16-08-2018

A Beginners’ Guide to Brand Consistency

Branding isthe center point of a business's marketing strategy. A company's brand reflects its identity, culture, and reputation. A consistent brand identity helps your target audience recognize your company and know what to expect. Your goal is to provide a positive and memorable brand identity.

Consistent branding helps people perceive you as the same company they've interacted with before. After consistent exposure to a brand, people feel like they knowyour brand and they start to trust you. It takes up to 7 handshakes for consumers to remember your brand and connect it with your organization. Displaying a brand consistently on different platforms can boost revenue by 23 percent, according to Forbes. So, here's a brief outlining the best practices for brand consistency to help you build customer trust and increase sales.

Examine Your Branding Efforts

Present the same values, visuals, and brand messaging on all customer touch points, to achieve brand consistency.

Your brand's logo design, website, mobile app, customer support, and marketing messaging must be recognizable. You can achieve consistent branding if you understand your brand's values and unique selling proposition (USP).

Determine what makes your business unique and the values, which drive your business forward. Develop a visual design, which reflects your brand and which prospects can associate with your brand. If you already have visual elements in place, perform a self-audit and determine if they represent your brand. If not, consider a full visual rebranding.

The Style Guide

A style guide helps you check your visual brand. It's a document that includes rules to follow when a staff memberwants to present, publish, and promote content about your brand. The style guide includes details about fonts, logos, brand colors, signage specifications, branded graphic elements, and typography style. It must also comprise ideal tone and voice, your organization's values and your company's mission.

For example, Walmart's Corporate Brand Guidelines covers all aspects of using the Walmart brand. It highlights direction on Walmart's editorial voice and howto use the "Walmart" logo online, in print, or on promotional products. Your company may be smaller than Walmart, but you should establish a clear foundation for your brand messaging.

Internal Branding and the Company Culture

Once you've built a brand voice, which resonateswith your customers, the delivery of your brand experience must match it. This requires the participation of your employees.

Make sure that your onboarding and training courses include brand values. Distribute branded items such as business cards, mugs, shirts and laptop cases to build internal loyalty to your brand.

Build a corporate culture focused on your brand. Your company's employees must buy-in and believe your brand. They can advocate and promote your brand on social networks using tools such as Everyone Social and Google AMP. When your employees understand your brand, they can deliver a consistent brand experience to your customers.

Brand Consistency and Content Marketing

Once you've established a brand guideline and style, use them when you're planning your content marketing strategy. About 75 percent of shoppers use different channels to make a purchase. Considering the variety of offline and online opportunities, you must maintain consistency across all customer touch points and sales channels.

Use your Company's logo

Share visual content elements on your company's network, which employees can access and use. Create a branded template theme for your webcast videos and webinars. Create cover photos for social media networks, which employees can upload onto their accounts, and use the visual elements consistently.