loyalty, as your brand can even become an extension of themselves if they love it enough!
So everytime you create content or send an email or interact with customers, position your messaging in a way that surrounds them and makes them feels seen.
Not Implementing Your Brand Strategy
The final mistake you want to avoid with branding is not actually implementing your brand strategy.
Which, yes, I know sounds easy - but sometimes, it can be overlooked!
Even if you spend hours coming up with the best brand message, tone that connects with your customers, and stories that sell your offerings - if you don’t use them, then you totally wasted all of that time!
It’s very easy to get stuck in a silo of just creating marketing content as much as possible - but you want to consistently be returning back to your brand strategy to make sure that you are creating a consistent brand for your customers.
It may not feel normal at first to be niching down your content and tone around your brand, but keep at it until it becomes second nature to you.
Whew! That was a lot, but I hope these tips can help you avoid major branding mistakes a small business owner and build a brand that you and your customers are just obsessed with!
