Digital Marketing Tips: Maintaining Brand Consistency
One of the biggest pitfalls small businesses make when they start working on their web presence is disregarding brand consistency. Brand consistency is one of the most important components of developing a web presence and growing brand recognition. In the same ways you want your values, your services, and your products to remain consistent for your customers, you want your content, voice, and online engagement to also be consistent.
In this article, we’ll explain what brand consistency is and how you develop a strategy to maintain it. By the end, you’ll have all the tools you’ll need to develop a strong and consistent web presence.
What is Brand Consistency?
To put it simply, brand consistency is ensuring that all forms of communication (and marketing) are consistent with your business’s core values and mission and consistent across the types of media these materials are conveyed through (social media, advertisements, videos, promotional material).
So what does this look like in practice?
Let’s set up an example: You’re launching a new thrifting business. You decide that you’re going to put a lot of your efforts into social media sales and so you want your brand to feel engaging and fun. But social media isn’t the only place you’re selling; you plan to work with some resale stores as well as open pop-up shops.
Social Media
Your first step is to build a following on Instagram and get people excited about your upcoming sales. You decide a good way to do this is to stay active on your stories, post regularly building hype for products you’ll offer, and you engage with customers regularly. This means you “react” and respond to comments, find prominent local accounts to follow and reach out to them, and develop strong captions and content to encourage engagement.
Throughout all this content, you’re keeping a positive, fun voice. You make references to memes, popular television shows, and popular music. You create reels where you dance comically to popular music, modeling the clothing you’ll be selling. When you reach out to local stores or potential customers, you make sure your tone is light and positive, you may even joke around a little.
Advertising
While many of your ads will be on social media, you decide to put up some fliers. You choose colors that are vibrant and fun and a unique image that fits your brand, like your friend in one of your outfits rolling around on roller skates. You pick a font that’s easy to read but is interesting enough to catch someone’s eye. You put minimal words because you know your audience (and your brand) is young and responds to images more positively than written content.
You join forces with several other thrifters in the area and decide to have a massive lot sale. You all go in together on some paid advertising slots in local papers and on local radio stations. You make sure your portion showcases your product in a fun way and tells your potential customers that they’ll find cute clothing that they can have fun in at your sale.
Emails
You receive emails from local stores wanting to collaborate, local influencers hoping to collaborate, and customers who have questions. For each situation, you realize that a different tone is necessary, but you want to still remain as true to brand as possible. With the potential store collaboration, you choose to be direct and to the point but with a light, excited tone by using a lot of exclamation marks and explaining how excited you are to collaborate in a way that is consistent with your brand. You’re direct with the influencers too, as you have the position of authority in this situation, but you keep a light tone and have more fun with it by dropping some cultural references.
When you respond to customers, you keep it very light and fun; you make some jokes, use cultural references, and speak more like someone they met on the quad and less like a business.
Developing Your Brand
Now that you understand what brand consistency is, it’s time to learn how to develop all the components of your brand that need to remain consistent across media and communications. First thing’s first, you’ll have to decide how you vision your brand appearing to customers.
The Look of Your Brand
Let’s start with the visual component. You want your brand to be visually consistent by using the same color schemes and fonts, the same profile picture (ideally your logo) on all social media channels, and the same general theme to all the images you post on social media.
The Voice of Your Brand
When you make posts on social media or interact with customers (on the internet or face-to-face), you want to maintain the same voice and tone. Decide how you want your brand to be perceived by your ideal clientele and keep that voice consistent. Don’t forget to read all the way to the end for the Brand Consistency Best Practices; it’s a fine line between friendly and too friendly and you don’t want to cross that line in business.
Staying Consistent
The best way to ensure you stay consistent is to develop a strategy and a marketing plan for each outlet (social media, blog, advertising, etc.). Write down clearly what your brand goals are, including your color and font decisions, tone, logo, etc. so that you can easily refer back to it as you go along.
Brand Consistency Best Practices
There are some best practices you should be aware of before developing your brand’s web presence. Below, we’ve compiled a list of a few of the most important best practices when it comes to brand consistency. This list is in no way exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point.
Don’t get too personal
Sure, you want to be fun and engaging on social media, but, as we said earlier, there’s a fine line between being fun and engaging and getting too personal. You want to keep your posts and comments business-related and in the voice and persona of the business that you have created. Even if the person you’re interacting with is a long-time friend, if you’re posting as the business, you need to maintain consistency and stay in that persona.
Post things that your customers will care about
At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of your ideal customer and their interests. Post content they will like in the style they prefer. If your customer base is between the ages of 18 and 25, you’re likely going to want to post video content. If your customer base is more around the 35 to 45 age range, you’ll want to post aesthetically pleasing images with a solid and clear caption.
Don’t post everything
While posting consistently is good, there is such a thing as posting too much. Don’t bombard your followers with a million updates a day. Keep your posts to the big announcements: events, daily/weekly specials, etc. Same with blog posts, you don’t want to post short blog posts about nothing or blog posts about your personal life. Use this space for major news updates or informative and/or fun content that will help boost your brand.
Maintaining brand consistency is an incredibly important part of building your business’s web presence and one that absolutely cannot be ignored. If you want people to know your brand, remember it, and recognize it quickly, you have to be consistent in all your marketing efforts.
To get help building your business’s web presence, contact us today for your free consultation. We also offer a variety of virtual courses and workshops to help you find “the write stuff to boost your business.”