The bedrock principle of any business is attracting leads and converting them into paying clientele. As you grow your business, you want to put its name out there and acquire new customers who become loyal, repeat visitors, and shoppers for your products or services. But is pushing your name through emails, social media, and your website enough? Not really.
While sending emails and posting blog entries is simple, constantly changing up your brand’s design and the message that this design sends is a detrimental approach that does not do anything to retain your brand consistently in customers’ minds. When you change everything about what makes your brand its unique self, you will drown in a sea of similar brands.
Think about the one overarching trait of all successful brands. What is the one trait that companies like Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, and Fed-Ex have in common? It is brand consistency. You can find various experienced branding services to help you design your brand, but once it is established, you must understand why you need to keep your brand consistent.
The Importance Of Brand Consistency For Your Business
An established brand must maintain a singular visual, tonal, and emotional feel throughout its life and many other aspects that must stay consistent that include the mood, images, and brand voice. Take Apple, for instance. If you view their official website, Instagram page, and Facebook profile, they all feature minimalist usage of colors and fonts, straightforward messaging, and vibrant images. As a brand, Apple wants to communicate to the world that they are sleek and sophisticated.
Why Keep A Brand Consistent?
However, brand consistency doesn’t just apply to large companies as smaller businesses can and absolutely should abide by the same consistency principles as well. Doing so will assure a greater chance of the growth and stability of your business. Here are some of the more explicit reasons why brand consistency is so pivotal:
● Consumers in your particular niche are a lot more likely to retain your brand in their recollection when they think of the product or services your business offers.
● Your brand will be distinct and stand out from your competitors in the business realm.
● In the long run, it builds trust between you and your customers as they become able to know what to expect from you.
● It sets your own brand’s personality apart from others, allowing you to establish a deeper connection.
Maintaining Brand Consistency Across The Marketing Spectrum
We have now explored what brand consistency is and why it is so important. Now it’s time to dive into how to maintain such consistency across all of your business’s platforms.
Defining Your Brand
To maintain consistency, you must first establish what your brand stands for to set a standard that you will then uphold. You can start by determining the answers to the following questions:
● Who are you, and what do you do?
● What are your goals?
● What problem do you aim to provide a solution for?
● What are your business’s driving beliefs?
● What makes you different from your competitors?
● What personality would your brand have if it were a person?
● How would your brand speak to an audience if it were a person?
Brand Book Development
Keep in mind that you are not alone in working to develop your brand. Your team, as well as third parties that will eventually be your partners as your business grows, all contribute to your brand’s manifestation as well. With so many “cooks in the kitchen” it is essential that there is a set of guiding principles that assure that everyone aligns with the one vision of the brand. To establish this set of principles, you need to prepare a brand book.
The brand book is a set of guidelines that will serve as a roadmap for how your brand is portrayed across all platforms. You can distribute it to everyone who has a hand in working with your brand to ensure all have the same core brand principles to abide by. Some of the aspects included in the brand book are:
● Brand Elements: Those attributes that define your brand.
● Brand Messaging: Your brand’s message aims to communicate to the world to be portrayed through your design and marketing content. Your brand’s team must understand the core messaging as they need to communicate that same message to your target audience consistently.
● Brand Identity: Your brand’s style includes its unique color palette, typography, logos, and various other design elements.
● Logo: The visual representation of your brand and what people will most vividly recall about it.
● Color Pattern: The color palette that is most reflective of your brand.
● Typography: Because each font has a particular personality and mood, all of its own, it is essential to keep the font representing your brand consistent.
Elemental Similarity
Visual and text elements should stay consistent across all platforms representing your brand, even though the media are different.
● Website And Social Media Domains: Staying consistent with your username across all platforms assures that they can quickly locate you anywhere if your audience wants to find you.
● Profile Imagery: Using your brand’s logo as your profile picture across all social and business channels, you assure that your brand’s visual representation gets maximum exposure. Even if you conduct specialty campaigns, your customized logo should be reflected similarly across all channels at the time of the campaign.
● Header Imagery: Personalizing your profile through a header image (such as Twitter and Facebook) can be most effectively utilized to promote any ongoing campaigns. You can also humanize your brand by using a photo of your brand’s team in the header.
● Profile Description: While different platforms have varying character limitations in terms of brand descriptions, assure that the consistency of the content remains even if the rhetoric differs.
Advance Planning For Content
One of the biggest challenges with consistency retention across all platforms is staying true to your brand message with the content you put out. This endeavor is challenging when you have to put something out at the drop of a hat but is made significantly more straightforward and more effective when planned out ahead of time.
By planning your content, you will avoid posting content that feels out of place or counterproductive to your brand. Giving yourself time to prepare will allow you to formulate better and refine your content and the message it promotes. This way, when you publish content across all platforms, it is well prepared and consistent long before it makes out to the public eye. Don’t worry; there are powerful social media tools that make managing your content consistently across your platforms as simple as performing a few clicks.
When you post content on one platform, try to repurpose it when posting it on another. So if you recently published a blog post, you can link to it from Facebook, use its featured images on Instagram paired with a catchy comment, and highlight some helpful notes from the post on Twitter.
Offline Brand Extension
Your business may do a lot of brand promotion online, but there is an excellent chance that it also interacts with customers face to face. There is no reason that brand consistency should be confined to just online messaging. The brand consistency should be available through offline channels as well.
When communicating with customers, brand representatives should speak to customers with a personality and tone consistent with the brand. Even your store layout and design and extended aspects like delivery trucks should be designed in alignment with your brand’s identity. Every aspect of your business should be performed with brand consistency in mind.
Final Thought
Now that you know the what, how, and why of brand consistency, you need to ensure that every platform that broadcasts your brand stays streamlined in terms of brand messaging. This will ensure that customers know what to expect from your brand, growing to trust it, and become loyal customers in the future.
Choosing the right branding agency is pivotal to your overall success and vital to managing your brand. Brand consistency starts at the initial brand design stages, making sure you see eye to eye with your branding firm—the more consistent your brand, the higher your ROI in the future.