When it comes to creating a prominent brand, ensuring brand consistency is critical. Although there may be quite a lot of talk around brand colors and logos, consistency in business in truth goes way beyond that.
In relation to content marketing, although not explicitly followed across the board, ensuring brand consistency can help you to stay on top. How so? Firstly, it helps establish the brand’s voice and identity among its readers and customers. Secondly, it helps people understand that your core message and values stay the same across all communication, which is often reassuring.
Regardless of the kind of content you create, be it a blog, a YouTube video, or a TikTok, ensuring your brand stays consistent while still being flexible to evolution is pivotal. While this may seem confusing for those not sure where to start, not to worry, we’ve got you covered.
Also read: How to Make Use of Google Ads for Brand Growth
What Is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency refers to practices and guidelines followed by brands to ensure that brand communication remains uniform. Majorly, consistency in business helps to build credibility among customers and ensure that the brand remains reliable and trustworthy. Besides this, it also ensures that advertising and marketing material look professional and recognizable by both potential and recurring customers.
Brand consistency is usually followed through brand design, brand colors, communication, and even messaging. While seemingly unimportant, having brand consistency is what separates the professionals from the amateurs.
What Makes a Good Brand?
When it comes to brand consistency in 2022, make sure you’ve got the fundamentals of your brand covered. Although these days, there’s a lot of noise as to what you need to focus on more when it comes to creating a brand, there’s only a handful of things you need to focus on.
Brand Image
A term that’s thrown around the most when it comes to branding, brand image plays a pivotal role in how viewers see your brand, which can heavily influence their loyalty. When it comes to brand image, there are a variety of factors that can help build it. Some of which include quality, brand messaging, brand colors, and your brand story.
Besides this, your brand design and ideas really pay off in the long run. To illustrate further, Nike as a brand can be associated with its logo – the Nike ‘swoosh’.
Brand Message
The brand message simply refers to the message and ideology your brand wishes to stand for and communicate with the general public. For the most part, people tend to be loyal to brands that stand for something or have meaning.
For example, when people think Nike, they relate it to people who are go-getters and the idea of hard work bringing results.
Besides this more popular brands design their campaigns to make sure there are also elements of inclusivity in it, be it race, age, or gender identity. While there are many market elements that cannot be controlled, ensuring your brand message is rock solid is always a wise move to make.
Instantly Recognizable Logo and Brand Colors
When it comes to creating an iconic and easily recognizable brand, your brand logo and colors are everything. For newbies, starting by making sure you work with an experienced brand designer can save you a lot of time in the long run.
Other than this, making sure your brand logo and colors stay consistent with your brand image and messaging is critical when building your brand. While it may seem not as pressing as marketing or product creation, in the long run, a good brand design markets itself.
Credibility and Trust
Last but not least would include credibility and trust. While this goes without saying, quality and user experience is what makes all the difference in sales. When it comes to branding, however, you build credibility and trust through the quality of your products and services.
Credibility and trust play a vital role as they are what ultimately determine brand loyalty. So while credibility and trust may not seem like the most exciting subject, they can make or break your business.
6 Ways to Ensure Brand Consistency in 2022 for Your Brand and Products
1. Set Brand Guidelines
Setting brand guidelines is generally where any brand should start after creating its brand design and colors. While not particularly exciting, making sure there is a fixed typography and color swatch for brand messaging, as well as clarity on the imagery you use is a basic requirement.
Other than this, creating a brand playbook is common practice. Brand playbooks generally ensure that your branded material remains consistent, be it messaging, product labeling or even your digital assets used in marketing.
2. Creating Templates for Brand Communication
For newer companies or brands that cannot afford a brand designer, creating a brand playbook and making sure you have templates created by your designer is essential. When doing this, making sure you have a file saved locally or online with your creative master files is vital for marketing.
Creating templates for your brand where your logo and digital assets are designed to be treated in line with brand guidelines can save you time and energy in the long run. To do this, having templates for your emailers, posters, labeling and social media posts are a great place to start.
3. Maintain Brand Identity and Personality
As mentioned earlier, maintaining your brand identity is crucial when it comes to building a brand. Some great ways to do it are by actively reviewing your marketing material and, at the same time, having a playbook for that material.
Although it may seem cookie cutter or unauthentic, ensuring your guidelines are followed through a sound guide, brand consistent communication, and product design that reflects ideology is something worth keeping in mind.
For example, Apple ensures that they convey thinking differently and keep things simple, and their product design and branding material strongly reflect this. Brand Identity and personality are essentially the reflections of your company’s ideologies and goals, and staying consistent helps to build a loyal customer base.
4. Execute Branding Campaigns and Rebranding Simultaneously Across Media Communication
Ensuring that your marketing material for advertising campaigns is consistent and released simultaneously is another common practice. Usually, in the advertisement, a series of marketing communications are released in the form of emailers, Facebook posts, billboards, and newspaper ads for traction.
From a business’s point of view, this helps to ensure awareness of the new product or service. But from a marketing standpoint, it helps build your brand. Making sure your brand releases communications that have the same message can help ensure both increased touch points for your consumers and effectiveness in your campaign.
Also read: Effective Facebook Retargeting for Your Business
5. Connect with Your Audience through Social Media Platforms
Social media is an excellent and affordable platform to communicate your brand’s ideologies and establish a relationships with your consumers. For new brands, creating a relationship through consistent and on-brand posts can make for improved sales and brand loyalty.
While there may not be a direct correlation in sales, posting on social media affordably builds brand awareness and consistency. Besides this, making sure your posts are scheduled on social media platforms by using tools can save you time and energy when marketing consistently.
Also read: How to Generate Leads through Facebook Ads
6. Research Your Audience and Current Trends
To your brand, staying consistent when researching your audience and adapting to the current trend is vital. For brand consistency to be effective you must stay in tune with your audience and evolve with consistent core values.
While there is an archaic school of thought that brands need not stay close to trends, keeping track of trends helps cement your brand identity and gain new demographics of customers.
Keeping Your Brand Consistent for the Longrun
That said, you should now have a fair idea of what it takes to keep your brand consistent. For the most part, making sure you follow some of the tips mentioned above will certainly get you pretty far.
Besides this, however, making sure your marketing team knows how to effectively market your brand is also of paramount importance. Brand consistency boils down to how true you stay to your core values, branding material, and relevant with current trends.
In doing so, provided that you deliver on quality, your brand is bound to go only upwards and onwards.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a brand playbook?
A brand playbook is a document created by your main marketing team to ensure your client communication, advertisements, marketing material, and messaging are consistent with the brand image and ideologies. From a marketing perspective, it helps both designers, editors, and regional offices to understand the dos and don’ts.
What is a brand designer?
Unlike regular designers, brand designers are equipped to create responsive logos that emulate your brand’s goals and ideologies. Besides this, they also help establish branding colors and the treatment of logos on various marketing materials and digital assets.
Does effective marketing influences help brand consistency?
Absolutely! Effective marketing can make or break your brand. While the market is oversaturated with marketing firms, picking the right one can certainly take you a long way. Besides keeping in mind brand consistency, your marketing team should help bring visibility through effective marketing via digital avenues.
