Here are several warning signs that your brand may need a makeover. And I don’t mean adding eyeliner, lipstick and hair frosting. If you suffer from one of these issues, you are weakening your brand.
Signs Your Brand Needs a Marketing Makeover
- You have inconsistencies in how your colleagues tell your company’s story. It is as if they are all speaking a different language, describing a different movie.
- Your materials are all about you and what you sell. They don’t communicate any of the benefits that customers would gain from working with you.
- You aren’t explaining what problem you solve for them. Instead, you talk about peripheral issues and minutia. You don’t do enough listening.
- You forget that most visitors to your website will stay there for less than one minute. If you don’t explain your value to them in less than seven seconds, they are gone. Your site could be way too complicated for a quick visitor.
- You haven’t successfully set expectations around the promise that your brand delivers. Customers are confused, and your message is unclear.
- You overwhelm your clients with choices. You make the ability to make a decision complicated so that they are overwhelmed.
- Your competitors sell the same products or offer the same services as you, and there is no meaningful point of differentiation.
- You make it difficult to do business with you – not because you aren’t polite, but because you make it hard to get started.
- Any company could say your mission statement – it a bureaucratic blabber of words like synergy and innovation.
- Employees aren’t motivated because no one focuses on the internal marketing required to align the team.
- You lack a cohesive way to communicate frequently with existing customers to remind them of the benefits you can bring to them.
- Your contacts are in 15 different places, and you aren’t using simple, outbound marketing to remind clients i.e.human beings of what you can help them achieve.
- You want to market to everyone versus a very specific and narrow audience segment.
There are marketing makeover opportunities for all these problems. It isn’t about window dressing and making things look pretty. A makeover can help you help your customers tell the stories they want to tell themselves. A marketing makeover is a shift in your perception of how you view your branding activities.
Remember, you are a facilitator of your customers’ success, not the other way around.
Photo: By Michel Ozimo (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Need help with any of these problems? Contact me so we can get started.
