In today’s fast-paced digital age, it’s incredibly easy to start up a business, put out content, and sell products or services.

However, most businesses end up failing or needing to take a step back to restructure simply because their brand’s identity and voice deviated significantly.

Since your brand’s message and persona is something that can make or break your success, we’re going to address how to keep your brand look and feel consistent. Read on to learn more.

Brand look and feel: The importance of brand consistency

Your brand should reflect the personality and mission of your business. When we talk about brand consistency, we’re talking about creating a pattern of expression that’s consistent with how your audience views your business.

That means everything your brand does—content, social media, logos, website design, etc., should all express the same thing about your business. 

95% of all purchase decisions are made subconsciously. That means your audience is making their purchase decisions based on emotion rather than total logic. Therefore, you should be thinking of brand consistency as a way to create stability, which generates trust and loyalty among your audience. 

If you don’t make an effort to maintain brand consistency both on and offline, you’ll be leaving your business open to interpretation.

Here’s how to keep your brand look and feel consistent:

• Develop brand guidelines

First thing’s first—you need to develop brand style and usage guidelines to ensure that all your brand messaging and asset use remains consistent among all teams. 

It doesn’t matter how small or big your organization is, your brand needs structure. Look at Walmart, for example. Their brand guideline outlines every imaginable way their editorial voice and assets can be used, right down to the fonts, icons, and taglines.

• Pay attention to your corporate culture

Brand consistency requires employee participation, even if all you have is a virtual assistant. Once you’ve established your brand’s voice and identity and have developed brand guidelines, everyone needs to fall in line.

Here are a few ways to ensure your employees embrace your brand’s identity and voice:

• Include your brand values in the onboarding and training process
• Provide branded items to promote internal brand loyalty, such as coffee mugs, shirts, pens, etc.
• Appoint brand ambassadors from within your team to advocate for your brand on social media

Your team members are your first target audience. The more they align with your brand, the more consistent your message will be.

• Be consistent with your logo and design elements

Everything from your brand logo to the size, colors, and fonts involved should remain exactly the same on every piece of paper and every screen. The last thing you want is for anything symbolic of your brand to look faded, stretched out of proportion, discolored, and so on.

Therefore, you want to make sure you use the same department or business for print and promotional materials. You also want to ensure that your employees have access to all approved visual content as well as for instructions on how to use them on and offline.

• Choose topics that are relevant

Creating valuable and insightful content is the key to creating a strong online presence. However, you can’t just make videos or create blog articles about anything. 

All of your content, whether it be your blog, videos, Twitter tweets, advertisements, social media, TikTok videos, webinars, etc.—everything must be relevant to your brand’s identity, style, niche, and mission.

• Maintain the same tone across all channels

According to a study conducted by the Verde group in 2012, about two-thirds of all shoppers use more than one channel to make purchases. Today in 2021, that would include social media channels such as Instagram.

Therefore, wherever you’re communicating your brand message, whether it be online or offline, the most crucial thing to keep in mind is maintaining your brand’s tone of voice and personality everywhere. 

Remember, consistency creates stability which builds trust. So, while your mannerism may vary slightly among the different channels, your personality must remain the same.

• Only participate in relevant platforms

You may feel like you need to jump on every digital platform in order to gain a competitive edge within your industry, but we can assure you that’s not the case. Not every social media platform is suitable for your business. And that’s okay!

Ask yourself:

• Does this platform in particular resonate with my brand’s style?
• Would you trust your brand if you saw it on a particular platform?
• Does your current audience hang on on this particular platform?

The key is to participate in the platforms that are relevant to your brand’s identity and voice. So, before you follow the networking crowd onto FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, IG, SnapChat, or wherever else, take a step back and view the bigger picture.

• Work with the right influencers

Influencer marketing blew up over the past few years. Working with influencers can help you reach thousands—if not millions—of people you’d never be able to reach on your own.

However, different influencers have different niches and followers. So, it’s critical that you choose the one that can hold up your brand’s voice and will appeal to your target audience.

Furthermore, the influencer you choose should be able to convey your message by talking about your audience’s pain points directly and their personality should fit into your brand guidelines. In essence, they should feel like an extension of your team.  

• Partner with your sales team

More often than not, your sales and marketing team won’t really be on the same page. This is a relationship that takes time to become agreeable, but it must be done.

You need your sales team to not only align with your brand but align with your marketing team in terms of using their specific content throughout the entire sales journey. One way to do this is by revamping your “sales playbook” or whichever guidelines they follow and pinpoint exactly where the sales content goes off-brand.

This also works in reverse, as your sales team has valuable insights into your customers’ journey and can provide your marketing team with feedback on which content isn’t working.

No one will buy into your brand if they don’t trust the message it’s conveying. Maintaining brand consistency is the key to gaining lifelong customers that will take part in representing your products or services simply because they align with what you stand for. So, take the time to ensure that you, your team, and your customers are all on the same page when it comes to your brand’s identity.