Imagine you go to a new sandwich shop for lunch. You saw their funky ads, with claims about fresh ingredients and great portion sizes. Their ads have modern, eye-catching designs that resonate with you and make you want to visit. But then you go to their website. It’s slightly outdated and doesn’t quite match their ads, but hey, first-world problems. Their menu looks nice, and you liked the ads, so you go anyway.

Then you get to the shop. It also looks odd, mismatching further with the ads and the website. The colours are off, and the messaging in the store is tacky. You aren’t connecting with their brand here. It feels off-putting. But you buy the sandwich anyway, and that’s the final straw. The purchasing experience was sub-par with a grumpy staff member, the sandwich did not look like it did in the ads or the website, and it’s not living up to any of its claims. So, you never purchase from them again. You might even leave a bad review on Google.

Brand consistency across your customer journey is critical to gaining and maintaining customers. So, what exactly is branding consistency and how does it help? Let’s dive in.

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency is all about your messaging, design, communication, and everything in between. It’s necessary at every stage of your customer journey, from marketing, to purchase, to support. Essentially your customers should experience a consistent look and feel whenever they interact with your business.

So, your ads, website, in-store experience, products, packaging, support system and more should all have consistent design and messaging. This way your customers can connect with your brand at every stage of their journey.

Why does it matter?

While it would be amazing if your customers just understood your mission and trusted your brand from the get-go. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Your branding exists to build connections, trust, and maintain relationships.

With consistent branding, you can build these relationships by being memorable, recognisable, and providing positive experiences. This consistent experience allows you to build a reputation in the market, so new customers will recognise and trust you faster than before.

It doesn’t end there, it can also massively increase your revenue. Referral and repeat business are often the cheapest, easiest, and most lucrative types of business you can get. By building a strong relationship through consistent branding, your customers will advocate for your business and recommend you to their friends and family. They know that you will provide their friends with the same positive, consistent experience and can trust that you are an excellent recommendation.

10 tips to ensure your brand is consistent

Now that you know why consistent branding is important, let’s dive into 10 ways to keep your branding consistent.

1. Create a mission statement

A mission statement will provide a unifying message for everyone in your company. It tells your brand’s story, how it functions, and what you want to achieve. The key to creating a successful mission statement is to keep it memorable, easy to read and stick to a big-picture point of view. You can also use it to display your unique value.

2. Have brand guidelines

Brand guidelines provide a comprehensive set of rules surrounding your brand. It includes instructions for tone of voice, logo usage, colours, fonts, communication with clients, stylistic preferences, and social media post examples. This allows your brand to be consistently replicated regardless of the team member.

If you ever get an agency on board to do your marketing, using these guidelines will ensure consistency, creating better results overall.

3. Use a consistent tone of voice

You may have seen the mention of tone of voice in the above section and thought, what does that mean? Tone of voice is all about how you speak to your customers. Whether that is through website copy, blogs, brochure copy, social media captions, and even just on the phone. It sets out guidelines on what you can and can’t say, how you should phrase things, and the overall tone of what you do say.

These guidelines ensure that all communications with your customers feel consistent. As if there was one voice talking to them. It helps build that connection with that voice, and eventually trusting it.

4. Create internal brand values

Your values take what your mission started with and provide a deeper level of detail. They outline what value your business offers. So, they guide how you interact with your customers, deliver your products/services and position yourself in the market.

Values are designed to be words you and your team live up to daily in your business. By doing so, they will provide your customers with a positive and consistent experience.

We recommend coming up with 5 values. Keep them to one word. Make sure they are specific and memorable. For example, LINK’s brand values are Dependable, Genuine, Brave, Epic, and Energetic.

5. Reinforce branding internally

So you’ve created a bunch of guides, a mission statement, and brand values. What next? Now you need to get your team on board. This can be tricky, as people sometimes resist change. But everyone needs to be brought along to create a consistent experience.

You should engage the team at every step of the process. Get feedback and ideas from them so they feel like they are a part of the brand as it is built. Let them know why the change is happening, what will change, and how it affects their job. By bringing them along and keeping them informed you will receive less pushback and more excitement surrounding the changes.

6. Keep a consistent schedule

Consistent branding requires a consistent schedule. Creating a schedule for your marketing strategies allows you to provide consistent and targeted content at the right time. You’ll be able to maintain connections and communication with your customers and keep them on your side.

Start by creating a content calendar to plan content months in advance. Create this content in batches and schedule it in advance. That way you can set and forget it.

7. Be thoughtful on content topics

Don’t post just anything. Everything you post needs to align with your brand and values. Posting about everything, even if it relates to your industry, could harm your consistency. Instead, focus on what your business does best and content around that.

8. Unify your brand’s name across social media

Handles, social profiles, email titles and more need consistency. Your name is how people find you. If your handle is consistent on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn then your customers will have no difficulty finding you.

It can be tricky to find handles available across all platforms. But keep brainstorming as it will strengthen your brand on social media.

9. Audit your brand

Implementing policies and guides is one thing, but you also need to regularly review your brand’s implementation. You may find that some marketing materials aren’t quite on brand, or some team members aren’t following the guidelines correctly. This can happen as people interpret the guidelines.

In this case, simply let the team member know what they did wrong and how they can stick to the guidelines in the future.  

10. Keep your offline marketing consistent

We’ve talked a lot about digital marketing, but offline marketing also needs to follow your branding. Things like brochures, billboards, TV ads, vehicle liveries, and signage all need to stay consistent with your brand.

If you use vehicles with branded liveries, make sure you regularly check your vehicles for dirt, peeling, or other issues that may conflict with your branding guidelines. Regularly reviewing and auditing your physical marketing materials is important as they can be damaged.

Conclusion

Consistent branding is key to developing and maintaining strong relationships with your customers. It’s a crucial aspect of signing them up and keeping them. Give these tips a try and see how they transform your customer journey.

If you need any help with your branding, feel free to reach out to the creative team at LINK.