If your brand isn’t successful digitally, it won’t be successful at all. That’s why it’s vital to maintain brand consistency when messaging across multiple channels. You want potential customers to find you — and recognize your brand and its core values, whether they’re scrolling through Instagram or browsing through search engine results.
Here are a few strategies to achieve that.
The Importance of Brand Consistency
While you might be aware that your website is your welcome mat for potential customers, your online presence is so much more than your site’s logo and content. Consider how you interact with the world around you. If you’re cold or rude to your neighbors, or scatterbrained with the cashiers you encounter at your regular grocery, people will develop a certain impression about you, no matter how lovely your curb appeal.
Since the pandemic, statistics have found that 88% of consumers say consistency is important when deciding which brands they support and like. Brand consistency ensures that how you show up in the digital world builds trust.
Modern audiences, especially millennials and Gen Z, make decisions based on what your feed looks like across multiple channels (and they particularly want businesses that are authentic, caring about more than just profits). It takes about 50 milliseconds for a person to form an opinion about your website, so if you have a logo of a different size or color for Instagram, another for Snapchat, another for LinkedIn, and another on your website, that creates a subconscious feeling of distrust and uneasiness.
A similar feeling of unease is triggered when a franchise brand says something on a social media bio that doesn’t mesh with the brand image, brand voice or brand values on your website. Consistency, like transparency, builds trust and an emotional connection. In fact, 74% of consumers in one survey said that transparent communication with a personal touch has become more important to them since the pandemic.
Stay on Brand with Consistent Messaging and Visual Elements
Investing in your digital presence and developing consistent brand guidelines are crucial to your company’s success because consistent branding is a fruitful investment in the perception of your brand. Statistics show that more than two-thirds of businesses attribute revenue growth of 10% or more to brand consistency.
To ensure that you stay on brand, develop templates you can use across different channels that maintain your visual identity and brand recognition. Keep a library of marketing materials with clear specs about fonts, image size and colors. You’ll want to ensure that the color schemes, color palettes and other visual elements enable people to recognize your brand across various media platforms.
Work with your team members to craft a style guide for a consistent tone of voice in the brand messaging in social media posts, across other marketing channels, and even during customer service interactions. If you enlist brand ambassadors, give them adequate training and support on how they can assist your marketing efforts with consistent messaging about your brand’s identity.
Lastly, you might want to assign a marketing compliance team to regularly assess and measure brand consistency over the long term. This can ensure that customers have a high-quality experience no matter how and when they interact with your brand.
Remember, your brand isn’t just a logo for people to recognize and remember. It’s an identity and a perception of the kind of “person” your company is and wants to be – and a key way to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
