In a world of change, people are looking for brands they can trust. And that trust is earned through consistent branding. Brand consistency is a company’s ability to maintain communication and positioning in line with its values and the elements that make up its identity.
If a company executes its brand consistently, a survey has found that revenue will increase significantly. If it strays from its consistent brand communication, there will be repercussions to pay. In the first instance, customers will be confused, at worst a company’s reputation or credibility damaged.
In the worst instance, inconsistent branding damages a company’s reputation or credibility.
It is therefore critical to maintain consistent brand design.
Today’s ever-changing global landscape makes this undeniably challenging. Compounded by the move to remote work, organizations creating 50% more content than the prior year, exceedingly shorter deadlines, and nearly everyone in your business being content creators, it is increasingly hard to ensure that your marketing stays on brand.
With this in mind, and with some practices and understanding, it’s vital to build and maintain a consistent long-term brand implementation plan.
How to build brand consistency?
The work to build brand consistency is based on strategic efforts to communicate a company’s values. Part of this process is providing access to all content creators and giving them the right tools.
Clear brand guidelines
Guidelines are essential to ensure that the brand always follows a path in its communication strategies. They are rules that should never be bent since consistency builds trust.
The importance lies in the recurrence in using elements such as:
- the voice used by the brand;
- the visual elements that make up the identity;
- the use of slogans;
- the application of the company’s values in its actions and campaigns.
In the absence of guidelines, branded collateral becomes warped and disjointed, which directly impacts brand consistency. For customers, this is confusing and massively decreases your credibility.
Guidelines, specifically clear and up-to-date, go a long way. They keep individual contributors on-brand and help ensure customer retention through repetitive, consistent exposure.
Implement your brand consistently
Consistent messages are those that convey the main idea about the brand. The same approach, a specific language, the traditional tone, and on-brand design are essential to give consistency to marketing content.
The problem most companies face is that in today’s world nearly everyone is a content creator. Not just your marketers, but your sales team, your customer service team, your other employees, your vendors and partners. All of them are representing your brand to fragmented audiences on endless channels: web, email, social media, direct mail, etc.
The answer to this lies in easy-to-access brand guidelines. In larger organizations, you need more than a brand book. You might employ a range of MarTech tools for the creation of brand communication templates.
A smart tool to help you stay on brand
PageProof has numerous time-saving smart features to help ensure your creative work is on-brand:
- Smart detection of colors and fonts in the proof letting you quickly determine whether the content meets brand guidelines.
- Stakeholders both internally and externally can easily be added to your online proofing process to ensure that all content is seen by the brand guardians.
- The ability to create your own review and approval workflows, ensuring the right stakeholders are involved in the process at the right time.
- Include a brief in your proofing workflow, to ensure that content being reviewed can be checked accordingly.
Investing in brand consistency ensures that a company maintains customer satisfaction, as well as attracting new consumer’s attention while keeping its ideas, values, and identity in focus. But more importantly, it could result in your revenue increasing by 50%.