Would you buy a company’s goods or services if you had no idea what to expect? The overwhelming majority of people will say “no.” Because buyers rarely buy without first forming expectations about what they will receive. To create and capitalize on those expectations, a consistent brand experience is required. Maintaining brand consistency is critical for long-term customer recognition.
Furthermore, according to Demand Metric, consistently presented brands are 3.5 times more likely to enjoy excellent brand visibility than inconsistently presented brands.
What is Brand Consistency?Â
Brand consistency is about retaining your essential identity no matter what happens in your company. While you adopt new marketing methods, launch new products, and even follow current marketing trends, the heart of your business remains the same.
Brand consistency is Critical to The Customer Experience
Consistency equals reliability, and being reliable also means being identifiable, which means you’re more likely to gain new or repeat customers because you’re in the spotlight.
Consider “Nike,” one of the world’s most well-known sportswear companies. As a result of their consistency, Nike and its logo have become synonymous. You’ve most likely noticed their signature tick on every product they produce. As a result of its brilliant consistency, Nike became reliable and recognisable.
Brand consistency is critical for your company’s consumer experience. This applies to the visual design of your logo, website, and other brand assets, as well as the content you create to represent your brand online and offline. When a customer notices or hears a change in the appearance, feel, or voice of your company in one or more of its communication channels, their trust and confidence are immediately eroded. If you want to leave a lasting impression, make your brand representative, strong, consistent, and instantly memorable.
Unfortunately, maintaining a consistent brand is easier said than done. Hence, we’ve listed a few tips to maintain brand consistency in this article.
Let’s dive in!
Pointers to Keep Your Brand Consistent Throughout The Customer Journey
It is challenging to build a brand from the ground up, but it is even more difficult to maintain brand consistency throughout the customer experience.
The key to consistent messaging is ensuring that everyone in the organization knows, understands, and adheres to your branding requirements. Sharing branding expertise is much easier than you might think, and the framework below can assist you in getting started.
1. Clearly Define Your Brand Personality
When it comes to how to keep your brand consistent, the essential requirement is to have a defined brand personality that includes the project’s mission, vision, values, identity, and voice. However, it would be best to consider the emotional impact you have on your customers.
Potential customers want to learn more about your brand after a positive first impression. They’ll interact with you to see if you’re interested in them. Hence, find out why they became customers and apply what you’ve learned. You might want to ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your brand making them feel like they’re a part of something?
- Do they have a sense of belonging?
Determine the impact of your brand to understand better how your identity is perceived. If it’s out of place, tailor and reshape it.
2. Be Aware of Your Target Market
Consistency means that your target audience is exposed to important messages, visual branding, and other brand elements consistently, which can help with brand recognition. But how can you be consistent if you don’t know your target audience and why you’re selling your product/service to them?
According to CB insights, 14% of small businesses fail because they ignore their customers’ needs.
Brand consistency is excellent, but it will only produce excellent results if you preach to the right people. So, whether you’re running a large, medium, or small business, make sure you know who your current audience is and what they expect from you before deciding how you’ll construct your personality. A user persona will give you a lot of information about the person you’re speaking with. Examine your ideal customer’s beliefs, the language they use, and the brands that most resonate with them to help you design a winning strategy.
3. Employees Should be Educated on The Importance of Brand Consistency and Identity
Consistency in branding isn’t just crucial for marketing. It can also be accomplished by ensuring that everyone in your organization understands your brand’s values, mission, and voice—not only for formal marketing initiatives but also for informal brand advocacy. Your employees are your company’s public face, and their actions can significantly impact your image. When it comes to recommending your products or services, the more familiar your employees are with your brand, the more confidently – and effectively – they can communicate value.
To ensure that everyone is on the same page, bring up the importance of brand consistency regularly. You’ll have a much easier time maintaining your brand messaging if you ensure your entire team understands the importance of consistency and has access to your branding style guide. Maintaining brand consistency with your employees might be difficult and time-consuming. Still, it’s well worth it in the end and must be considered as one of the important ways to maintain brand consistency.
4. Encourage Cross-channel Consistency
Presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by 23%. – Forbes
Consider all of the platforms your company communicates with its target audience. It can be challenging to keep up with everything from social media to websites, paid advertising, email, direct mail, content marketing, and print advertisements. It is, however, critical to ensure that your brand is consistent across all platforms. Allowing for smooth transitions from one platform to the next is another aspect of providing a consistent multichannel experience. This is where cross-channel communication comes into play.
A customer may contact you first through social media, then via email or chat. Ensure they hear the same message across all channels to avoid confusion and ensure a positive experience. Lead generation can also benefit from cross-channel communication. A teaser video on Instagram with a link to Twitter or an embedded video on your website will connect your platforms and strengthen your message. Internally, you must account for the multichannel experience of your customers in your analytics. Make sure your marketing staff can collect and analyze input from all channels, including how your customers transition from one to the next.
5. Perform Regular Communication Audits
Communication audits examine how effectively you communicate about your brand with all stakeholders. They assess whether your communications are consistent with your brand image, beliefs, and company goals, thereby clarifying how you connect with the rest of the world. To conduct regular communication audits, you must examine the current scope of your internal and external communications, which includes website content, social media posts, newsletters, press releases, brochures, signs or banners, pieces of media coverage, and even your logo. Almost everything contributes to your communication strategy’s overall effectiveness.
In addition, you should solicit feedback from your employees, customers, stakeholders, and the general public, as well as evaluate all existing and previous communications and conduct a SWOT analysis.
6. Maintain Relevance in Your ContentÂ
To ensure that you’re promoting the same message across all marketing platforms, your content must remain relevant. Businesses prefer consistency because it guides customers smoothly through the sales funnel and results in conversions.
If your campaigns, emails, blog posts, landing pages, and other content do not accurately reflect your brand and its values, your audience will perceive you as lacking a clear vision. Customers avoid doing business with a company that is unsure of what it is doing. As a result, relevant content must be included as one of the ways to maintain brand consistency that should never be overlooked. Furthermore, tracking your success at each stage of the process is the best way to ensure that your content marketing remains relevant.
7. Incorporate a Review Stage into Your Process
Businesses naturally evolve over time. As a result, just because your brand must be consistent, it does not have to remain static indefinitely. Quality assurance is critical, and incorporating a review stage into your workflow can aid in the improvement of any activity or project. Reviewing content will immediately improve the quality of your company’s work. Still, task reviews can be time-consuming if you do not have the right culture and preparation measures in place. However, once you’ve established a delivery culture in which teams collaborate to produce high-quality work, reviews can be the cherry on top.
Conclusion
Brand consistency ensures that your identity remains dynamic, recognized, and well-suited to your customers’ needs regardless of how your company changes over time. Although determining whether each image you publish and blog you write reflects the same personality may be difficult at first, brand consistency will become a natural part of everything you do as your company grows and takes on a life of its own.
We hope this article on how to maintain brand consistency assists you in providing an excellent customer experience.
