Consistency in Branding: Why It Matters and How to Achieve It
When it comes to marketing and building your business and your sales, consistency is key. It’s not just about consistent advertising, posting or showing up on your socials—consistent branding is crucial too. But what does consistent branding really mean? Do we need to constantly update or discuss our branding? Not necessarily! Consistent branding means presenting a unified image of your business across all touch points and mediums, both visually and in your messaging.
In a minute we’ll dive into what this looks like in the real world. But first, let’s touch on a trend: simplifying logos. While I’m not suggesting you mimic others, there’s wisdom in observing what major brands do. Their marketing strategies, especially around design and branding, are based on solid data.
While we may not have the budget of giants like Apple or McDonald’s, we can learn from their research. One notable trend is the simplification of logos.
Over recent years, there’s been a shift from complex logo designs to simpler, more easily reproducible ones. Here are some examples:
A simpler logo is easier to reproduce
Amex have removed the shading to make it more versatile
No drop shadow for Rolling Stone for a cleaner and simpler look.
Just from these few you can see the trend towards simplification. Elements have been removed to make logos more versatile and easy to replicate across a variety of media.
Why this shift? One reason is brand consistency. Think about all the places your logo appears: your website, favicon, social media profiles, uniforms, business cards, vehicle signage, letterheads, merchandise—the list goes on.
So, why does a logo need to be simple? Some platforms are easier for complex logos than others. A website can easily accommodate them, but embroidering a complex logo on a uniform is challenging. A busy logo is almost indecipherable as a favicon, and social media profiles require simple brand marks that fit square formats. The big brands understand the importance of presenting a clear and consistent image across all touchpoints. And they’ve done the research so while you certainly don’t want to copy anyone, it’s just smart marketing to keep up with the trends being set by those in the know.
But your logo is just one part of maintaining a consistent brand image. What else should you consider?
Elements to Ensure Consistent Branding
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Your overall Visual Identity:
- Colour Palette: Stick to a defined colour scheme that reflects your brand’s personality. Consistent use of colours enhances brand recognition. It’s a good idea to get help from a graphic designer, and even create a brand kit in Canva
- Typography: Choose fonts that align with your brand’s tone. Use them consistently across all materials. It helps if they are clean and easy to reproduce and it’s also good to have your headline font, with complimentary fonts for subheadings, body text and so on.
- Imagery: Use a cohesive style for images and graphics. Whether it’s photos, illustrations, or icons, consistency in imagery strengthens your brand’s visual identity. Set rules for the kind of images you’ll use. For example should your images have people in them? Should they be looking at the camera, or away from it? What tones and colours should be in the images? These seem like small details but they all matter.
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Voice and Tone:
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- Messaging: Develop a brand voice that resonates with your audience. Whether it’s casual, professional, or quirky, maintain this tone in all communications. Use consistent words, phrase and terminology (preferably the words and phrases your target audience would use. If they use jargon, you can too. If not, then avoid it altogether.
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- Content Style: Ensure your writing style is uniform across platforms. This includes blog posts, social media, emails, and more. Whether that’s fun, educational, aspirational, conservative or any other style, be consistent. Naturally you’ll tailor it for the medium; shorter for Instagram, longer for websites and landing pages, more professional for LinkedIn and so on, but the overall tone should be consistent.
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- Offer Positioning: Offer positioning is how you talk about your offer. How you describe the benefits, the outcomes people can expect and clearly articulate what they have AFTER they say yes that they don’t have now. As business owners we often start our business so we can help people, so this can feel a little too sales pitchy, but without it people just aren’t going to take up your offer. NOTE: Your ‘offer’ doesn’t necessarily have to be an incentive and it can be your free offer, entry level offer or core offer. Which ever one you’re talking about, be consistent!
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Customer Experience:
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- Touch points: Ensure every customer interaction reflects your brand values. From customer service to product packaging, consistency in experience fosters trust.
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- Feedback Loop: Regularly gather customer feedback to ensure your brand is meeting expectations and adjust as needed. You can do this by talking to your clients, doing a survey or reading their online reviews.
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Digital Presence:
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- Website: Your website should be a seamless extension of your brand. Ensure the design, content, and functionality align with your brand image.
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- Social Media: Use consistent branding elements across all social platforms. This includes profile pictures, cover photos, and post aesthetics.
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- Outbound communications. It’s easy to overlook emails, messages and SMS but these are critical parts of our branding. Especially when it comes to talking about your offer and your positioning. In a lot of cases you’ll generate mroe sales from your list than from your initial advertising so ensuring your tone of voice, messaging and visuals are consistent with all your other platforms is even more important when you’re sending emails and messages.
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Internal Alignment:
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- Team Training: Educate your team about your brand’s values and guidelines. Consistent internal understanding translates to consistent external messaging.
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- Brand Guidelines: Develop a brand style guide that outlines all branding elements. This ensures everyone involved in creating content or marketing materials is on the same page. Your style guide should contain your logo and its use guidelines, colour palette, fonts, tone of voice, image guidelines (ie, photos with people, how many, colour tones, diversity of people etc) and core messaging and even brand values. Circulate this to your team and anyone creating content for you.
By following these steps you’ll ensure you create a brand that’s consistent, resonates with your audience and is easily recognizable all of which just increases the likelihood of your audience choosing you over your competitors.
If you’re struggling to find the time to do all this yourself, let us take it off your plate. Our team will create and implement a complete marketing plan tailored to your business that will not only save you time but genuinely grow your leads an sales in under 90 days. Book in for a chat with Simon HERE