South Florida Web Design, Brand Management, SEO and Digital Marketing Agency

You’ve built your brand. You’ve watched it grow. You have plans for its future. Nothing can stop you now, right? pause…

Reality Check: Most businesses fail. Even people with the clearest brands, the clearest visions, and the best reputations don’t make it.

Hate to burst your bubble. But you shouldn’t be living in a bubble anyway.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that a little success automatically translates into a bright, unlimited future. Just because you didn’t step into any of the early pitfalls doesn’t mean you are going to not have any setbacks.

You will. It’s a part of business.

The difference between a successful business owner and a loser is recognizing that every failure is an opportunity learn to be better.

You are going to make mistakes. But your mistakes should be your own. They shouldn’t be other people’s mistakes.

So give yourself a head start by avoiding these 8 biggest branding mistakes tons of other business owners have made countless times already.

Mistake 1 – Trusting the Wrong People

Your brand will be judged by the company you keep. And while you can control your actions and decisions, you can’t always control those of the people you choose to be partners with.

So it’s essential that you choose wisely. Don’t make decisions on who to bring on board to your brand lightly. Yes, you will need to hire outside help like consultants or marketing agencies. Yes, as you get bigger you will need to rely on other people to help you run the day to day.

But no, you shouldn’t trust everybody. Or even anybody without vetting them first.

And not just people, either. You need to worry about the other brands your brand is associated with as well. If you tie yourself to somebody else’s brand, you better make sure it’s not going to blow up in your face later.

So how can you protect yourself and your brand? By asking questions. Lots and lots of questions.

For example, when hiring an outside vendor, consider things like:

• Do they understand my brand?
• Do they have a track record of success helping brands like mine?
• Are there any red flags I need to be aware of?

Even partnerships with other brands come with enormous risks. Trusting your gut is fine. But knowledge is power. Ask questions like:

• Are their values consistent with mine?
• What other partnerships do they have?
• Would I choose their brand?

Don’t waste your time with people or other brands that you don’t believe in. If you are willing to put in the effort, then time is on your side.

Mistake 2 – Chasing Trends

Trends come and go. But successful business stick around for a long, long time.

If you are constantly chasing after the shiny new thing, then you are going to be constantly frustrated. That’s because the public is fickle. And what’s popular today probably isn’t going to be at the top of the Yahoo! Trending list in a week or two.

Instead, focus on your core beliefs rather than what’s popular. These are unlikely to change much over time. And when they define your business, you truly believe in them, and you can get people to put their genuine trust in them, they can ensure a longer-term success.

Mistake 3 – Being Afraid of Letting Go

Have you ever watched the TV show “Hoarders”? It features people who fill their homes and storage lockers with tons and tons of useless stuff they just can’t let go.

When it comes to running your business, don’t be a hoarder. Instead, learn to become comfortable with change. Let go of outdated or inefficient things that harm rather than help your business.

This includes people, systems, products, promotional campaigns, designs, content, logos, and anything else that doesn’t feed growth and profitability.

Inefficient brands live in the past. Successful brands live in the present and strive for a brighter future.

Mistake 4 – Making Bad Hires

We’ve written in the past about when and how to hire. At some point, growing your brand needs to become a bigger priority than running your day to day. That’s when you need to bring others on board.

But picking the wrong people can sabotage all the success you already have achieved and keep your brand from living up to its potential. That’s why it’s so important to schedule time, money, and resources to hiring the best people for the right positions.

Inevitably, there is going to be some turnover. Life is complicated.

But if you can find excellent people who genuinely believe in what you are doing, you can minimize the amount of time you spend replacing people and maximize the amount of time you focus on big picture branding growth.

Mistake 5 – Straying from Your Core Values

Okay, it’s a tricky world.

In order to attract new markets, you may need to consider new strategies for growth.

But these should never, never, never compromise the core values you established when you created your brand.

Stay true to your core values and people will trust in you.

But if you compromise your message just to attract new audiences, you invariably will lose the customers who are most loyal to you. And once they fall away, there’s usually no winning them back.

Mistake 6 – Brand Wandering

Similarly, you need to stay loyal to the brand you created. If you wander too far away from your successful brand, it’s going to alienate existing customers and drive off prospective new ones.

For example, what if Apple suddenly decided to get into the fast food business? How would the people who own iPhones and Macs think about the company if they started also selling tacos and cheeseburgers or milkshakes?

Apple is smart enough to know its core business is tech. And they have built that brand into a trillion-dollar business that serves passionate customers who are fiercely loyal.

So what’s your core brand?

Identify it and stick with it. And avoid new products or services that don’t align with your proven brand.

Mistake 7 – Taking Your Eye Off the Prize

If you’ve built a successful brand, it’s probably because you had a clear vision of where you wanted your business to go.

Don’t screw it up now!

Preparing for growth means always seeing the big picture. Once you lose sight of where you want to go, it’s difficult to recapture the magic that made your brand successful in the first place.

The business battlefield is littered with brands that took their eye off the prize.

Maybe they chose products or services that weren’t consistent with their core values in order to attract new markets. Or maybe they made bad hiring decisions and spent more time managing people than managing their own brand.

There are lots of distractions out there. As an effective brand manager, it’s your job to keep steering toward the successful goal you have set for yourself and your business.

Mistake 8 – Failing to Define Your Brand Standards

The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.

The biggest branding mistake you make is failing to define your brand standards, your core values, in the first place.

You can’t build a successful brand without a firm foundation. And that’s one that’s based on a clear understanding of what you stand for.

You need to understand what your business is all about before you can move forward. Failing to do that is going to undermine every step you take as you build your brand:

• You won’t be able to differentiate what’s good or bad for your brand
• You can’t hire people whose values are consistent with your brand
• You can’t guide your brand towards a driving goal
• You can’t dispose of things that aren’t consistent with your brand

Your brand standards are the driving force behind every decision you make as a brand manager.

So when they aren’t clear, if they are constantly changing, or if they don’t exist at all you already are doomed before you even begin.

Fortunately, helping business owners avoid brand mistakes is what Lytron  does best. Want to learn more? Call or contact us today!

Choosing a branding company is one of the most critical decisions any company can make.

Branding is one of those things that most businesses don’t spend enough time focusing on. But it actually plays a huge role in the enterprise’s long-term success or failure.

Collaborating with a successful branding company that knows what it’s doing can have powerful, immediate impact on things like market share, sales figures, and profitability.

But all too often, business owners either pick a branding partner from among the affordable yet unproven random freelancers currently peddling their wares online or – worse yet – think they can do their branding themselves.

Before you choose a branding partner, consider the three essential elements of successful branding and how they play into your overall business strategy:

1. Visual Branding
2. Brand Messaging
3. Brand Positioning

Some branding partners are good at one of these things but aren’t experienced in the other two. Or perhaps they can be successful on two of these elements but can’t close the deal on the third.

But your business will only have a successful overall branding strategy if your branding partner can hit for the cycle and deliver on all three (more on that in a moment).

So let’s take a look at what role each of these three elements play.

Visual Branding

Visual branding is the element most people are familiar with. When you think of big, successful brands the first thing that typically comes to mind is something visual: the Ford logo, Apple’s iconic symbol of the apple with the bite taken out of it, the US Marine Corps’ symbol that features an anchor, a globe, and an eagle.

These are instant, immediate symbols that can call a brand to mind visually. And while they aren’t exactly easy to create, they don’t generally require as much work or effort to sustain once you land on a visual logo or branding symbol you like.

Yet visual branding designers are available by the boatload online. Freelance designers, artists, and branding “agents” compete ferociously with each other for the opportunity to draw your brand logo or symbol. While this can often lead to competitive pricing, it can also be a time trap.

You see, the symbol of your brand – while important – isn’t as critical to your overall success as the other two branding elements we are about to describe. Yet so many business owners spend so much time pouring over dozens of logo proposals or spin their wheels working with artists and freelancers when they could be doing something much more profitable – such as working on their brand messaging or positioning.

There are plenty of great companies with less-than-perfect visual branding elements. And there are even more businesses with knockout logos or symbols that can’t get off the ground on the more important elements of branding. Speaking of which …

Brand Messaging

The easiest way to describe brand messaging is: Words more than pictures. Brand messaging can include things like a tagline – such as the US Marines’ “Semper Fidelis” or “Semper Fi”, McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It”, or Mercedes-Benz’s “The Best or Nothing” – as well as other words, phrases, or even the overall tone they use to describe their company or products.

The way Pepsi talks about its products is quite a bit different than how brokerage firm Merrill Lynch describes theirs. Yet both are the product of brand messaging specialists who focus their skills and talents on communicating to prospective customers through words and phrasing rather than logos or visual images.

While some branding agencies are adept at integrating design with messaging, it’s a good bet that the art school graduate pitching their visual branding skills on Craigslist, Upwork, or another freelance marketplace isn’t going to have the writing experience or skills needed to succeed at brand messaging.

Finally, there’s …

The Three Pillars of Successful Branding – Brand Positioning

Today, it’s not enough to have a great logo, amazing ad copy, or print or video ads that combine the two. Your business needs to get its message TO its prospective customers first. Otherwise, all the time and money invested in developing visual branding and brand messaging will be squandered.

That’s where brand positioning comes into play. Its also where experienced branding agencies excel in the 21^st Century.

You see, all the old paradigms of business marketing were shattered about a decade ago. Traditional marketing platforms like TV, radio, print media, and direct mail don’t have the value they once had.

New media such as social media platforms, podcasting, streaming video, and other technologically advanced models are now the best way to reach consumers regardless of how you have positioned your brand with visual images or ad copy.

The successful branding agency can do all three: Create or improve existing successful visual branding, develop effective and consistent brand messaging that genuinely connects with targeted audiences, and then deliver both of those things on the platforms people actually use today.

The Three Pillars of Successful Branding – Lytron Design

As our name implies, Lytron Design originated as a design firm. But we quickly came to realize that if we were going to successfully deliver the kinds of measurables our clients demanded, we were going to have to expand our offerings to include all three branding pillars.

Currently, we are one of the fastest-growing branding agencies in North America, creating highly effective, hugely successful visual branding, brand messaging, AND brand positioning for small- and mid-sized businesses worldwide.

It’s not enough to pick a branding partner that can do only one or two of these branding pillars well. If you want to truly reach people and expand the size and scope of your offering, you need to collaborate one that can do all three. And that branding agency is Lytron Design.

Working with an effective branding agency can lead to immediate, sustained advantages — including increased brand recognition, penetrating new markets, and the “holy trinity” of more sales, bigger market share, and overall business growth.

Yet collaborating online, by phone, or even through video conferencing with file sharing capability can only do so much. To truly get at the core of your business, it’s sometimes necessary to go “all-in” with your branding partner.

And that’s known as brand immersion.

Full Brand Immersion

Brand immersion involves having your branding partner embedded within your organization for a specific period of time. It may be a few days, a week, or even longer.

During that time, the branding expert can assess all of your brand systems, review your brand messaging, and delve deeply into your brand positioning in order to identify what your business is doing well and what can be improved.

The results are often astounding. Full brand immersion is one of the best ways for you branding agency to get the true inside picture of how your business works, what its genuine struggles are, and how it can be improved. And the takeaway is often worth the investment in time, effort, and money.

First Phase: Brand Auditing

The first step is a complete brand audit. During this phase, the branding agency will conduct a deep dive into the business’s past branding efforts, digging deep into how the business is perceived by the outside world.

Brand auditing often requires full access to analytics, marketing reports, and internal planning documents with the objective of coordinating a complete picture of where the brand marketing has been, where it is currently, and which direction it is likely to go moving forward.

Typical things that are uncovered during brand auditing include:

• Bottlenecks that can inhibit brand growth
• Keywords, phrases, and tone that best appeal to targeted audiences
• Point of view statements that attract the best customers and filter out time thieves
• Strengths and weaknesses of current visual branding, brand messaging, and brand positioning
• Content analysis with an eye toward both consistency and effectiveness.

Once a full picture of where the brand stands from the brand auditing, the next step is complete and total immersion.

Second Phase: Brand Immersion

During the immersion stage, the branding agency partner physically travels to the business and becomes embedded in the operation. Generally, this lasts a week but in some cases it can be longer or shorter depending on the branding challenges to be overcome.

During this time, the brand agency meets with the CEO, marketing team, and even business clients to drill down into potential opportunities for improvement based on the brand auditing.

For a brief time, we will become an active part of your business. We listen in on how your reps talk to clients, we will interview our team members to get their candid thoughts on operations and overall culture, and we will speak directly engage with clients to get a feel for existing best practices and potential opportunities.

Finally, we will even spend time with leadership outside of the workplace in order to get a feel for what makes the business tick. We will eat at your favorite restaurants, meet family members, pet the dog, and see you in your true element.

All of these elements of full immersion are critical to determining areas for improvement, branding opportunities, and to gain an understanding of the underlying business culture that fuels its successes.

Third Phase: Report and Recommend

All of the data from the brand auditing combined with the in-person research from the full immersion will then be brought back and compiled, analyzed, and assessed by our team of brand experts.

The result will be threefold:

• A truthful, unbiased picture of where your brand is right now
• Recommendations on how to improve visual branding, brand messaging, and brand positioning to achieve optimal results
• And a road map on how to achieve these mutually agreed upon objectives with maximum speed and efficiency.

Lytron Design has achieved enormous success with this type of full brand immersion. We have worked with a wide variety of clients in a number of industries and geographic locations to deliver tangible, effective branding results that have resulted in measurable successes.

Success Stories

One of the most recent was VTEC Lasers & Sensors, a pilot project funded by the European Commision to support the digital transformation of small- and medium-sized businesses throughout the EU.

Here’s what VTEC founder and president Jan Mink had to say about the full immersion experience of working with Lytron Design:

“We at VTEC had the opportunity to work with Lytron and specifically with Mariana for 4 weeks, supported by DigitaliseSme. It was a great experience, the energy , support and knowledge she has put in makes you directly become a fan of the possibilities of digitalising your companies message. She supported strongly in creating a great website and also presenting VTEC in all the different media and news channels. Based on my experience i can advise you to first contact Lytron if you want to enhance your digital presence.”

Not every company needs brand immersion. But many can benefit from the getting the full, undivided attention of a branding expert embedded within their organization with the objective of creating a comprehensive, highly effective strategy for global branding success.

If you want to learn more about branding immersion and the other services we offer, all you need to do is contact Lytron Design. We can’t wait to partner with you to streamline your branding to achieve outstanding success together.