Correct These Common Branding Mistakes

Are you making branding mistakes? It’s a good idea to do occasional maintenance. Go over your print and online materials with an eye to your brand; you may be making errors without realizing it. Here are some we frequently come across:

Using your company logo too large. You may love your logo, but it is not the most important element of your brand — your message is. Don’t waste valuable marketing space by using an over-sized corporate logo.

Not being consistent. Keep your message, your colors and fonts consistent throughout all of your materials. You can veer from this a bit on social media and in advertising, but overall there should be a recognizable consistency of look and feel.

Redesigning the logo you’ve had for years. Think long and hard about making a change; there’s a definite risk in redesigning a logo. The top one is mistaken identity, i.e., your market no longer recognizes your brand, or is confused by the change. Have a strategy in place to ameliorate the risk.

Writing your own marketing content. This is a big one. Unless you’re a professional copywriter, generating your own written content will risk look amateurish, be a time-suck, and at worst affect your bottom line. Instead, hire a pro who knows how to write efficiently and effectively for each type of media.

Not keeping it simple. Each marketing piece should be easy for your customers to understand and take action:

• Make your tagline short and snappy.
• Streamline your text by slashing unneeded phrases and redundancies.
• Design with more white space to give elements a chance to grab your audience’s attention.
• When in doubt, take away, don’t add!