Your brand is much more than your logo and other visual elements. Your brand is about convincing customers that you are better than the competition. Every promotion and identification you make for your business are part of your brand.

Your brand can have a significant impact on your ecommerce success.

Your branding strategy execution and strategy should be as hard as product development. Consistency and persistence are key to branding. Your business’s ability to communicate with customers effectively is at risk if you don’t have a well-planned branding strategy. This can limit your brand recognition, profitability, growth, and future success.

No matter how small or large your business is, branding is essential. To keep your branding intact and your customers happy, avoid the following mistakes

1. Without a clear strategy, creating a brand identity is difficult

Many companies skip branding strategy altogether and just jump into designing a website, logo and other marketing materials. Brands built solely on aesthetics can quickly fall apart, just as with any other haphazardly done task.

Your brand identity should be built on solid business foundations. It is important to understand what your business stands out for, how you compare to others, who your target market are, and where your business wants to go in the future. Only after you have answered these questions can you begin to create a brand identity.

This step is crucial for your success, no matter if you are an established ecommerce company or a start-up that sells online courses.

Your brand identity needs to change with your business. Amazon is a great example of an ecommerce company whose brand identity changed as it grew.

After a lawyer misunderstood it as “cadaver”, the original business name, “Cadabra”, was quickly replaced by “Amazon”. Name “Amazon” is the result of two conscious efforts to achieve two things.

• You will be found at the top or near the top in alphabetical lists (search engines used to arrange links alphabetically back then).

• You can conjure up images of sheer volume and size (the tagline for the site when it began was “Earth’s largest bookstore”).

Although Jeff Bezos had finally settled on a name for the brand, its logo was changed five times in five year. The logo’s first two iterations consisted of a river flowing through an “A” stylized. The logo was then reduced to the URL and tagline of the site.

A new identity was required as Amazon began to sell more than books and records.

The arrow element is used in the latest version of the logo that was introduced in 2000.

Three purposes serve the arrow. The first was to honor the company’s goal of selling everything alphabetically. The arrow runs from “A” through “Z”.

The company’s dedication to getting its products to customers all over the world was also represented by the arrow. The arrow is also a symbol of a smile.

Customers are guaranteed a great experience with Smiley.

Your ecommerce business may not be a billion-dollar enterprise, but that shouldn’t stop you from being ambitious when defining your brand strategy. Your brand might not grow if it isn’t clear or well-defined.

2. Use vague copy or contains errors

A common mistake made by many brands is to use unclear or incorrect copywriting in order to impress and attract their target audience. Many brands use buzzwords and jargon too often. In an effort to reach as many people as possible, they also use generic content.

This strategy is not sustainable long-term. The reader will likely leave the brand if they realize they were misled into believing certain things. Worse, they may tell anyone they know that the brand lies about what it says.

This can be explained by the desire to pitch the brand and sell it.

It’s important to grab customer attention but your copy should be clear and concise. You might not be as innovative if you have to use buzzwords such as “disruptive” and “innovative” to describe your product.

What options do you have if your product isn’t innovative? You can instead focus on the things that make your product stand out like price, ease-of-use, and availability. Understanding your brand’s unique selling point (USP), will allow you to create a copy that is more engaging and persuasive.

You must proofread your copy, not only should you be focusing on your USP. Your brand should be remembered for the quality of your products and copy, not because it doesn’t match your brand identity.

3. There are no brand guidelines

It’s no good if the business doesn’t have rules about what employees can do and cannot. To ensure consistency and reliability across campaigns, your branding should have a set or guidelines.

These are the areas that specific brand guidelines address:

• Proper use and placement of logos
• Style, voice, tone, and writing style
• Images and visuals
• Color schemes
• Fonts and typography

HubSpot has, for instance, a set of brand guidelines which specify how to use its logo. This includes the maximum number of clearances that can be used when creating marketing materials. It also dictates which shade of orange a designer may use to create its “Sprocket” logo.

You can make sure that all the content your business produces – social media advertisements, product pages, and email signatures – looks and feels the same by using brand guidelines. Customers value predictability and consistency. This increases brand recognition.

Consistent branding across media can help set expectations about the quality and reliability of your products or services. This shows that you are attentive to details.

4. Insufficiently strong visuals

Research has shown that images are understood by the brain 60,000 times quicker than text. The eye also responds more to visual content than the written word.

You will have trouble keeping people interested if your ecommerce branding lacks visuals.

There are many types of visual content. Many visual content is decorative and doesn’t add any value to the text. You are missing an opportunity to strengthen your brand and get your message across to your audience if most of your visuals are this type.

Your visual content should not be used to create decorative images.

Your images should follow the brand guidelines if they have a specific color palette. Stock images are fine if they show people in motion if your business philosophy is quick, agile, responsive. Images that tell a different story than the one you are trying to tell will hurt your brand more than anything.

5. Don’t underestimate a logo

Your logo is the most prominent representation of your brand. Your logo should be easily recognizable and leave a lasting impression. Poorly designed logos can make it difficult for businesses to get off the ground.

These are the top logo design errors brands make:

• Combinations of poor colors
• Illegible fonts
• Symbols that are not related to the brand or business purpose
• Slogans that are not necessary

Too many companies try to save money on logo design, especially if they are tight on budget. They claim that they should save money on branding and logo design for product development. Customers will dismiss your products as unreliable and cheap if they don’t have a professionally designed logo.

In design circles, there’s an old saying: “You get what you pay for.”

If you pay someone who doesn’t have any knowledge of design theory to create your logo, you will get a poor product. A professional graphic designer will create your logo for a fraction of the cost.

6. Neglecting user experience

Your brand should reflect the quality of your customer service. Your brand will fall apart if your customers’ experience with your business isn’t up to their standards.

Your business should be known for offering great customer service.

A study by InMoment found that customers have a negative impression of a company’s sales and customer service representatives. Negative interactions can be caused by a lack of understanding of customer needs, inability to access staff or products or the use of membership platforms which fail to capture important information that could be used to personalize user experiences.

UX is not just about the appearance of your ecommerce website. UX encompasses everything a user does on your website or app, including searching for products.

7. Too fast branding

You must be consistent in your brand identity when you establish a brand. You can confuse your customers and yourself if you change too many elements of your brand.

Yahoo had to learn this lesson the hard way. Yahoo tried to create anticipation for its new identity when it scrapped its logo a decade ago by changing its logo every 30 days for 30 days.

The company stated that it wanted to have fun and honor the legacy of its old logo but it ended up backfiring. The iconic logo was featured in several versions.

The CEO of the company claimed she had spent a whole weekend working on the final design. This just confirmed what many others were already thinking: Yahoo didn’t have the right idea.

What can we learn from this case?

It takes time to rebrand. This involves much internal discussion and soul-searching to determine what the brand should represent. The next step is to develop the marketing materials to support your brand identity and to deliver products or services that are consistent with it.

Closing

Ecommerce businesses often become so focused on their operations (lead generation, sales, quality assurance, product development) that they forget about branding. Your business is at high risk of failing if you don’t have a clear brand strategy and identity.

Branding goes beyond a logo and a slogan. Your brand identity is what you want your customers to know about your company. It is a key element in brand recognition, marketing, loyalty, and customer loyalty. Your brand is part of the experience that someone has when they make a purchase on your ecommerce site. You should create a brand identity that puts the customer’s wellbeing first.

It doesn’t take millions to build a recognizable ecommerce brand. You must put in the effort and time to make sure your messaging and identity resonate with your target audience. It’s a good idea to avoid the mistakes we have just mentioned.