Each year, we accompany dozens of entrepreneurs through branding, growth, and marketing processes. Some are establishing a business for the first time, while others aim to stabilize an existing business marketing-wise—sometimes 20 years after it was founded. We’ve gathered several critical mistakes from various business types that owners frequently make, which are directly or indirectly related to marketing and branding.
- “Everyone is Just Waiting for Me”
A very common mistake among business owners is the illusion that everyone is just waiting for them to open their business or launch their product, and all they need to do is post on Facebook with the words “we’re open” or “it’s here,” and they’ll have a line out the door. This illusion is mainly created by the paradigm discussed in the next point, and the way to avoid this mistake is to recognize the trap and steer clear of it. Our tip: Before starting a business or embarking on a business venture, conduct a market survey. This survey will either validate the assumption that the initiative can succeed or bury it, saving you a lot of money, time, and disappointment. - You Are Not Selling to Yourself
One of the most common mistakes among business owners is the belief that they know everything: about their audience, their market, their products… Perhaps this is why sometimes you stand in front of an advertisement and can’t understand what they’re trying to sell you. This mistake appears in large companies and especially in small businesses.
Our tip: When creating a marketing action (from a Facebook post to a TV advertisement), you must remove yourself from the equation—the audience is what matters. What interests them may often not make sense to you, but they are the ones who are supposed to buy, and without them, there is no business.
- “I Have Nothing to Do…”
A very common phenomenon among business owners, especially those who have transitioned from employee to entrepreneur, is the belief that work simply “falls from the sky.” When you were an employee, this was the case, but now that you are self-employed, the situation is exactly the opposite. Work does not appear out of nowhere; it is the result of constant initiative, creativity, and forward-thinking. Marketing is the business engine that creates sales opportunities—there’s always work in marketing!
Our tip: Keep a calendar! A digital one! Fill it with marketing activities whenever you see an empty slot. Make a list of marketing tasks (building a website, designing an advertisement, social media activities, following up on leads, planning a promotion… the list is endless) and schedule them into your marketing windows.
- Marketing is a Profession
Another very typical mistake made by business owners is not dedicating enough time to learning the marketing profession. Remember, as long as you don’t have a full-time marketing manager, you are your own marketing manager. If you don’t do this at a high level, it means your marketing manager is on a slow strike, and you have no right to complain if your business results are poor.
Our tip: Acknowledge that the management board of your business is you. Any key position that you don’t fill will be the “Achilles’ heel” of your business. This is particularly true for marketing because, somehow, we all believe we are champions at marketing. Well, in most cases, that’s not really true. Create a routine of training, learning, and improving this function in your business—it’s a very important key to success!
- Gestalt Theory and Design Principles
If the title of this mistake is unclear to you, it’s a warning bell because it means you probably don’t really know how your design should look. Remember, the fuel of the business world is graphics. This is the combustion material on which most marketing machines operate, and if it’s not right, it’s like fueling your gasoline engine with diesel. Design principles, and especially Gestalt theory, form the basis of a topic you need to know—marketing communication or how you are perceived by people.
Our tip: Familiarize yourself with design principles and their impact on marketing communication. For instance, one of the Gestalt principles describes the importance of figure and ground in any image. Our brain struggles to identify a figure within the background. If we overload our flyer with dozens of products to cram the entire catalog into it, we create a background without a figure. It’s likely that the results of such a flyer will be much poorer than one designed according to design principles.
- Tell a Story – Storytelling
If you search Google for the term “storytelling,” you’ll discover a rapidly evolving world that is gaining substance and soul right now. For us, branding professionals, this is an amazing time to be in because until recently, the story of the brand was considered peripheral information. Today, we are witnessing the rise in the value of the story, and it would be wise for you to harness this movement for the benefit of your business.
Our tip: What’s your story? It’s time to write it, extract juicy details that will interest your audience, and mainly present it outwardly. Your story will never end and will never be told “too much.” To build your brand, you need to polish your story repeatedly, refine it, and consistently share it along the way.
- Separation is Key to Success
Do you know what shouldn’t be included in your story? That’s right, your private life. If you want to turn yourself into a brand, you need to understand a simple thing – a brand is a separate entity. The more you try to attach it to yourself, the more you delay and hinder its development. The brand’s outward presentation must include only topics that will strengthen the brand. Pictures of the kids? Political opinions? Insignificant events? Keep them out of the brand’s messaging. One post on a political topic, and all the branding you’ve built collapses. This is the sure way to remain a local business or brand, but it’s not the way to build an empire.
Our tip: Simply maintain a purely business discourse! Want to post for Memorial Day? Great, do it branded. Volunteering? Excellent, important – connect it to talking about the brand. Your kids at the pool? Not significant to the brand – open a private profile and post whatever you want there, as long as you don’t speak on behalf of the brand.
- Faith
We’ve reached the heavy, most significant tips. Even if you read them repeatedly, without internalizing them, they won’t impact your life.
For this tip, I invite you to do a guided imagery exercise. Imagine you’re sitting in a room with a devoutly religious person and try to convince them, with the most substantial scientific evidence, that God doesn’t exist. Do you think there’s a chance they’ll agree with you? Let’s make it harder. Take them to the most advanced laboratories in the world where it’s clearly shown that everything they attribute to divine action is actually physics. Will you succeed now? Probably not.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is true faith.
Our tip: Ask yourself – do I believe in my business’s success and its potential to become a brand as fervently as that religious person? Faith creates unbelievable processes, draws out strengths from people that are inexplicable, and can move mountains. In business, we need faith to create positive momentum for our ventures. Without faith, every bump in the road sends us back to square one. Incidentally, it’s not just you who are influenced by the power of faith; your audience is too.
- Does Size Matter?
Branding is a container, much like a pot that holds a plant determines its size. When you undergo a branding process without a marketing plan (a small pot), you essentially perpetuate your current size, creating a situation where you’re pulling the brand instead of the brand pulling you. And pulling a brand is extremely hard due to its enormous significance to the audience. So, fake it till you make it! Branding thinking is about living where you’re headed. The better you execute a branding process with a skilled professional, the more accurately you’ll be aligned with a future branding atmosphere, and that’s where you need to dwell. From that moment on, you live with complete faith that the future you’ve created with the branding professional, and even gave a symbol in the form of a logo, is on its way.
Our tip: Prepare a precise strategic marketing plan for the next five years (a big pot) – only then proceed with the branding process. At Mitzugo, we help business owners write their branding vision and conduct market research. Without these processes, you’re shooting in the dark and hoping to hit the target. You’ll need a lot of luck because it’s going to play a significant role here.
- Why Do People Buy?
When delving into our formula for sales-oriented marketing (SOM), it becomes clear that this is the fastest and most cost-effective way to create a brand. The foundation of our method is a deep understanding of sales processes and the application of sales principles in all branding and marketing efforts. One of the key principles is that every purchase decision starts with two very significant factors. These two factors, which lead to buying any product (from rice in the supermarket to a car), are product and quality. It sounds simple, but it’s not. We’ve developed an entire doctrine around these two factors, which forms the basis of the “pressure cooker” brainstorming process that initiates every branding project in our studio, leading to excellent and swift branding results.
Our tip: Create branding only with skilled professionals – skimping at this stage deflates your sails and results in expending a lot of energy, time, and money to create the reality you want for your brand.
Good luck!
