Welcome to Day 23 of the 30 Days to Develop Your Brand Challenge!
If you are sending mixed messages in your branding, it can cause confusion and reduce the trust your audience has in you, thus making it hard for you to get your message out and build your brand into a strong business entity. If you’re not consistent, it can dilute your brand and make it hard to define the benefits you offer. However, it’s easy to avoid sending mixed messages if you’re careful.
Create a Brand You are Passionate About
When you are naming your business, choosing a personality for it, and dressing it up, don’t choose things you’re not proud of and sure about. You can test your ideas out on your audience before finalizing them using surveys and the internet. When you decide on a brand voice, look, and feel, it’s time to live it.
For example, if you have created an exclusive training brand, your brand identity may be very business-like and buttoned up. If you then turn around and post pictures of yourself working in sweat pants after you published an article about the importance of getting up and getting dressed for the day, the audience will find that as incongruent and sadly, it will lower the trust your audience has in you.
If you know you’re not the type to really do what you are advocating for, don’t do that. You oversee the branding and your own business. While you do want to ensure you are attracting the audience you want to work with, don’t choose to work with an audience that you won’t even like. Instead, realize that you can attract your own audience based on your personality. You don’t have to copy others.
Continuously Study Your Metrics
It’s a balancing act to stay in your lane in terms of branding and checking up to ensure that your ideas are really working. For example, you may think you had a great idea with that last Facebook Ad campaign, but after looking at the numbers, you may discover something wrong. For example, maybe you got a lot of traffic to your sales page due to the advertisement, but few people took advantage of the offer. Why?
It may be a very subtle incongruency between your advertisement and what they found on the landing page that made them not trust you enough to go forward. It can be something as small as an image out of place or a word that turns off your ideal audience. This is one of many reasons always studying your numbers and your audience will pay off big time.
Create a Style Guide & Templates to Systemize Your Development & Marketing
One of the tasks that will take the longest but pay off the most is creating a brand style guide and templates that will help you systemize your product development as well as your marketing efforts. Looking at your customer avatars and choosing a customer to create content for to help them move through their place in the buying journey before creating the content will ensure you are more consistent just like using an eBook cover, or newsletter template, will help create consistency, too. Plus, it saves time.
If you outsource, giving this information to writers, graphic designers, and others will ensure consistency without you having to spend too much time explaining your brand. The contractor can simply use your style guide that is going to explain your brand’s audience, voice, as well as show the type of images to use, including design and so forth.
The more you create systems in your business, the more consistent you can be with your branding efforts. That consistency will ensure that you avoid mixed messages – whether you do the work yourself or you outsource it to someone else.
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