Just like having a unique personality is an inane desire of every person, businesses should spend time on brand building so that they stand out in the crowd.
Spending time and effort to carefully build a brand for your company can change how customers look at a company, how people in the industry perceive the company culture, and what they stand for.
Despite its obvious benefits, a large number of entrepreneurs give less time to brand building. One major reason is that brand building is a slow process. Since the payoff is not immediate, entrepreneurs tend to put it on the back burner.
Then, there is another group of entrepreneurs who put in the effort, but the results come out negative. In this blog we will look at the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make in brand building.
Top 5 common mistakes of brand building
1. Vague brand strategy
One of the major mistakes many businesses make is they start working on brand building without having a clear vision of how they want their customers to perceive their brand.
Customers nowadays are quite sensitive about which brand they want to buy from and which ones to avoid. That is why people are willing to buy organic products even if they are expensive. Many people prefer purchasing from a brand that is known for making animal cruelty free products.
Solution: Businesses should spend some time to determine the purpose of the brand building activity. A research by Zeno said consumers are four to six times more likely to trust a brand that has a strong sense of purpose than those who don’t.
Businesses should have clear answers to questions like what does the brand stand for, which demography does it want to relate with, and how they want customers to see their brand.
Also Read: Importance of Customer Service For Your Business
Should customers see the brand as someone that always makes cutting-edge products, or a brand that offers really cheap products with all the top features?
2. Ignoring the importance of logo
More often than not brands don’t take their logos as seriously as they should. The biggest mistake brands make is assign a third-party design team to make the logo for them.
To add to this, many times founders don’t actively get involved with the team that is making the logo. When it comes to brand building, logo is the most important thing founders can focus on initially. It requires the same amount of attention as solving any other business problem.
Solution: Businesses should obsess over having the perfect logo that not only creates an everlasting impression on customers, but also is able to communicate what the company stands for, its philosophy, and the products it makes.
Right from the font, colour, and tone, to the image that goes along with the text, will be a big part of the brand image. These elements should come together and tell the narrative the brand wants to convey.
3. Not engaging enough with users
Brand building is a continuous effort and doesn’t end with a sleek looking logo and advertisements. One part of brand building is regularly being in touch with customers.
In this age of social media, if businesses are not speaking with their customers regularly, they are setting themselves up for failure. Listening to customers and solving their problems should be one of the top priorities as a part of the brand building process.
Solution: Create a dedicated team that actively tracks any mention of the brand on social media. The team should be educated on how to engage with customers – things to say and not to say. It becomes even more important when the customer is unhappy due to some reason. How the company deals with such customers will impact the brand’s image.
It’s also important for companies to actively reach out to customers to get their feedback on the product. Businesses can also use social media to post creative content to engage with customers.
4. Not having crisis management in place
Over the lifetime of a company, branding mishaps have to happen. Even though it’s apparent that this is something that can’t be avoided, companies often don’t prepare for such an eventuality.
Even if a company becomes big and established it doesn’t mean they can be immune to any PR blunder. The recent example of a major cab hailing company that got a number of bad reviews regarding its new electric vehicles proves that no matter how big a company becomes, PR blunders are inevitable.
Solution: Whenever the company puts out a post on social media it should always be vetted. Very often companies in their pursuit of being funny and witty end up offending a large section of the people.
Before launching a new campaign or an advertisement get a legal team to look them over for any compliance issues.
In short, always be prepared. Preparation includes having a PR team and a legal team that can guide the company if the situation goes out of hand. Having a great PR team is quite important to maintain the company’s brand. It should be sensitive and know how to handle difficult situations.
5. Ignoring customer experience
While this should be an obvious thing to focus on, companies, in their zeal to launch new products and tweak the existing ones, forget to focus on customer experience.
Since customers are the flag bearer of any company, ignoring their convenience of using the product, website, and shopping, can be detrimental to the brand.
Online payment experience is another area that businesses don’t give much thought to when it comes to enhancing customer experience. In addition to negatively impacting brand image, bad payment experiences increase cart abandonment rate as well.
Solution: Businesses should partner with a payment gateway that cares for customer experience. The payment gateway should have easy checkout process. Customers detest filling long forms on the checkout page. The payment process should be smooth and without any redirections.
How Paytm Payment Gateway improves customer experience
Paytm Payment Gateway prioritise customers ease over everything else. Right from one-click payment to creating customised checkout page, Paytm Payment Gateway offers it all.
Here are a few benefits of using Paytm Payment Gateway:
- Industry-best success rates: Payment failure is one of the biggest reasons why customers hesitate to shop from a particular website. Businesses can improve their customers’ payment experience by using Paytm Payment Gateway, which has the industry best success rate.
- 100+ payment sources: Since Paytm Payment Gateway supports over 100 payment sources, customers get the freedom to choose the way they want to pay. Whether they want to pay via credit card, debit card, net banking, UPI, or Paytm Wallet, we support them all. To add to the list, customers can enjoy the buy now, pay later option with Paytm Postpaid.
- Instant refunds: Customers trust brands that process refunds as soon as possible without any hassle such as regularly tracking. Businesses can improve their brand credibility with Paytm Payment Gateway’s instant refund feature.
- Extend bank offers to customers: Who doesn’t like discounts and cashbacks? Paytm Payment Gateway regularly partners with banks to provide businesses with exclusive discounts or cashbacks if customers pay via a specific card.
- Customise checkout page: Brand building includes customising the checkout page with businesses’ own logo, colour schemes, etc. Paytm Payment Gateway provides merchants with the full freedom to design their checkout page. This will ensure brand’s name and image is etched in customers’ mind.
It is important that businesses get on top of building their brand image from the beginning. Keeping online payment experience simple and smooth is one of the most important aspects of brand building.
