Branding is essential because it plays a significant role in advertising and building customer loyalty. Proper branding also attracts investors, stakeholders, and the target market for your products.
This is a crucial aspect for any company because it helps in growing the business. A customer tends to lean towards something that they see and they also develop some trust to some extent because they will have an idea of what they are buying.
Brand consistency comes in when an organization needs to solidify its credibility in the market and build customer confidence. It also helps to provide clear information to customers and in turn this expands a customer base.
In this piece, we shall look into some of the things companies do to maintain brand consistency across all brand touchpoints.
Steps for Brand Consistency
High-Quality Content
There is a need to always maintain top-notch quality in every area of any business. And especially when branding, it’s equally important to maintain a high caliber of quality.
This can be done by adopting the new editing templates that help produce good logos by incorporating colors and fonts into what you desire.
Customers are drawn to clear branding on products and company adverts. Something that is well-detailed, clear, and informative is always a good idea when it comes to branding.
Advertising On All Platforms
You need to have uniformity with your branding on all channels. While different platforms have slightly different audiences and often require changes in brand presentation, you can still do that while maintaining consistency.
And this doesn’t mean completely changing your course of action. Utilizing online branding tools could help create social media graphics and adverts that look consistent across all platforms because they use the same visual style and tone of voice.
They allow you to upload some brand assets, previous versions of your logo, and your brand colors.
Having these quick-to-hand-in platforms makes it easy to create your graphics and ensures that you’re using the same elements of your brand in everything that you create.
Partner With A Strong Team
Partnering can be viewed in two aspects. First, you may need internal partners strong enough to drive the business toward achieving the goals that you have set for your brand.
The best way to make sure that the team is always at par with each other is to ensure there is regular internal vetting. This will ensure each member keeps up with the demand that comes with maintaining and improving the status of a brand.
The second method is having external partners. To increase brand awareness you could partner with other brands. Some examples of this are Red Bull and GoPro or Apple and MasterCard.
By associating with a brand that you are partnering with, you add value to them and vice versa; you’re sharing your audience with them and you’re leveraging their audience to build your own.
Make sure that you engage with brands that have similar purposes, values, and lifestyle aspirations. You want to co-publish content with them or show up in the same place and give value to their audience. By developing those partnerships, it can build your brand and your brand awareness much faster. The stronger the partnership the stronger its results in your campaign.
Maintain The Same Consistency in Brand Design
Both brand identity and consistent design affect a business’s success. A discovery was made that showed that entrepreneurs with a consistent brand are three times more likely to last ten years in business than those who aren’t.
Brand identity should be directly linked to a business plan and its business strategy; It’s not just a pretty picture.
Your brand design is a strategic exercise and a strategic expression of what your company and brand are.
The colors, the fonts, the logos, and the imagery, all communicate through something called semiotics, which is a scientific interpretation of what symbols are perceived to mean. Yellow Eagle Relocations has maintained the same font and primary colors on different pages. This consistency plays a huge role in maintaining the brand image and making it easy for customers to relate to the brand.
Create Informed Guidelines
Your brand needs to have an organizational bible and you want to train people how to use it. This should be incorporated deeply into the whole organization. Additionally, it needs to be available to all departments including the sales team, the marketing team, and the product development and production teams.
The guidelines also need to be shared with third-party vendors, freelancers, consultants, or anyone that you do business with outside of your company. If they are responsible for creating assets for your brand, they need to understand your brand needs, rules, and guidelines.
They need to be equally equipped with the brand guidelines as much as the team within the company. So you also want to disseminate your brand guidelines outside of the company.
Authenticity
Being like everyone else isn’t going to cut it for your business. People are too Internet savvy at this point to be played by brands that are putting on a mask to make a sale.
Authenticity is especially important for small businesses. You can easily get lost in the jungle of other companies and businesses out there if you sound exactly like them. There are a ton of people that are fighting for the audience’s attention. Even a small business can gain an advantage when it avoids binding itself to any corporate requirements.
A small business is likely to have a much closer connection to the customers than bigger companies because they can easily stick to the authentic brand image that they are portraying
Stay Connected With Customers
All the aspects of branding are mostly geared toward connecting with the clients. However, one thing that stands out the most is brand voice.
From your brand’s conception stage, how you interact with your customers will always be determined by your voice. Staying true to the voice that you first came into the scene with will help the customer resonate with you for years.
An example is coca cola has always interacted with its audience with a fun voice and they have stuck with it to date. Customers feel a sense of connection when they experience such.
Schedule Content Creation
For your brand to get noticed and to stick in people’s memory you need to constantly create content. You need to remind your potential customers about your brand, and one way to do so is through content.
Take it up as part of your business framework and schedule when to create and present content to your audience.
Following the set timeframe to the latter is king to avoid killing the momentum and anticipation that you have been building with your consumers over time.
The Bottom Line
Brand consistency will help your business to define itself and also appeal to a certain demographic. In today’s market, it isn’t enough to have a product or service that sells features and benefits. People are looking for brands that put more effort into interacting with them creating a sense of togetherness between them and the company. Consistency is a key factor in achieving success.