It’s always going to be tough to stand out from the crowd when you’re just starting out. You’ll have spent so much time getting your company ready for the launch date and ensuring that everything is working properly that it’s sometimes easy to forget that everyone else has been outside the bubble that you’ve existed in for the last several months. Given how challenging the market is for small businesses, you can’t afford to leave your branding to the last minute, and you need to have an engagement plan ready to go.

There are a surprising number of big mistakes that a lot of first-time entrepreneurs make when it comes to branding and engagement. You don’t want to fall into these traps if you can help it.

Having A Logo That Doesn’t Reflect Who You Are

Let’s start with one of the biggest mistakes that you can make. Figuring out the logo for your brand doesn’t always come easily, especially if you’ve never been a visual person. We don’t all have an art or business marketing degree, and it’s tough to think about how you can distil your entire company into a small, simple image.

But your logo is one of the first things that visitors or potential clients see. They will be taking a lot away from it even if they’re not doing it consciously. Finding the perfect logo doesn’t need to feel like you’re getting blood from a stone. You can use a tool to create a logo for free based on AI suggestions and templates. This will help you to save on your marketing budget and find a great logo for you.

Getting Your Target Audience Wrong

You’re going to have put a huge amount of work into making sure a target audience even exists for your business before you launch. But there is still the question of communication and engagement. What’s more, you can still fall into that classic trap of wanting to appeal to as many people as possible. This is how you can end up spending money on a campaign designed to engage a youth market that actually has zero interest in what you have to sell them.

There should generally be a limit to niching down, but it makes a lot more sense to spend your time targeting the right people instead of trying to cover all possible bases. Once you have a clear idea of who will be interested in your product, then you can work on branding that is actually going to connect with them.

Choosing The Wrong Social Media Platform

Following directly on from the point above, you need to remember that social media is not one single channel. You can’t lump all the available platforms into one box and expect to get the same results from each one. Even the most social media-addicted individual probably won’t spend the same amount of time on each, even if they have an account. Figuring out which social media platforms your target audience uses will save you a huge amount of time, and possibly money too. You’ll find that once you have a platform, it will become much easier to find branding options and a tone that will connect.

The tone is absolutely crucial to your branding, but there are some more essentials that you need to consider. Once you set up a profile on a social media platform, you can’t just leave it alone. Remember that people may want to contact you, and missing complaints is the kind of bad business you don’t need. What’s more, seeing an account that hasn’t been active in days is not going to make people think that you’re particularly invested or excited.

Spending Too Much Money On Campaigns

The issue of budgets is something that everyone is struggling with at the moment in the UK. Very few businesses have a limitless amount of spare cash that they can just throw at a problem. It’s tempting to throw your hands in the air when it comes to branding and engagement if it’s an area that you feel you don’t know much about, but if you do need to find a digital marketing agency, you should be wary of any that recommend big spending as the best route forward.

It’s worryingly easy to end up losing a lot of money on campaigns, particularly if you are placing ad banners or using pay-per-click. It’s always better to spend more time in the planning stages for a focused campaign that will reach the people who are more likely to spend money. If you just flash phrases like 2 for 1 or unbelievable deals, you will attract a lot of people who are not going to be interested in what they find when they click through. For more on branding contact the specialists at PrintUK.com.