#5 Challenges Entrepreneurs Face While Building a Brand Before building a startup, it is imperative to create a brand for yourself and influence people with your thoughts

Every entrepreneur wants their brand to stand out and be the best. Having a clear vision and identity is very important. But before building a brand strategy, you need to know some facts that can positively impact your brand as a whole when appropriately applied.

Here are five challenges that majority of the entrepreneurs face while building a brand and how to overcome them.

Lack of Personal Branding

Today is the era of personal branding. Each one of us must consider ourselves as a brand, and we should always strive to be a known self in the field of our expertise. Before building a startup, it is imperative to create a brand for yourself and influence people with your thoughts. Becoming a thought leader or an influencer within your industry impacts your business a lot.

Whenever anybody hears about a company for the first time, one of the first few things people do is to search about the founders of the company. When they search your name on Google, there should be enough data about you to prove your identity and authority on the subject as an expert and an influencer.

Lack of personal brand creates chaos around the credibility of your startup, and it takes more time than usual to build a brand. Hence, building your personal brand before going to start your company is essential. Get on social media, make relevant connections, be consistent and provide value. Contribute articles for prominent publications, go to meetups and speak in the industry events.

Poor Value Proposition

It is not just about having a startup offering generic products or services and trying to build a brand around. The technology is moving fast, and the expectations from startups are high. Innovation and creativity are a must to be on track.

If your product has a weak value proposition, then it is a waste of time and money to market such product. Your product should solve your target market's problem in a much better way than your competitors. In addition to that, what extra benefits you are offering is always what people look for. Hence, make your product as a bundle that not only solves your target market's problem but can also provide extra benefits at an affordable price.

Conduct a focus group survey and ask the sample to share their views on your sample product, get customer feedback from social media channels, and make changes accordingly, and this will help you upgrade your upcoming products since you already know your mistakes previously and how to solve them.

Unskilled Team

We all know how difficult it is to find the right talent for a startup, they usually have a budget problem, finding the suitable and passionate talent is a difficult task altogether. Since many startups cannot afford a hiring agency, the founders, and co-founders initially get their team members onboard. Since the founders are too busy with many other things, there are a lot of chances to misgauge and hire a non suitable candidate.

This way, if the majority is an amateur talent in the company, it is difficult for any startup to grow and performs poorly. Hence having some benchmarks along with tests are necessary to gauge the candidate's real knowledge about the subject. Every startup needs someone who can understand the company's vision, who is flexible and takes the initiative in solving the problems. Having three to four rounds of interview on different aspects or category with proper guidelines on what is expected from the candidate can easily help finding the suitable candidate.

Shoddy or Bad Design

We all know this, good design is good business. The first thing anybody notices after the company name is its website, the design, the overall look and feel. Poor navigation, images, loading speed, spelling and grammatical mistakes make a terrible first impression on the visitor. So make sure to take care of these things to increase the visitors average duration time on the website, this will also help in SEO.

The more the visitor stays on the site, the more value Google gives to the website. The user interface and experience are critical for any website and play a vital role while the new visitor visits the website. Make sure to hire a creative designer who not only knows coding but also understands the user behavior and what type of design fits well for your business.

Your website is the face of your company. Make sure that looks good enough for people to visit and take desired actions. Content is still the king, and we all agree. So, make sure to have a great title, description, H1, H2 tags, mention product features with strong tags, and a great call to action at the end.

Underutilization of Social Media

One easy, free and useful thing you can do in marketing your startup is to create social profiles on every social media platform. Your target market dwells on such social channels throughout the day. Understanding the best medium is next part, but first, being on every possible channel is a must.

Majority of the businesses still underutilize these social channels, and some have no idea of emerging trends on social media.

The most important thing to consider here is, all these social channels are free to create a company profile. You can pay for ads, and it is up to your decision. It might take some time to build some core fans around your pages initially on these social channels, but with a proper social media marketing plan, you can do wonders with your content. Have a weekly content plan as a calendar and push your messages on these social media platforms, cross promote your social channels and initially invite your friends and family to like and share your content.

Make connections with industry experts, tag them in your posts, and ask them to share your content. Make use of influencers in your industry and collaborate with them to produce and promote your content. Create an infographic, an expert round-up post, or a video and provide value. Share astounding information that people want to share.

These are the five challenges that majority of the entrepreneurs face while building a brand.