Template Marketing: the Industry DOPPELGANGER plague

Here is a business woman making a decision between copying everyone else’s templates or building her own brand.

Content creation for the sake of creating marketing can be tedious. Especially, for those who don’t love marketing or don’t know how to market their brand. If you don’t love the process of marketing, it will show in your results. We’ve grown accustomed to marketing templates becoming widely available.

Canva and Adobe have democratized entrepreneurship, meaning they are giving the small business owner a fighting chance with creating visually stunning and eye-catching ways to reach their audiences. Their secret to democratizing marketing lies in their easy-to-use features and marketing templates.

A small business can easily make marketing and really has no excuse to NOT make content – other than time constraints or not understanding your market/industry enough. But here is our new locust plague, business owners all using the exact same templates or – GASP – the wrong templates. We will talk about AI another day.

This is very prevalent in the service-based industry. Mimicking another business’s brand is very common. But, here’s the thing, you don’t really admire the business, you are admiring the business owner. Hoping to emulate their success and a persona/life/work repertoire that you have built in your head. 

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors if you are using the exact same fonts, pictures, colors, descriptions, even stock images as your competitor? Do you have your neighbor’s family photos on your fireplace mantle, too? Was Timmy’s C+ report card not good enough, so you put a copy of his best friend’s A+ marks prominently displayed on your fridge (with the GOOD magnet)? Oh, oh, did I go too far? Is that where you draw the line? Because it’s the exact same thing. Some would describe that as stalker-ish. Instead, you are okay with your business displaying it for the whole world to see.

You need to differentiate yourself. Make yourself known. You are unique.

You’ve seen it before when everyone is using the exact same stock photos to describe your/their services. There is a difference between trying to convey a symbol and just straight-up copying and pasting earned trust. It’s cheap and customers know.

Using templates is not the same as creating the actual brand. Building your brand requires custom tailor-made templates for you and your services and products. That’s where the COMMS team can help. You get a graphic design team that gives you a customized experience that understands you and your target market.

If you are interested in learning how to build your own brand, you can always book a free consultation session with us here.