How To Build ‘Online Brand Consistency’
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How To Build ‘Online Brand Consistency’
In This Guide…
We’ll define brand consistency and how to manage it in this guide. We’ll go through: how to build a strong brand architecture for your business, how to create a brand strategy, how to streamline content creation for coordinated campaign activities, and how to track performance for ongoing improvement.
Brand Consistency, An Introduction
Breaking through the noise in today’s digital landscape is becoming increasingly difficult. With so much competition across so many channels, how do today’s audiences decide where to focus their attention? It all comes down to personally aligning with the values of a company.
Your brand is created of carefully selected elements. This includes not only the visual aspects, but also the mission and values that define the purpose of your company. These values should be compatible with the target audiences.
Inconsistencies in those brand elements will directly undermine their impact as your brand presence takes shape across an increasing number of platforms. Brand consistency provides a solid foundation for audiences to better understand a company.
What is brand consistency?
Brand consistency refers to how an organisation delivers messages that are consistent with its core values and mission, resulting in a unified brand experience.
Ultimately it comes down to how “on-brand” your company’s communications and campaigns are with your established brand guidelines and identity. Brands can be built in an instant and they can fall just as quickly. To avoid limiting their impact, those brand details must be carefully considered and communicated clearly.
Changing business objectives and priorities can make it difficult to adhere to brand guidelines. A successful brand is one that is in it for the long run. Built up over time by remaining consistent while remaining flexible enough to adapt to current market trends and expectations.
Audit Current Brand
If your brand isn’t brand new, it’s almost certain to have pre-existing content. Any effort to truly establish brand consistency must begin with a comprehensive understanding of the current brand. What initiatives have been launched? What tools does the sales team use during outreach? What’s on our website, as well as other websites that mention us?
The answers to these questions will start to paint a picture of where and how the brand is making an impact. Documenting these items in an audit will help you identify areas of inconsistency in your brand and create a plan to address those issues.
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CONTENT AUDIT:
A comprehensive content audit benefits your brand in a variety of ways. You can identify brand inconsistencies and maximise available resources by knowing what documents, images, ebooks, blogs, videos, slide decks, and the like are already created.
Brand Strategy
A brand strategy is a long-term plan developed to assist your company in achieving specific objectives. Brand consistency is essential in creating a unified experience for target audiences in order to build lifelong customers and engagement based on brand trust.
A cohesive strategy encompasses all branches of an organisation and pervades all aspects of a brand’s daily operations. Because some teams are naturally more immersed in your brand than others, providing everyone with a single source of truth is a critical step toward success. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to build a brand with consistency in mind.
BUILDING BRAND ELEMENTS INTO GUIDELINES:
The first step in achieving brand consistency is determining what you want to be consistent with. This is where a comprehensive brand guide comes into play. It’s a one-stop shop for everything you need to make create for your brand.
Important Elements of a Brand Guide
LOGO:
A brand’s logo is arguably the most memorable piece of collateral. Does the image of the Golden Arches come to mind when you hear the word McDonald’s? Customers can automatically associate products or services with any given brand thanks to logos.
TONE AND VOICE:
How does your brand sound? Silly? Professional? Academic? Is it all of the above? This may vary slightly between channels. Emails are more formal, whereas social media is more casual. That’s perfectly acceptable! However, there should be a unifying factor; a blanket mission statement or mantra to which all content adheres. Keep your mission statement in mind when promoting the positive aspects of your brand and responding to criticism.
COLOURS:
When seeing certain colours immediately brings to mind a specific brand – even when the brands’ names are nowhere nearby – you know branding is done well. A good colour scheme can make a big difference. As you are aware, there are an infinite number of colours available, and when one is even slightly off, people will notice.
FONTS:
Similar to colours, there are as many variations as you can imagine, and even minor inconsistencies will draw attention. It can be difficult to determine which fonts should be used when. Having specific guidelines for which fonts should be used as headers, descriptions, body copy, and so on will help teams use it more efficiently and remove the uncertainty that leads to inconsistency.
Creating Buyer Personas
Who is your ideal target market? To effectively target your customers, you must first understand who they are.
A buyer persona is a character profile of your prospective clients that includes information such as who they are, what they want, how they live, issues they confront, who they interact with or are affected by, the tools they use, and more. These facts assist you in determining their fundamental motives for engaging with your brand and the pain spots your product seeks to alleviate.
Personas provide real-world context for the brand you’re attempting to create. To ensure that you’re speaking their language, all creative, blogs, white papers, and other inbound content should be created with buyer personas in mind.
Streamline Creating Consistent Content
Increased content creation is a requirement for any developing brand. As you work to support numerous teams and initiatives, the pace with which you produce may conflict with your efforts to maintain brand consistency.
ESTABLISH CREATIVE WORKFLOWS:
Content is how you show off the expertise that your company is built on. Your content helps your customers identify the themes and causes that you care about.
It can give advice, provide thought leadership on a relevant topic, provide a step-by-step guide to solve a specific problem, or simply share a sympathetic narrative to your consumers.
Regardless of the sorts of material your company wants to produce, the process of acquiring those assets from inception to dissemination should be efficient.
PERSONALISE BRAND ACTIVITY:
Not only has the demand for more personalised brand experiences grown, but so has the volume of information and creative development. Brands have been able to reach out to audiences more directly thanks to targeted digital campaigns and dynamic content. It’s excellent for customer service, but it can wreak havoc on a company’s creative process.
Personalised content increases the amount of steps and assets required to support any particular campaign. Rather than a single asset with a single message, multiple copies are created to be hyper-targeted to certain audiences. With each new moving aspect in the process, there’s a chance that brand consistency will fall between the cracks. It’s something to consider when personalising your content and adjusting your brand consistency strategy to accommodate that creative workflow.
Social Media Marketing uses content that is published on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn to direct traffic to your website and create awareness for your brand online. Businesses mostly post their own content that is in line with their services or products to their own social media profiles. Sometimes they use influencers who have larger followings and trust with their own followers to send traffic to a company’s website or social media profiles.
In order to be successful with social media, companies must have a good understanding of their audience and what type of content appeals to them so they can increase engagement and create awareness about their brand.
CREATE BRAND TEMPLATES:
What if there was a method to speed up the creation of personalised content, minimise the workload of the creative team, and ensure brand consistency all at once? It may seem too wonderful to be true, but there is a system that can help you do just that. To support the use of different material, several brands have turned to templates. Your creative team can use a brand template to produce a single asset that can subsequently be updated by other stakeholders in the company.
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Activate Brand Presence
It’s time to put those assets to work now that you’ve created a brand consistency plan and established workflows to streamline creative production.
ASSET ORGANISATION:
A crucial part of establishing a central source of truth is establishing a clear asset organisation structure. Consider the following questions when deciding how to organise content:
- Which groups require access?
- What are the campaigns we’re running?
- What are the many sorts of assets we have?
- What are the target audiences for these assets?
You won’t need to consider all of these factors, but they will assist you in determining the structure that is best for your company. Understanding which assets are most likely to be relevant to the appropriate groups within your organisation will enable them to self-serve their requirements and put content to use.
IMPLEMENT ACROSS DIGITAL CHANNELS:
Online, a company’s content is its brand in every aspect. It’s the company’s salesperson, store, and marketing department all rolled into one. It’s the narrative of the company. A brand’s visibility is becoming increasingly digital. Your digital activity is likely to be the majority, if not the only, sort of interaction your audience has with your brand.
PRIMARY DIGITAL CHANNELS:
WEB:
Your company’s face is your website. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and understand, that your logo moves smoothly from page to page, and that the typeface and color palette remain consistent. Those design aspects, no matter how minor they appear, are an important part of the brand.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
The ability to have a two-way discussion with your customers is one of the things that distinguishes digital marketing from traditional marketing strategies. This is what social media is all about for brands, whether it’s paid or organic. Because it’s hard to be active on every social site at the same time, you’ll need to figure out which ones will best help you reach your target personas.
EMAIL:
Email marketing is still an important and effective part of a company’s marketing strategy. It’s typically the most straightforward approach to reach out to your consumers with critical information, from newsletters to product updates. Your brand can be influenced by the frequency, design, and sorts of email communications you send.
Evaluate & Track Brand Activity
Your brand’s presence will (hopefully) begin to increase once your content is put into action. But how will you be able to tell? It’s critical for continual improvement to keep track of where your brand is succeeding and where it isn’t.
Things will alter as you learn more about your brand. Change brings with it the risk of brand inconsistency. Monitoring your material entails not just reviewing analytics, but also keeping track of what content is available and where it is located. Your authority over brand consistency is limited to what your company generates and distributes. Nonetheless, you should keep an eye on how your brand is mentioned and interacted with by others. All of this data combined will provide a more accurate picture of the impression your brand is making.
METRICS TO MEASURE:
Not every component of your brand was designed to be the same. You should keep an eye on asset performance as you continue to optimise for brand consistency. Here are some metrics you may measure to get a thorough picture of how your brand is interacted with and perceived by the public to start the process of brand monitoring:
KEYWORDS:
Keep track of your keywords to see which ones bring the most visitors to your homepage.
BLOGS:
Find out which blog posts result in the most comments, social shares, and inbound links.
EMAIL:
To better connect future email campaigns with other material that raises your brand, find out which email content causes the most forwards and reconversions, as well as to which part of your list that content travels.
LANDING PAGES:
Find out which landing pages result in the most sales and the most profitable average sales per customer.
LINKS:
Regardless of which campaign(s) you’re doing, test which links have the highest click-through rates on multiple platforms and make sure they’re up to date.
MENTIONS:
Monitor your social media mentions, particularly those that include questions, to keep an eye on how people are talking about your brand.
GROWTH RATE:
By choosing a reporting period, you may track the growth rate of your social media accounts. Then divide your new followers by your total followers to get your new followers for that time period.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Find the most engaging social media material and track whether or not that engagement leads to revenue-generating behaviour in the future, and at what rate.
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