Why Your Business Needs Consistent Branding

One thing that sets businesses apart from one another is familiar branding. To become familiar with your target audience, you need to be consistent in your branding — across all channels!

I’ll admit, I love branding and things like The Logo Game so I recognize brands more than some, but consistent branding is so important to help businesses connect with customers. Customers may not even realize you are connecting with them through consistent messaging, but it will pay off for your business!

Have you ever been watching TV when a commercial comes on and before the product or business name comes up you know who the commercial is for? That is consistent branding. A lot of decisions go into a commercial to carry a brand and resonate with customers.

So let’s talk about this some more.

What Does Consistent Branding Mean?

Branding is more than a logo and branded colors. Brand consistency is more than using your logo and colors on your website and social media banners and profile photos. For a brand to truly be consistent, the business need to be consistent across all channels with visuals, messaging, and customer experience.

According to marcom.com, brand consistency is how an organization delivers messages aligned with its core values, brand promise, customer experience, and brand identity elements.

Why is Consistent Branding Important?

For the growth of your business! Consistency of your marketing materials can impact your overall company growth, helping to increase revenue by 23%.

Aligning your businesses message across all channels is important to build a connection, recognition, and trust. Brands attract through authenticity. It is important to know who you are and what you stand for within your business. Customers are more likely to have positive feelings toward your brand if you use consistent branding and they know what to expect with quality of service or product. If the consumer feels you are always changing, they will be confused and assume they cannot trust your business.    

How Create and Implement a Consistent Brand

Every aspect and member of your team must play a role in your branding. This means from development to implementation.

Developing Your Brand

As I’ve mentioned, branding goes beyond colors you like and a logo. You’ll need to develop a voice and personality that fits your target market. When in development of your voice, consult with your sales team to see what language connects best with leads. What has been successful for them?

Talk to your social media manager and see what types of posts have resonated the most with your audience. Same with your website manager — what is connecting with visitors the most on your website?

Learn more about developing your brand with my previous Branding 101 blog.

Implement Your Brand

Once your branding has been developed, create strict brand guidelines for everyone (yes, everyone) to follow. 95% of companies have some form of brand guidelines, however only 25% of companies actively enforce the brand guidelines.

One your guidelines are developed, be sure you are using them across ALL your channels. You want a customer to recognize your brand from the moment they see your content. Here are some places to consider when making sure your brand is consistent:

• Your email — This is often over looked, but does your company have a designated font (this may need to be a ‘web font’ option) to use in the body and signature of your emails? Are your email signatures consistent?
• Social media – This goes beyond your banner image and profile picture. Are your captions using your tone of voice/personality you’ve developed? Do your graphics use the correct colors and fonts?
• Other digital media – Make sure throughout your website there is one “voice” and colors and fonts are consistent with your brand.
• All your printed materials – If someone found a random piece of paper in the street would they be able to figure out where it came from? Look at things like does it have your logo, is it using your font or colors, does it embody your business with the language used?
• Calls to action (CTAs) – This goes for digital and print. Make sure you are consistent when sharing URLs (Rebeccaleighdesigns.com/signuphere vs rebeccaleighdesigns.com/page/blog/opportunity/signuphere) and you give clear direction for a customer to make — visit a website, call, etc.  

Enforcing this can be tedious for businesses large and small. Find someone to be the lead on making sure everyone is staying the course with guidelines. Do regular audits of all channels, internal and external.

The best thing to do — start now and build a solid foundation. Even if you are a seasoned business, review your brand and nail down your voice, logo, colors, etc. and set guidelines for moving forward. Consistency takes time and commitment, but now is the time to set yourself up for success!