Tips For Maintaining Brand Consistency

Brand consistency refers to the sustained delivery of brand messaging in line with brand values, strategy, and identity. It means that you expose your target audience to core messages, visual branding, and other brand elements repeatedly in order to build brand recognition. Consistent branding helps to create a specific feeling among your customers and strengthen the business. The more consistent your messaging is, the easier it will be for your audience to recognize your brand without excessive branding. The benefits of brand consistency include:

• Increase brand awareness and visibility

Consistent branding helps to build awareness around the brand. Customers are able to easily recognize your messaging and image. Consistency and uniformity across different marketing channels helps customers to know what to look out for when associating with your brand. You should ensure that your visual content has the same logo placement, color theme, and photo quality. 

• Establish trust

According to Global Banking and Finance Review, 71 percent of customers prefer purchasing from a brand they recognize. One of the ways of building trust is through brand consistency. Provide your audience with relevant content regularly, use the same platforms for specific purposes, and be consistent in your messaging. It’s a gradual process that takes time before you customers are able to identify and trust your brand. 

Furthermore, only 18 percent of consumers would react positively to a brand changing its name. Constantly changing your brand, platforms, and messaging makes customers to lose trust in your business. They are also likely to find it difficult to keep up with the constant changes.

• Make your brand memorable

The more people are exposed to something, the more likely they are to remember it. The power of repetition is often underestimated. If you want your brand to stay on the mind of consumers, then be consistent and frequent in your messaging. But this doesn’t mean spamming them with your advertisements every now and then.

• Evoke positive emotions among consumers

Brand consistency isn’t just about staying memorable to your customers. It also helps to evoke positive emotions from your target audience through consistent positive messaging. At the end of the day, what matters is how they feel whenever they associate with your brand. Happy customers are more likely to turn into paying customers.

• Get an edge over your competition

As businesses move online due to the coronavirus pandemic, the digital marketing space is getting crowded by both established brands and startups. It’s highly saturated and competitive so you have to stand out in your niche. This is where brand consistency comes in. It helps to set your brand apart from your competitors. When customers have to choose near-identical offers from you and your competitors, they’ll choose a brand they recognize, trust, and have a positive perception about. Brand consistency will determine whether you win the client over or not.

• Generate more revenue

When you’re consistent in your branding, consumers will expect you to offer a reliable shopping experience too. They are therefore more likely to trust you with their money because they know you’re dependable. Once you’ve established trust among your audiences, you will be able to generate more leads and increase your conversion rates too. Returning customers will also be able to refer their networks to your brand. This helps to reduce your customer acquisition costs and increase your revenues. 

How To Maintain Brand Consistency

Without brand consistency, your customers will get confused and ultimately lose interest in your brand. An identity crisis isn’t something you want for your brand. Here are tips that could help you to get started on brand consistency:

• Define your mission

Your brand identity is tied to your mission, vision, and core values. What is your business looking to achieve? You should ensure that your branding is in line with your mission and sends the right message to your audience. This will give them expectations on what they can gain from engaging your brand. Conduct an audit to see if your visual materials and marketing campaigns align with your mission statement.

• Build a foundation for brand communication

Brand consistency isn’t something that you leave to the marketing team. It cuts across the entire organization. Every employee has to stay within the brand guidelines when making business communication. To make it easier for everyone, develop a communication template so that everyone can be consistent in the message they send out. Have a template for emails, blog posts, and even business cards. This will ensure that your communication remains consistent across the entire team and over the years.

• Establish branding guidelines

Some of the branding guidelines you’ll want to consider include the general code of conduct, tone of your campaigns, and preferred professional teams. The guidelines form the core center of your branding activity. They should be consistently enforced. Organize sessions to take your staff through the branding guidelines to get them onboard. It helps to get everyone on the same page. Explain everything in detail and give them copies of the guidelines so they can easily refer to it when they’re unsure about how to represent your brand.

• Provide branding resources

Once you’ve onboarded your staff and they have a proper grasp of your branding guidelines, you’ll need to provide them with the resources they need for consistent marketing campaigns. These include social media graphics, color palettes, logo variations, font names,  and whitepapers among other marketing material. It helps to keep a high level of brand consistency when everyone is relying on the same resources.

• Go beyond your website

Digital marketing goes beyond your website. So don’t put too much focus on it and neglect the other channels. Most businesses make the mistake of assuming that a website and logo is more than enough for brand consistency. Don’t be part of the statistics. Think of the other customers who’ll interact with your brand on social media, email, and offline too. Out-of-place social media posts that don’t fit with your brand will find a way of standing out and becoming the cente of attention. You don’t want to confuse your followers. 

• Be authentic

It’s very important to keep your branding authentic. Consumers can see beyond the smokescreen and determine if you’re just putting up a show. Before your customers feel connected to the brand, your employees have to have a connection with it too. Brand consistency starts from the inside before you can extend it to the outside. It’s easier to be consistent in your marketing campaigns if you’re consistent in your internal communications. Ensure that the organizational culture is in line with the company image.

• Learn, adjust, and make improvements 

As you go along, it’s important to make adjustments and improvements whenever necessary. Perform regular audits to see if something isn’t aligned with your brand and fix it. Keep in mind that total overhaul could result in distrust from the consumers. Just make minor tweaks here and there to make your messaging clearer. Always be cautious when rebranding because it can have a major impact on brand consistency.

If you want to build brand awareness and recognition, then brand consistency is a must for you. It will help you to foster positive perceptions and trust in your business. These tups can help you to get started on growing your business through brand consistency. Get in touch with Salt Marketing to learn more on how we can get you on the path to brand consistency.