Consumers want to buy from a brand they recognize and trust. They don’t respond to sales pitches and bald-faced marketing schemes – they want a relationship. That’s why brand consistency is more important now than ever before. Your audience should be able to identify your content as uniquely belonging to you, no matter where they see it. It makes your brand feel dependable and true, like an old friend.
Reaching Millions
In the past, business owners had to turn to marketing outlets such as newspaper ads, postcards, and flyers – items that required a lot of thought and process before reaching a finished state. Today, without much more than the click of a button, a blog post, Facebook update, or Tweet can reach millions of people. While this certainly does make things easy, it also tends to encourage a certain sort of laziness.
Many people, lured by the fast and easy appeal of the social world, fail to check for brand consistency before sending something out. This is a mistake. As we all certainly heard again and again growing up: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. As a business owner, it is important to thoroughly vet everything you put out there, no matter how tempting it is to get press “save” and go.
Develop Brand Guidelines
In order to ensure brand consistency, most large corporations create brand guidelines for their employees to follow, and so should you. While this will take some thought and effort up front, it will make everything flow much more smoothly in the long run. Your guidelines should be a set of written rules that align with your company’s brand and vision. Any time you have a question about anything, consult your rules and make sure your content is staying on brand.
Keep Branding Consistent
It’s easy to stay on-brand when you’re creating your website – it takes a lot of time and effort to put it all together. At that time, you’re likely to put a lot of consideration into what should go in there. Social profiles, though, are easy to create and require a lot less effort – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put the same effort into it.
According to a study by The Verde Group and the Wharton School, two-thirds of all shoppers use more than one channel to make purchasing decisions. What impression do you think those shoppers would have if they went to your website and then checked your Facebook, and they each looked like two totally different companies? They’d probably be pretty confused – and they might lose some trust in what you have to say.
Stay on Track
Use your company logo on all content – website, social media, newsletters, etc. Be sure to use the same headshots and photos on everything and maintain a consistent color palette across all channels. Be sure to continue to use the same tone of voice and type of language in all content too.
As our ability to create and share content becomes easier and easier, it’s more important than ever to keep branding in mind. No matter where you’re creating and sharing content, your audience should look at it and instantly recognize it as yours.