Is your business suffering from Brand Fatigue?

Is your business suffering from Brand Fatigue? Not just a trendy buzz word to be used around the water cooler, Brand Fatigue is an actual thing in today’s digital age and one that every business should be aware of.

The problem with brand fatigue is that when your target audience is suffering from it, they tune you out leaving you as background noise, which is most certainly not what you want.

So…let’s jump into brand fatigue; what it is, what it does and of course how to avoid it!

What is Brand Fatigue?

In a nutshell, brand fatigue is when people get tired of being bothered by communications from your company. They find the messages to be exhausting to the point that the ignore posts or tweets, delete emails in bunches without reading them and generally treating your brand like something a dog might leave in the park after a walk.

That’s not a pretty picture and certainly not something you planned for with your marketing strategy.

A great example is a friend I follow on Facebook who is a very active advocate for women. While I support her, her ideals and the points she makes, her messages now fall on deaf ears. Why you ask? The simple answer is fatigue. She posts similar messages multiple times per day, every day. Every time a message pops up in the feed it is something that has been somewhat covered.

While these are messages from her personally, as an advocate for women, her brand became exhausting so now her posts do not appear in my feed.

There are many examples like that which you have probably personally experienced with everything from emails to tweets. It’s not just the message that causes this fatigue; it’s the frequency and repetitiveness which is exhausting.

What does it do to your target audience?

As you might have guessed, it causes people to ignore your messages. In some cases people might just delete emails or regulate them to spam. People might not follow a feed but check in when they like.

The bottom line is that people are not getting your messages.

That generally means even if someone still wants to follow you, engagement levels have dropped. Additionally when people start seeing the same business name, same name of the person on an email, same logo and the same colors again and again the association is creates is either annoyance or weariness, neither of which is your goal.

Tips for Avoiding Brand Fatigue

• Reduce messages per medium – First things first, reduce the total number of message you send on any and all mediums. In some cases, you might be flooding someone via email but posting moderately via Facebook. The goal should be to provide a moderate amount of content so that people can handle the volume. Attention should be made to the total number of message sent across all mediums per day and week as well to take into consideration people who subscribe to multiple things. That might mean an email on Monday, a Facebook post on Friday and 3 tweets during the week is the best combination to not overwhelm people.
• Always provide value – Sometimes people get caught up in posting and tweeting just to do it and the value provided is too low to matter. If you send someone 5 emails a week and only one has good content where is the incentive? Too few valuable messages mean people will not pay attention and thus engage with your brand.
• Email should be personal – In general email should be used conservatively and with a personal message. Not only is this a great way to foster a connection, but you learn more about your audience and the types of messages that resonate. With a good base, when you start scaling your email you have a better understanding of how often you should mail, what people care about and are really looking for. Then follow open, unsubscribe and engagement rates to tailor what you are doing regularly.
• Blogs should be tracked and tested – You need to test your blog regularly to see what type of reach you get, what annoys people and what they will amplify along with why. You don’t want to guess, you want to know. Also keep an eye on the conversation rate for people that then go from reading the blog to opting in for the newsletter or following you on Facebook, etc. Your content needs to be successful and serve a purpose of not only providing value but making people want to engage more.
• Social media should be used carefully – Facebook actually punishes you for low engagement so you need to be careful with what you post and when you post it. Twitter, Google+ and other platforms are not subject to the same rules, but you should develop an ideology to be used for all of them. That means being careful with what you post, analyze it for engagement, learn from your analysis, and then do the same or better with subsequent posts so that the things you share as your brand gets high engagement.

The bottom line is that brand fatigue is a very real thing that people should be considering as they develop and update content and marketing plans. If your brand is suffering from brand fatigue our tips can help get you back on the right path, but the best option is to work hard initially so that your brand never suffers from this malady.