Knowing what it takes to maintain brand consistency across all platforms can determine the extent to which people will know you.
Brand consistency involves ensuring that every element of your company or organization retains similarity in its tangible and intangible aspects across various customers’ touchpoints.
Think of your brand as a face or an ambassador that represents your company. The first impression it gives has a huge factor as to whether your potential customers will want to do business with you or not.
This implies for your company to gain trust and build strong customer loyalty, it is important to ensure that your company’s tone, core values, customer experience and it’s overall identity are the same across diverse marketing platforms.
In this article, we will cover seven effective strategies you can deploy to ensure consistency in your branding:
1. Develop a clear brand identity:
Table of Contents
Your identity as a company is a clear definition of who you are as a company. It includes your logo, colour palette, typography, infographic and more.
Marketing pro, Marty Neumier defines brand identity as the outward expression of a brand including its trademark, name, communications, and visual appearance. Simply put: it is how your company looks, feels, or even tastes.
Your brand identity is made up of basic core elements:
- Logo
- Color palette
- Typography
In building your identity as a corporate brand it is important to ensure that it is:
- Distinct enough to stand out from the crowd
- Memorable and easy to remember,
- Scalable enough to grow and evolve with your company
- Flexible enough to be used in various medium platforms (print, web, etc).
Also Read:
- 7 Winning Strategies To Dominate Social Media For A Healthcare Brand
- 7 Unique Steps To Picking The Perfect Colour For Your Business’ Branding
- Maximizing Brand Exposure: Incorporating Logo Placement Tactics From Custom Polo Shirts
2. Create a comprehensive brand style guide
To maintain brand consistency, you need a comprehensive brand style.
A brand style guide is a comprehensive document highlighting your brand’s core components. It serves as a system of instructions that outlines rules and standards that should be identified with your brand hence, it guides users on how they interact with your brand assets and products.
They can also be referred to as a brand manual, or brand book and could range from a one-page book to many pages. However, they hold certain instructions and elements that reflect a clear image of the visual language and the brand voice.
Moreso, it is important it embodies your overall brand identity and contains essential elements including:
- Your brand story
- Brand logo
- Colour palette
- Typography
- Image and typography guidelines
- Spacing and layout
- UI elements
- Iconography
- The do-not guidelines
- Social media use
3. Consistent messaging and tone of voice
This involves communicating your brand personality through the messages you distribute across your marketing channel.
Simply put, your brand voice is what you say, your tone is how you say it.
Envision your brand as a person in a social event. How would you show up? What would be the personality trait that you would be associated with? Critical melancholy or shy?
However, when it comes to the tonality of your brand, think of the emotions you intend to convey to your target market and craft your product or service around the resultant feeling you want them to get.
Consider this list of brand tones:
- iPhone communicates the feeling of trends
- Coca-Cola sells the feeling of happiness and fulfillment
- Nike sells the feeling of motivation.
- Tesla sells the notion of innovation
You can determine this by stepping into the minds of your target customers and deciding how you would like them to perceive you. List possible persona you would love your target customers to know you for and utilize various elements to suit them
The trick is to identify certain key attributes in conveying your message. Determine the complementary language and vocabulary, writing tone (formal, informal, or conversational) that aligns and reflects your brand persona. You will do this while ensuring a complementary tone that is appropriate for your target market.
4. Training your team on brand guidelines
To entrench your identity regularly, it is important to train your team to understand your brand irrespective of their title or level. The aim is to ensure that every member or the team understands your business philosophy.
To ensure this consider the following:
- In your content, pay attention to simple details like the color scheme, and fonts that are related to the topic in the presentation
- Build a company culture around your brand values
- Consistently communicate the brand identity to everyone
- Ensure you onboard new members and educate them properly on your brand identity
Also Read:
- 5 E-commerce Marketing Secrets You Can Learn From Big Brands
- How To Make Your Brand More Visible Online
- Top 5 Innovative Brand Awareness Campaign Ideas That Work
5. Audit and update regularly
Branding is a continuous process. By analyzing your brand, it can determine your brand strengths and its corresponding weaknesses. Conduct a SWOT analysis. Highlight risks and opportunities for growth strategies.
It is advisable to review your brand identity at least once a year. With exceptions towards special events such as, changing brand positions and during a need to address key issues like low customer loyalty and sales slump.
To effectively audit your brand, consider the following steps:
- Verify your brand values. What are the mission statement, vision statement and values?
- Review its external branding to uncover how it is perceived in the market
- Review your internal culture to ensure that your team members and key stakeholders are properly aligned and reflect key values
- Analyze your customer engagement and experience to track potential misalignment with your brand
With all these evaluated, you can probe further by ensuring that they are updated on larger platforms like your social media and website.
Remember that trust is a currency in the world of branding. You must take the plunge to consciously remain consistent in the marketplace. Failure to maintain your brand consistency on all your active platforms can rob you of the trust customers have on your business.
