Broad Audience
Your target audience is a core piece of your brand identity, as it provides focus and direction, and helps to craft strategy as you continue building your business. Your audience should be broad enough to encompass a flexible working definition of your brand's core base, however, keeping your audience too broad will make it impossible to identify patterns or commonalities among them, and therefore will make it very difficult to build meaningful, lasting connections with your customers.
Buddy Tip:
Think of your target audience as a person. Who are they? What do they like? How do they like to be talked to? What do they want out of a brand, and more specifically out of your brand? By personifying your audience, you can get incredibly specific and will end up with a much stronger picture of who you are selling to.
Consider the following parameters: Demographic, Psychographic, Geographic, and Behavior. These are great way to start defining your target audience.
Inconsistent Across Channels
Branding is all about consistency - in order to build a strong, cohesive brand, every element has to remain the same across all channels. Be it voice, colors, visuals, messaging, etc., the more consistent you can be with your branding over time, the more recognizable your branding will be, and ultimately, the more trust and loyalty you will begin to build with your audience.
Buddy Tip:
Build a branding style guide that outlines the core tenants of your brand and includes your colors, fonts, visuals, audience, etc. This will become your brand's bible, and all content created should be checked against this document.
Inauthenticity
It's tempting to mimic strategies or elements of successful brands, or utilize AI software generate content, in hopes of finding success for your own brand, and, in conjunction with your own work, these methods can be very effective in crafting successful branding. However, the more you use methods like this, the less authentic your brand will be. Mimicking competitors can make your business seem less unique and less-trustworthy, while AI will generate copy that is generic, and that can feel robotic and lacking heart. The more of YOU that you can include in your brand the more authentic your brand will be.
Buddy Tip:
Be inspired, take note of successful strategies or businesses practices and find out why they work. Apply that knowledge to your own brand. You'll find that its more authentic and repeatable over time. The most effective tools you have are your core tenants: YOUR vision, YOUR values, YOUR Voice, YOUR mission. The clearer these are to you and to the rest of your team, the easier it will be to build an authentic brand. Nail your foundational elements, and the authenticity will follow.
No Differentiation
In a similar vein, differentiation helps to make your brand stand out among the masses. What value does your brand bring that other brands don't? What sets you apart, and why should a customer purchase your product/service over a competitor selling at a similar price point? Without differentiation, customers will simply shop around and go for the cheapest option.
Buddy Tip:
Start with your points of differentiation before you touch anything else. Do your competitor research, and find out what and how you can be of value to the customer that the competition doesn't provide. Once you have an idea of your points of differentiation, you'll have a very clear idea of who you are, who your customers are, and how you can connect with them.