Have you ever wondered how established companies manage to retain their customer base over the years? How do these companies maintain their follower base despite all odds or economic turbulences? If yes, you need to pay heed to the brand-building activities. Once you’ve established your brand identity, relevance, and visibility to your audience base, you need to keep adding to it. That way, your brand becomes an entity that people love to remember and connect with.

Are you a small or start-up business owner? If yes, then it is natural that you outshine other market players. When you get a clear vision about your brand, you can establish it correctly as well. But you need to develop a compact strategy. Doing that, you might come across a few challenges. Eric J Dalius throws light on a few of the problems and the correct approach to resolve the same.  

Eric Dalius highlights crucial brand building challenges

• An absence of personal branding

The 21st-century business era is all about personal branding. Every business needs to work as a brand and work on the correct positioning. Even before entrepreneurs have given shape to their start-up, they must develop a brand for themselves. It will help to impact people and their thoughts.

When people get to know about a new brand, they research the founder or director. And as people search you in Google, if they find your expertise in a specific area, they are likely to follow you more. If there’s no personal branding, there’s a question on your credibility. And you need to work extra to build your brand, which might stop you from focusing on other essential business activities.

• Inferior value proposition

Today, technology is developing at a faster pace. Hence, the expectations from start-up ventures and business owners are more. It’s essential to keep creativity and innovation on the right track.

When your product has a weak value proposition, you might waste capital and money to market the product. A product must solve a market issue, in a way that other experts can’t do. That aside, it is necessary to provide some additional benefits, that will set you apart from your competitors. Ensure that your product/service addresses the customer pain points and is also affordable. That way, you can create a constant demand, and your customers will want to opt-in for your service/product.

Organize a focus group survey and ask people to share their feedback on your sample product. Once you receive the feedback, you can enhance your service/product accordingly. That way, your service/product will have a good value proposition that will add to the brand. 

• Managing an amateur and unskilled team

Finding the correct team structure for your start-up is challenging! The real issue is the budget and business capital accumulation. Expert staff and employees will charge you a specific amount of money. And during the initial years, it is slightly challenging for start-ups to find and hire the best talent in the industry. The majority of the times, you need to work around your way with amateur, unskilled staff and employees and train them adequately. 

EJ Dalius suggests that entrepreneurs and business owners should make the best use of this situation! They should educate their existing employees and staff about the business goal and brand mission. They should conduct daily orientation programs so that the staff and employees take complete charge in executing a specific duty set skillfully. They should also focus on their entire business grooming. All this will add value to the brand-building activities.  

• Managing bad design

Favourable design leads to favourable business!  Everyone judges a company based on its logo format and the website design. The website must look simple and attractive. The customers should be able to navigate through the site easily. On the other hand, if they find the website to get cluttered with unwanted texts, images, content with grammatical errors, and the like, your branding takes a beating. It is essential to correct these issues; else it will hamper the SEO.

Your brand’s website design success depends on the time a user spends on the website! Google also provides more value to a correctly designed website. It impacts the user engagement and also results in word of mouth publicity, which is one of the rewards of good brand-building strategy. Before you get into website design specifics, you need to check the design format that caters to your company. 

Also, in terms of the content, keep it correct and original. Make sure there are no grammatical mistakes and no duplicate content. Use the right tags and add a smart CTA (Call to action)  

• Not using social media appropriately.

Social media marketing has made it easy for brands and start-up ventures to reach millions online. However, when you don’t use social media channels correctly, you miss out on connecting with millions, which can be your customers. Hence, you need to identify the target customer on social media and act accordingly. Several businesses underutilize the social media channels and are not clued into social media trends.

Today, you can create a social media profile for free! After that, there are the ads that you can select depending on the reach you desire. There are several packages to choose from. You might need a little hand-holding through the ads to generate the basic fan-following during the first few years. Once you’ve established an audience, you can work wonders. It will become easy to give your brand a boost and also promote your service/products through social media channels. That will enhance the brand recall capacity amongst the customers. 

Networking plays a crucial role in brand building as well! Other than addressing and resolving the brand mentioned above building challenges, business owners and entrepreneurs should also focus on meeting new people and getting connected with the social media influencers. It will add the correct value to your brand building initiatives. When your brand becomes more visible socially, you can tap into more markets and other customers. It leads to better brand presence and sales as well.