With so many different avenues to promote, represent, express, and display your small business, it can be easy for various aspects of your marketing to take on their own unique profiles. However, the key to maximizing the impact of your marketing strategies is to maintain consistency across all channels. In this post we’ll go over how to maintain brand consistency so that you can strengthen your reputation, build your audience, and grow your business.
The Importance of Brand Consistency
Consistency is an essential aspect of marketing. We use various tactics for various marketing goals. There are advertisements, pamphlets, events, social media campaigns, landing pages, and more. There is brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, and beyond. At the end of the day, you want all of these tactics to be working together and facilitating one another. At the core of this integrated system is brand consistency. By keeping your image and messaging consistent, you can:
Be Memorable
Consistency facilitates memory, allowing potential customers to remember your business when they need it.
Get Recognized
Consistency and recognition go hand in hand. The more familiar a potential customer is with your brand, the more they will trust you. Trust is at the core of business growth.
Build Your Reputation
When people are able to recognize and recall your business, this means they have created “a file” in their brain for your business, making it easier for them to collect, process, and store information about you and better understand your reputation.
Stand Out from Your Competitors
If potential clients and customers can distinguish your name and logo from your competitors, they are more likely to connect with you for their needs.
Tips for Keeping Your Brand Consistent
Now that you understand the importance of brand consistency, let’s go over some actionable steps you can take to ensure your business marketing forms a coherent system.
Establish Your Message
Make sure you know exactly what your message is so that you have a common thread throughout all of your content. Every business needs a message. This is the means by which you stand apart from your competitors and connect with your audience. Your message needs to be very specific and should answer these questions:
• What is the mission of your business?
• What is the specific problem you solve?
• What is unique about your solution?
• What are your core values?
• What are the core values of your customers?
• What is unique about your customers?
Your brand message is not just a way of reaching your potential customers, but of connecting with them in a meaningful way. To come up with your message, write out the answers to the above questions and see if you can find any common themes and keywords.
Identify Your Brand Voice
You can think about the look and feel of your brand as a reflection of your messaging, and the voice as a more of a direct communicator of it. Your company should have a personality, and it should appeal to certain personalities. With the right language and tone, you can rest assured that what you are saying to your audience is how it is heard. Make sure you identify what your voice is so that it aligns with your messaging and stays consistent across all platforms, from printed flyers to digital ads, social media posts, and event invites.
Create a Visual Library
To keep brand consistency, all of your visual and design elements should always be the same, such as your logo, typeface, colors and graphic style. These are your constants. If you are a DIY marketer, make sure that as you create different forms of content, you save your images and files as templates along the way. Better yet, create a library ahead of time if you can, of logos and graphics of various types (black and white, color, different sizes, etc). Not only will this improve your brand consistency, it will prevent you from cluttering up your computer with duplicates and multiple files, and save you the time of fishing through folders and recreating visuals.
Repurpose and Repeat
It’s important to keep your audience engaged with interesting, relevant, and high-quality content, but this doesn’t mean that you have to put out unique information every time you post on social media, update your website pages, or publish a blog post. There are many ways to convey the same message without sounding like a broken record, and many forms of presenting the material that appeals to different senses.
Promote the same eBook across social media channels and email marketing campaigns. Write a blog post that goes into further detail about the benefits of one of your products or services. If your product or service saves people time, you can create blog content around increasing productivity. Repeating and repurposing information is not the same as being redundant. Presenting closely related (if not the same) information repeatedly, in different formats and across different channels, is the key to developing your brand and keeping it consistent.
Use Social Media Profiles
Visual marketing is a big part of building your brand, and aside from your website, social media profiles are a great way to grow your visual image. Your Facebook business page and timeline, Twitter profile and feed, and Instagram feed should all contain profile and cover photo images that align with your branding. They should either be identical or be recognizable as part of the same “family”. This will ensure your brand is recognizable no matter where customers see it, and that they feel connected with your brand even while switching from platform to platform.
Standardizing your brand helps maintain consumer trust. When customers become familiar with a business because of its identifiable messaging and visuals, they create positive associations with that business and can remember it more easily. Follow these simple rules in order to keep a harmonious image and gain more business.
