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Common Branding Mistakes

Common Branding Mistakes

by | Jun 14, 2019 | Business, Online Marketing

COMMON BRANDING MISTAKES

There are common branding mistakes companies often make that decreases their business ability to communicate with their target audience. There are certain companies that have create great brand image over the years, and one such company is the beverage giant, Coca-Cola. Their distinctive and obvious red and white lettering and powerful trademark make it impossible for anyone to confuse them for another soft drink manufacturer. The branding strategy of this great company will serve as a guide to small businesses who intend to grow and achieve great success soon.

What are the common branding mistakes that brands make that can impact the business negatively? Having carried out some research on this topic, I noticed that the following mistakes have been costly to small businesses.

Inability to identify brand strength:

As a beginner in a business, you cannot expect to have the same brand strength with a product which is already a market leader in that same environment. You must not expect your customers to suddenly recognise your product just like the market leader. Take for example the beverage company, Coca-cola, that has been in existence for over two centuries, imagine a budding beverage company that is new in the beverage business and wants to make Coca-cola is competitor, and starts copying its branding strategies, such a company may not last in that business. Some people already have these mentalities that all detergents are Omo, all cooking spices are Maggi, or noodles are Indomie. It is therefore wise to create a branding strategy by first defining and differentiating it from what is already existing in the market.

Failing to research the opposition.

When you research the opposition, it will help you understand what the established businesses in your industry have done, where they have failed and where they have succeeded. Then you know what branding strategies you can take advantage of. You should also carry out research on products, services, targets, audience, websites and social platforms.

Brand inconsistency:

Inconsistency has a negative impact on your brand, it brings about lack of trust and disloyalty. Companies like Coca-cola has been consistent in their branding for over 130 years. When you are consistent with your branding it will bring about familiarity, loyalty and credibility. Once your designer creates a brand style guide, the next thing you should be doing is to consistently follow the brand’s style guide on all your marketing campaigns across different channels, including your website, social networking profiles and printed materials.

If you’re not consistent, your brand will end up appearing unprofessional and lose identity, making your brand less trustworthy. Managing brand consistency across all marketing channels sets you apart from your competitors and helps you to accelerate the growth of your brand. A consistent identity for your brand will not only foster a sense of trust and comfort for potential customers, but it also plays a vital role in influencing your customers’ purchasing decision.

Careless changing of the brand logo:

It is important that you carry your audience or customers along, do not just suddenly change your logo feeling that your audience or customers should be able to know or recognise it as if it doesn’t matter. You have to carry them along so that they will know that there are changes already. Sometime ago, Gala, a leading sausage roll company, changed its wrapper without proper communication with its consumers, this didn’t go down well with the consumers as some of them taught Gala was out of production or the product available was fake. People were already used to and familiar with the old wrapper, immediately Consumers they switched over to the next best sausage-roll, Superbite, a product of chi limited, makers of Superbite. This brought a great loss to the makers of Gala.

Ignoring first impression:

There is a common saying that “first impressions last longer and matters a lot”. The first impression could be the product packaging design, the taste, the quality and the quantity which is the first point of contact between your brand and the customer. Your customers should be able to identify your product anywhere they go because its quality remains the same. Your packaging sells your brand, so if it is not well packaged, do not expect to make great sales in return.

Relying too much on Design trends:

Relying too much on design trends can make you to lose focus on the purpose and goals you are pursuing using your products. It can be easy to get swept up in what looks cool at the moment but remember that your brand will likely need to weather multiple waves of design trends without looking dated. It is advisable that you use design trends as a source of inspiration but not to rely on them too much when you want to redesign.

Using a vague copy to describe your brand:

Using a vague copy to describe your brand can be a major setback when it comes to positioning your brand in the market and distinguishing yourself from your competitors. To make your brand standout and unique, you have to understand what makes it unique and different from other existing brands. So many brands have been described wrongly for what they do not represent which in turn affects their sales.

Hiring an unprofessional Designer:

Nothing can hurt your brand worse than an amateur looking-logo. No matter if you feel OK with the logos of your graphic standards of your brand, it’s always worth taking the time and spending money to hire a professional graphic designer specializing in branding and logo development. Ask your designer to create a brand style guide that defines the colour palette, typography, visual style, imagery, etc., so you can follow it consistently on all your marketing channels.

Attaching Your Brand to the Wrong Things:

When it comes to branding, more is not more. In other words, use your company name and logo selectively and sparingly — especially when it comes to branded products, sponsorships, and events. When you attach your brand name to something, it should reflect and be compatible with your brand’s values and voice. When a brand partners with another company or product that doesn’t directly relate to or mesh well with their own message, it can seem inconsistent and untrustworthy to consumers.

Reasons To Constantly Updating Your Facebook Business Page With New Content

Reasons To Constantly Updating Your Facebook Business Page With New Content

by | May 28, 2019 | Business

Reasons for Adding New Content to Your Facebook Business Page

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that uses content in a variety of formats to build a stronger relationship with your audience, capture their audience, improve engagement and improve brand recall. Contents can be in the form of Photos, Videos, Articles, Comics, Animations, Plugins, Infographics etc. Adding new contents to our business page is very important for the following reasons:

Greater return on a smaller investment: Content marketing costs about 62% less than traditional and outbound marketing tactics. Therefore, it is a lot cheaper than other forms of advertising. One form of content marketing that offers the widest and highly targeted reaches with some of the best Return of Investment (ROI) is the email. Highly targeted email campaigns using segment lists, can generate up to 760% more revenue than traditional email blasts.

It exposes your business to new prospects and a larger audience: When you write high quality content, your audience will take note and may share these contents thereby reaching more audiences and these audience may also in turn share to more audience and the network continues to grow like that.

It improves brand awareness: You will stay in the forefront of consumer’s minds by constantly posting new contents, engaging them regularly and with that knowing what they want. If your posts are not frequent and your page is not engaging, then there may be tendency of losing your audience to a more active blogger who is always engaging his/her audience.

It improves engagement with your target market: Facebook generally is an engaging platform than most social media platforms. It is therefore important to use its full potentials. One should engage with his/her audience through various posts, with this you will have the opportunity to improve your brand recognition as well as learning more about your target audience, specifically their wants and needs.

It grows your target audience: When you make posts especially if it is a very good one, you may have some audience who may love such posts very well and may decide to share it to their friends and family members, who will in turn share it to other friends. This act grows your audience and helps you to market and advertise your page faster without it costing you anything, it is therefore important to constantly add new contents to help you achieve this goal without much stress and costs.

Improves your search engine visibility: Adding new content to your Facebook page improves your search engine visibility. When you use keywords, which will be read by major search engines, it drives traffic to your site, this will improve your site’s relevance and improves your ranking in search engine results.

To face and cope with competition: To be on the same page with your competitor or to be better than your competitor, you need to always add new content to your Facebook page. On the internet as it always was and would always be, content adding is very important. You should always keep your page fresh and engaging. This will make you achieve your goals and optimize your ROI. If fresh new contents are not seen on your page regularly, you may lose out of the competition and if possible, the business completely.

Useful Digital Marketing Blog Post Ideas

Useful Digital Marketing Blog Post Ideas

by | May 14, 2019 | Business, Online Marketing

Useful Digital Marketing Blog Post Ideas

 

The main reasons why we do research is to search for useful contents on the internet. We look for guides, case studies and resources that can help solve our problems and point us to the right directions in our businesses. Below are lists of useful Blog post ideas for digital marketing.

(1)  The List Posts:

A list post is one of the easiest to put together and can be versatile. They can be helpful and quick to read. When you want to list, you create the list of books, tools, resources or any topic that your market segment finds useful and relevant your business. Although list posts are text heavy hence it is important you use images which will help to break down the text thereby making it easier to read and much more accepted by your audience.

(2)   Case Study Post:

case studies provide great details and go beyond simple testimonials by showing real-life examples. In case study posts, get specific and talk strategy. Outline and unpack the details of topics such as projects, events, or processes. Exhaust completely every details of your story including the successes and failures, this will make your stories more authentic. Use actual and real statistics. Also include references if there are any.

(3)   Knowing How To Posts:

In writing articles, it is important you describe how to execute a process, use images, video or audio to enrich your posts and make it accessible to your audience. This can be done in various ways, you can introduce the content by outlining steps, and breaking down the articles into section.

(4)    Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

To detect FAQs; there are questions that are continually asked by customers or audience, these questions are referred to as FAQs. It is a great way to bring traffic to your website from search engines. To make your posts interesting and on point, you build your article around the FAQs topics and with detailed explanations. One can also use a checklist post. This lists the steps a person should take to complete a specific task.

(5)    Problem/Solution posts:

To do this, first you define a problem, then present a suitable solution to it. The given solution can come in the form of a product or service you sell. it can also be what people can obtain freely. The problem/solution post can cross over into the territory of other blog post types such as the FAQ post, how-to post or checklist post.

(6)    Research Post:

Conducting your own primary research around a topic in your niche is one of the best ways to build blog content that gets attention that is because primary research is hard to gather and extremely time consuming. Collecting all the research for someone and providing it for free all in one piece endears your brand to prospects and establish it as an authority on that particular topic.

(7)   Statistical Post:

Using statistics to round up your research post makes it more authentic. Statistics gives the reader more concise facts and data with references to fall back on. If the statistics was gathered from multiple locations it creates a very solid, well-rounded posts.

(8)   Ultimate Guide Post:

This is a detailed and comprehensive post on a topic in your niche. When it is done correctly, It helps to bring people back to your site and makes you an authority in your market. This post is usually long, with thousands of words, many figures and examples.

(9)   Series Posts:

When you break an exceptionally lengthy piece inti a series of posts, it becomes a series post. An example is the authentic post being broken into bits. One can break it into days, weeks, or even months. This enable you to maintain and engage your audience or customers.

(10)   Definition Posts:

This is an article that defines a topic. For this post you can create content around a particularly confusing or complex topic and then explain and inform your readers about the topic. You can also consider a series of posts which defines your niche to engage your readers.

(11)  YouTube Cut-up Post:

you can use a popular YouTube video to create stellar content, this video can be yours or someone’s else (with permission). To create an article from this, you will take screenshots at different stages during the video and add text explanations, then embed the entire video into your post. With this you will engage your readers more with your posts for they will react, like or make comments.

Has The Jumia IPO Been A Success Story

Has The Jumia IPO Been A Success Story

by | May 12, 2019 | Business

Has The  JUMIA IPO Been A Success Story

Has The  JUMIA IPO Been A Success Story. Over the years, several companies including small or large scale have experienced falls in the stock market, loses or gains in profit making. Could it be that Jumia, the largest e-commerce operator in Africa (often referred to as the Amazon of Africa) has joined the list of this sad story?

Jumia as at December 2018, has accumulated loses of nearly $1 billion, (like amazon), it’s initial shareholders will have to be patient on the path to profitability. Jumia’s shares have fallen by 14.6% after Andrew Left (a US short seller) allegedly called Jumia a fraud. Left said in a report that there were major discrepancies between a confidential investor presentation from October 2018 and what Jumia told the Securities Exchange Commision (SEC).

It said that the e-commerce company inflated active customer and active merchant numbers by 20% to 30% and that 41% of orders were returned, not delivered, or cancelled. While there were major concerns about Jumia’s business model and its profitability, fraud would not have been a suitable word in this situation.

Another analysis showed that it could possibly be that the company which was reported to have been under pressure to provide an exit strategy for major shareholder like MTN, who wants to sell off some of their Jumia shareholdings after the lock-in period. Even after all these allegations, we are still not sure of the credibility of Andrew Left’s citron research. Left who was once banned from trading in Hong Kong for making false allegations about a Chinese property developer, also makes millions betting against stocks. Therefore, his citron research will need to present evidence about its claims. Also, there is an ongoing four-month-old-petition asking SEC to investigate this research for publishing falsehoods in order to manipulate the market for their gain.

Meanwhile, Jumia’s CEO, Sacha Poignonnec in an interview with CNBC said that “the difficulty for e-commerce sellers in Africa is that of inefficient infrastructure throughout the continent, and the people are not savvy when it comes to online shopping, and in some part of Africa They still believe that online shopping is “alien”. However it is said  Jumia has so far recorded 4 million active customers as of the fourth quarter of 2018, operates in 14 African countries and provides a lot of inclusion for consumers who have not necessarily the right access to retail. He also mentioned that there is a huge opportunity in Africa because so many people still haven’t experience online shopping.

Jumia which was founded in 2012, is the first African Unicorn to go public. It’s platform allows buyers to buy smartphones, groceries, household gadgets, electronic devices, provision of services and retail items in general. It is headquartered in Germany where it works with local entrepreneurs and logistics companies to deliver the products. Some of their biggest customers are Apple, HP, and Huawei.

Keep an Eye on Competitors using Google Search String

Keep an Eye on Competitors using Google Search String

by | Feb 13, 2018 | Business

Keep an Eye on Competitors using Google Search String

There is no such thing as new business hence, the need to channel your inner James Bond. Starting a business that people are already into can be very stressful to push forward as a marketer, that is why a lot of digital marketers take their first strategy as carrying out a competitive research. there are free tools that can be used to carry out qualitative and quantitative data about your competitors that will be helpful in creating a digital marketing strategy and one of them is the Google Search String.

 Benefit of Competitive research

  1. Knowing Competitors strength and weakness: carrying out a competitive analysis exposes you to your competitor’s strength and lapses in the market will be helpful in mapping out your marketing plan.
  2. Marketing Trends: when you carry out a competitive research, you get updated on changes in your market and thus exposing market opportunities you need to tap into.
  3. Product Improvement: Products are rapidly developed to meet consumers needs. You need to key into this. competitive research helps you understand these improvements and other unique improvements that can drive in more sales.
  4. Marketing: competitive research also helps you identify key features that can improve your marketing plan. If your competition is successful in selling their product, then they are definitely doing their marketing right.

How to Use Google Search Strings

Google Search String is a line of a command typed into the search engine to find out a specific information. There are three major Google search strings that matter when carrying out competitive research and they are

Site:

This search string tells you how many pages your competitor’s website has. This comes in very handy for people who want to build a website but have no idea on how many pages they need. Using this search string, Google specifically shows you the website pages of your competitors and their titles. On the google search engine interface, type in the search string followed by competitor’s website without any space e.g site:website.com. Google will show you all the pages on the website.

Link:

Link search string shows up the result of other links and affiliates that link to your website. This search string come in handy when you are looking for your competitor’s backlinks or outbound links. The search string shows you several websites, blogs or affiliates programs including apps linking to your competitor’s website.

To use this search string, head on to your Google search engine interface and type the following; link:website.com. Remember there shouldn’t be any space between the search string and your competitor’s website. It is important to note that the first page of the search result normally comes out accurate, but the rest of the result pages can be inaccurate.

Related:

This search string comes in handy for those who do not have an idea of all their competitors. The search string is used to find out the websites that are similar or related to yours. For example, you want to start a business and you only have an idea of one major competitor. You will want to also find out other competitors out there who aren’t popular but offer the same services as yours. Using this search string you type the competitor website without any space; e.g: related:website.com.

Remember, when using the search strings, you need to be specific. Do not add space when using it and do not add www. when adding the website.

 

 

 

 

5 Team Management Tools to boost Productivity

5 Team Management Tools to boost Productivity

by | Feb 7, 2018 | Business

5 Team Management Tools to boost Productivity

Are you a Project Manager or coordinator? Do you have a team you are in charge of? Then, this article is for you. Communication is of utmost importance to the success of any given project, and it is arguable that ensuring that clear communication pathways are established between all team members and clients is the most important role of a PM. Hence, we’ve brought you 6 team management apps and tools that can streamline your communication pathways and supercharge your productivity.

1. Trello

A simple to use visual-based team management tool, the interface is extremely intuitive, and easy to grasp in not more than 5 or 10 minutes with only the minimal amount of instruction. Trello’s main function, is to organise projects throughout their various stages or iterations. Users can create boards, and on those boards, they can create lists, and on those lists they can create cards. Cards contain information and attachments – files, documents, images etc. As each task is completed, the card can be moved from one list to the next, so all members can view its progress.

2. Realtime Board
Realtime Board is the perfect tool for helping teams to brainstorm and communicate ideas. Every member of a particular Board can write notes, draw sketches and create diagrams – and communications can be made in real-time.

3. Droptask

This tool presents the user with ‘drops’. For each task – or stage of a task – a ‘drop’ can be created, colour coded, and then marked as in progress, on hold or completed. Furthermore, subtasks can be added to any individual task, comments can be left and files can be attached.

4. Slack

With Slack, all messages can be posted in one place, and access to all chats can be gained from both desktop and mobile devices. It’s also possible to segment chats so that communication can take place between only a few team members, or between client and PM.

5. Toggl

This a web app that monitors and tracks the time spent on various projects and allows users to analyse productivity. It monitors how long employees are spending on each project. Timesheets can be generated at any time, and, at the end of each month a comprehensive sheet detailing the precise hours of work can be easily formed and forwarded onto clients with an accompanying invoice.

 

This article was adapted from itsmonkie

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